End fracking, and leave our wildlife in peace — Erin McDaid, Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust

This week, Nottinghamshire County Council’s planning committee considered an application by IGas for an extension to its exploratory drilling operations designed to unlock huge deposits of shale gas at Misson Springs.

These sort of decisions, where the needs of commercial interests and the environment must be carefully balanced, come before councillors on a regular basis.

But, with just three months until world leaders, scientists and campaigners from across the globe convene in Glasgow for the pivotal COP26 climate conference, this particular decision seems to have increased significance ­— not least because it could give an insight into just how likely we are to be able to respond to the deepening climate and ecological emergencies in time.

It seemed illogical that permission for this extension could be granted while a government moratorium on fracking is in place and just weeks since the county council declared a Climate Emergency but our planning system doesn’t work on logical alone meaning a huge range of tightly framed and technical issues had to be revisited, polished and submitted once again.

Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust has stood with other campaigners, calling for the application for a three-year licence extension to be rejected to protect wildlife at our Misson Carr Nature Reserve, just 130 metres from the drilling site.

What started out as a temporary site in 2014 was in danger of becoming permanent. Any extension would have extended stress among residents and effectively left the site – and those fighting to protect it – facing an open-ended threat of disturbance to wildlife.

Like many others, we believed that this would have been totally unacceptable, especially given that as a nationally important Site of Special Scientific Interest, Misson Carr is supposed be protected.

Under the terms of the licence, the drilling plant should have been removed and the site restored by November 2020, but IGas didn’t meet this deadline and their bid for an extension would have made a future application for fracking, if and when the moratorium is lifted, cheaper and easier.

The detailed arguments relating to potential for disturbance to rare nesting birds, including owls, and disruption of the sensitive hydrology at our Misson Carr Nature Reserve, one of the last remaining fragments of fenland habitat in our county, have been discussed and debated almost ad nauseam.

However, the adversarial nature of our planning system meant that as a charity with limited resources to fight wildlife’s corner had to commit resource to slug it out, if you’ll excuse the phrase, over technical and legal points once again when what we really wanted to do was shout that enough is enough – frack off and leave the wildlife of Misson Carr in peace!

Thankfully, sense prevailed with councillors voting overwhelmingly to refuse the extension.

However, while the fight is over the battle is not yet entirely won and it is clear that we need a process that is better able to take account of the bigger picture and gives planners the ability to make the right decisions for all our future’s rather than weighted in favour of narrow commercial interests or worries over legal appeals by developers.

With the extension refused we hope the site will now be restored and that we can focus more of our energy and resources into enhancing its habitats for wildlife rather than fighting to protect it.

If the government were to lift its moratorium it seems inevitable that this site would come under threat once more; so we must all make our determination to secure a greener and wilder future clear to the government in the run up to COP 26. Business as usual is not acceptable and sound bites and greenwash are not enough.

Any future permission to frack the deposits of shale gas believed to lie beneath our county would open the door to decades of exploitation of fossil fuels at a time when we rapidly need to be ramping up investment in the green technologies.

With the government seemingly set on limiting people’s ability to have their say on planning applications we also fear that the ability of communities to be heard within the planning system and the potential for charity’s such as Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust to stand up for nature through the system could be severely compromised.

As we celebrate that the planning committee saw fit to call time on the unnecessary and unacceptable operations at Misson Springs, we will soon pick up the fight to ensure that views are heard within the planning system and that tired old arguments that pit profit and so-called progress against people and planet are no longer played out on a seemingly endless loop.