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Volcanic rocks in mid-Atlantic, coral atolls, white-beached Caribbean
tourist traps, Pacific islands so remote that even the Polynesians have
abandoned them – the leftovers of the British empire are a curious mixture
of the military and the forgotten. But these imperial relics, the Dependent
Territories, are increasingly involving the mother country in an extra responsibility
– the protection of their natural environment. It is a responsibility that
the government shows few signs of accepting, despite its commitments under
international treaties.

Over the past two decades, Britain has signed up its remaining Dependent
Territories to several conventions, promising on their behalf to protect
wetlands and endangered species, and to pursue the sustainable development
of their natural resources. Most important, at the Earth Summit in Rio de
Janeiro two years ago, Prime Minister John Major signed them up for the
all-embracing Biodiversity Convention.

After the Earth Summit, British officials drew up a series of 13 targets
for conservation in the Dependent Territories. The targets set out a timetable
for completing biological surveys and drawing up conservation plans – using
British scientists and often paid for from British coffers – to meet the
convention’s requirements. They made it as far as a draft of the British
government’s Biodiversity Action Plan, which is meant to meet Britain’s
commitment to the Biodiversity Convention. But when the plan’s final version
was published in January, the targets had all disappeared (This Week, 5
February). In their place the government offered a bland statement that
reads ‘the Dependent Territories have an international responsibility to
protect a considerable number of species which are found nowhere else in
the world’. This statement is in stark contrast to the ambitious tone of
the draft plan and the excised targets, which are summarised in the map
(overleaf).

Territories, mostly with populations ranging from a few thousand down
to a mere 50 – at least one with more species to protect than they have
human inhabitants – are being left to their own devices. Many of these plants
and animals are ‘end-emic’ to a single island – they occur there and nowhere
else. In her book Fragments of Paradise (published in 1987 by Pisces Publications,
Newbury, Berkshire), which is the only study of conservation in Britain’s
Dependent Territories, the biologist Sara Oldfield says that the territories
‘have a greater diversity of species and habitats, and many more endemic
plants and animals than the UK itself’. She adds that the territories are
too small to implement international treaties. ‘The UK government should
take responsibility,’ she concludes.

Next week, the UN holds a major post-Rio meeting of small island states
in Barbados to discuss their conservation and development. Baroness Chalker,
Britain’s overseas aid minister, is expected to be there, championing the
cause of sustainable development in the Third World. Though Britain’s Dependent
Territories are not island states, Chalker could come under pressure to
justify her own government’s inaction in the islands under its control.

Why, other delegates may ask, is Britain refusing to include within
the Biodiversity Convention the world’s largest, and probably most pristine
coral atoll, the Great Chagos Bank in the Indian Ocean? Why has virtually
none of the billions of pounds spent on defence installations on Ascension,
the Falklands and in the Indian Ocean been set aside for conservation? And
why, after almost twenty years, have all the mangrove swamps, peat bogs
and sleepy lagoons on the Dependent Territories yielded just one wetland
(a mangrove swamp on the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean) for
listing under the Ramsar Convention on wetlands?

The Ramsar Convention, which dates from 1971, is widely acknowledged
as one of the most successful international conservation treaties. It was
signed by Britain in 1976 on behalf of 13 of its Dependent Territories,
of which nine remain dependent today. Unlike nation states, Dependent Territories
do not have to nominate a wetland for protection when they sign, though
they are expected to do so soon afterwards. Yet it was more than a decade
before the British government even asked its Dependent Territories if they
wanted to list any wetlands under the convention.

Ascension Island

Isolated in the mid-Atlantic just south of the equator, the volcanic
hulk of Ascension Island, just 12 kilometres across, was not inhabited until
it was occupied by the British in 1815. It is best known today as the RAF’s
stopover between Britain and the Falklands.

Until the British arrived, ‘Ascension was one of the top seabird colonies
in the world,’ says Alistair Gammell of the Royal Society for the Protection
of Birds. But the British brought the cat. ‘Since then, feral cats have
worked their way through the seabird population. They ate an endemic rail
to extinction.’

Today, millions of seabirds, including the endemic Ascension frigate
bird, crowd onto a handful of tiny offshore stacks that the island’s 500
or so cats cannot reach. The only surviving bird on the main island is the
sooty tern, which is being eaten at a rate of 20 000 young birds annually.
The cats also consume numerous turtle eggs and young turtles that hatch
on the island’s beaches after their parents have swum the 2000 kilometres
from Brazil to nest.

In 1990, Birdlife International, the umbrella organisation of the world’s
bird protection bodies, called on the British government to eradicate the
feral cats on Ascension. Biologists meeting in London last October agreed
that ‘Ascension offers great potential for ecological restoration and ecotourism’,
but only after the cats have gone. Conservationists have a three-point strategy
to alleviate the problem: they want to kill the feral cats, to require all
truly domestic cats to be neutered, and to offer a constant supply of new
neutered cats to replace pets as they die. Similar plans are already working
on Pacific islands administered by Australia and New Zealand.

International agreements appear to commit Britain to such action. In
signing the Biodiversity Convention in 1992, Britain promised to ‘eradicate
. . . alien species which threaten ecosystems, habitats or species’. It
committed itself to similar action at a meeting of the World Conservation
Union (IUCN) earlier this year.

But neither the Foreign Office nor Ascension’s governor Alan Hoole,
who is based in St Helena, is prepared to support a feasibility study into
eliminating feral cats. ‘The governor will not permit a total cat eradication
programme,’ says the Foreign Office. The reasons range from the locals’
love of cats to the risk of bird strikes to military aircraft if the bird
population increases. The latter argument was shot down by a US study, Bird
Aircraft Strike Hazards Evaluation at Ascension Island, published by the
US Air Force in July 1992. The study concluded: ‘It is unlikely that restoring
bird populations will adversely impact flight safety.’ For Gammell, there’s
a frustrating edge to the problem. ‘The military are really in charge on
Ascension, and they change personnel every six months,’ he says. ‘As soon
as you persuade one commander, he moves on and you start again.’

St Helena

The island where Napoleon died in exile in 1821 is also a textbook example
of colonial invasion bringing ecological catastrophe. The problem began
with goats, which the Portuguese brought with them in 1513. ‘Within 75 years
there were herds that stretched for 2 kilometres,’ says Ghillean Prance,
director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. ‘The endemic-rich flora was
devastated long before scientists began to discover what was left.’ The
British, who took over in 1650, escalated the destruction by chopping down
the island’s forests for charcoal. Almost all the trees disappeared. Of
the endemic redwood, only a single tree survives in the wild. More than
60 per cent of the steeply sloping volcanic island’s 122 square kilometres
is badly eroded, and is categorised as ‘Crown waste’.

But the island is far from being ecologically doomed. Foresters have
replanted some hillsides, and in places ecosystems are reviving now that
the goats are penned and the growing of flax – which once provided raw material
for mailbags made in Britain’s prisons – has collapsed. Last year, the Overseas
Development Administration paid for scientists, headed by Mike Maunder of
Kew, to report on the potential for reviving the environment. Maunder found
that some 70 species of native flowering plants survive – 50 of them endemic.

Maunder’s report proposed that the island, which imports most of its
food and suffers from water shortages, could regenerate its economy and
improve its self-sufficiency by regenerating its soils and vegetation. The
proposals have been hailed by Maurice Strong, the secretary-general of
the Earth Summit in Rio, as ‘probably the first true plan for sustainable
development anywhere in the world’.

Here is Britain’s chance to pioneer a path to sustainable development
in a small island community that could become a model for dozens of others.
But Maunder’s team, which wants to return to the island later this year
to draw up detailed proposals, is still waiting for a response from the
governor and the ODA.

The precedents are not encouraging. A proposal under the terms of the
UN’s World Heritage Convention to create a World Heritage Site on St Helena
to protect its endemic plant species has already been turned down by the
British government. And conservation at Tristan da Cunha, another remote
Atlantic dependency administered from St Helena, is poor.

Tristan da Cunha

The Biodiversity Action Plan singled out Tristan da Cunha (population
300) and its three uninhabited neighbours – Nightingale, Gough and Inaccessible
– for their ‘international importance as breeding seabird colonies’ and
their high endemism. Around half their species of liverworts, beetles and
mosses are found nowhere else on Earth. Weevils are a speciality. But the
plan reported that the island’s only conservation officers are its policemen.
Oldfield complained in her 1987 book about the lack of a professional conservation
officer, and observed that ‘calls for recognition of the scientific importance
of Tristan da Cunha have been largely unheeded by the UK government over
the past 20 years’. The lapse now runs to nearer 30 years.

The British government announced in 1987 that it would propose the uninhabited
and unexploited Gough Island – home to penguins and elephant seals – for
listing as a World Heritage Site. The listing is uncontroversial and all
the legal measures needed to protect wildlife on the island are already
in place but the proposal is still bogged down in Whitehall. Last month
Michael Ford, head of the international desk of the Joint Nature Conservation
Committee (JNCC) in Britain, which advises on listings, said his office
had prepared a proposal for the Foreign Office. He is optimistic about the
outcome. ‘They are consulting and it is likely to go forward,’ he said.

Falkland Islands

Conservation constipation has taken hold in the Falkland Islands, too.
A report on conservation commissioned by the island government in 1988 is
‘currently being considered’, according to the Biodiversity Action Plan,
which also reveals that ‘there is no government agency responsible for conservation
in the Falklands . . . (and) no legal provision for habitat protection
on private land, which accounts for most of the islands’.

There is much to preserve. The wind-blasted peat bogs that cover the
majority of the islands’ area were once covered in giant tussock grass up
to four metres high that provided wonderful cover for birds. Sheep farmers
have cut down 80 per cent of the tussocks, but the surviving fragments provide
nesting grounds for three-quarters of the world’s black-browed albatrosses.

The Falklands’ craggy coastlines are the world’s largest breeding grounds
for the gentoo and rockhopper penguins, most of the world’s surviving ruddy-headed
geese, and the southern elephant seal and southern sea lion. According to
local conservationists, fishing boats are already responsible for a sharp
drop in the number of penguins and seals around the islands. The need to
protect these marine birds and mammals can only grow, says Mike Bingham
of Falklands Conservation, a local organisation largely funded by the Falklands
government. The seabed off the Falklands is one of the world’s largest
unexplored oil reserves according to the British Geological Survey, which
is currently surveying it.

Billions of pounds have been pumped into the defence of the islands
since Argentina’s armed services invaded – and was then expelled – in 1982.
But scarcely any of this has been used to defend its ecology.

British Indian Ocean Territory

A similar story of military investment and ecological neglect emerges
from the Chagos archipelago, a chain of coral reefs, atolls and submerged
banks in the middle of the Indian Ocean. In 1965, the government renamed
Chagos the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) and retained it when other
colonies in the Indian Ocean were granted independence. The following year,
Britain agreed with the US to manage the entire archipelago ‘for defence
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Most of the territory’s military activity is at a naval base built by
the US on the southern end of the archipelago on the island of Diego Garcia,
whose lagoon is one of the world’s largest harbours. The remaining 90 per
cent of the archipelago contains the largest expanse of totally undisturbed
coral reefs in the Indian Ocean, covering 50 000 square kilometres. Indeed,
it is one of the largest habitable areas on the planet where nobody actually
lives. The Great Chagos Bank is the world’s largest atoll, a mostly submerged
string of coral islands around a vast lagoon the size of Wales. Two scientific
expeditions in the late 1970s, one headed by the botanist David Bellamy,
counted 220 species of coral, several of them endemic, 384 species of molluscs
and 702 of fish.

British administrators have had a tendency to fall in love with the
place. Richard Edis, who was in charge in the late 1980s and is now ambassador
to Mozambique, this year published a history of Diego Garcia called Peak
of Limuria, in which he calls the archipelago ‘one of the great reef systems
of the world and probably the most pristine’.

His predecessor, John Topp, got together with Bellamy to write a proposal
to designate the entire archipelago, apart from Diego Garcia, as a World
Heritage Site. The Foreign Office turned the idea down flat, on the grounds
that Britain’s treaty with the US reserves the whole territory for military
use. It has also refused to designate any of Chagos’s many lagoons as protected
wetlands under the Ramsar Convention, though a study for the Department
of the Environment concluded that almost the whole territory would qualify.
And, most recently, it vetoed inclusion of the BIOT in Britain’s ratification
of the Biodiversity Convention.

So sensitive is the government to discussion of the BIOT that it deleted
all references to it in the Biodiversity Action Plan. Bellamy says that
‘the British government’s attitude is foolhardy in the extreme and shows
as usual a total lack of understanding of their international commitments
to Ramsar and Rio.’

The British government is clearly worried that conservation on the BIOT
is, as Edis notes in his book, ‘bound to be of growing international environmental
importance’. The official protestation that the great majority of the archipelago
is untouched by the military base makes it even harder to justify the British
government’s refusal to designate any part of the archipelago for conservation.
‘Benign neglect is no answer,’ says Bellamy. ‘It is simply benign neglect
of international commitments.’

After his expedition to Chagos, Bellamy called for a programme to exterminate
the rats that are killing seabirds, and he developed plans to regenerate
vegetation on the old plantations of Diego Garcia. But the Foreign Office
has consistently opposed such schemes. According to Topp, who was appointed
last year as the Foreign Office’s part-time conservation officer for the
territory, these proposals are unlikely to be examined during a scientific
expedition he is planning to Chagos in 1996, nor in a draft conservation
plan he is currently preparing.

Topp recognises that the rats on Chagos are destructive. Last year he
visited the 250-hectare Eagle Island, at the southwest corner of the Great
Chagos Bank. ‘It is infested with rats and has no birds,’ he says. ‘But
the six nearby atoll islands are all free of rats and full of birds.’ Nonetheless,
he argues, ‘the bird species here are found widely, so their protection
is not a high priority’.

Much the same goes for Bellamy’s call to restore natural vegetation.
Topp says again that ‘this is not really a high priority’ in his advice
to the Foreign Office. ‘The vegetation is recovering. Last year I found
seven new species, and this year ten. Probably the best thing is to leave
it to its own devices.’ However, even Topp admits that this revival in the
islands’ vegetation is not caused by the recovery of indigenous plants.
‘The new species are coming in with aggregates shipped to the base from
Singapore,’ he says.

Pitcairn Islands

The British dependency of the Pitcairn Islands sits in the middle of
the Pacific Ocean, one of the remotest places on Earth. Its population of
about 50 people, descendants of the survivors of the mutiny of the Bounty
in 1789, live on the island of Pitcairn itself. However, the largest of
the four coral islands is Henderson Island, uninhabited since the Polynesians
left in the 1600s. Britain made it a World Heritage Site in 1989 because
of its extraordinary number of endemic species. It has four endemic land
birds, similar to species slaughtered to extinction in many other parts
of the Pacific. And the Biodiversity Action Plan describes its raised coral
atoll as ‘unique’.

Yet even here, the environment is under threat for want of basic attention,
says Ian Hepburn, a British biologist who led a scientific expedition three
years ago to draw up a management plan for Henderson Island. The expedition,
found that the people from Pitcairn are overexploiting the island’s miro
trees. Travelling to the island by open surf boat, they cut the hardwood
to make carvings. These are sold to passing ships and form the main source
of the island’s income.

But the miro trees are being cut down more quickly than they can grow.
‘The groves need to be managed much better to increase production of the
tree,’ says Hepburn. He wants to send out a forestry adviser, establish
a miro nursery, and provide the tiny island community with a third boat
to provide better access to Henderson Island.

The cost would be small, but almost two years after submitting his findings
Hepburn is still waiting for a response. Like many other campaigners for
conservation in Britain’s Dependent Territories, he finds the cumbersome
Whitehall machine frustrating. In this case, there has to be agreement
between the Foreign Office, administrators based in New Zealand, the local
people, the ODA (which is in charge of aid funding), the Department of the
Environment, and its scientific advisers at the JNCC before a plan can
go ahead.

The Caribbean

The lengthy gestation period for conservation projects in the Dependent
Territories could be about to bring forth new offspring: the listing of
several Caribbean wetlands under the Ramsar Convention. This is not before
time.

David Pritchard of the RSPB, in a detailed report on the operation of
Ramsar in the Caribbean, concluded in 1990 that ‘the UK Department of the
Environment (the lead department on Ramsar matters) has so far not given
much if any attention to Dependent Territories.’ Perhaps stung by the criticism,
the department shortly afterwards commissioned a report from the International
Waterfowl and Wetlands Research Bureau at Slimbridge, Gloucestershire. Completed
a year ago (though still not published) it lists 17 wetland sites ‘ready
for immediate designation’. Three are in the Falklands, one in Hong Kong
and the rest are in the Caribbean region, where Britain has six Dependent
Territories. It also names 35 wetlands ‘requiring further technical work
prior to Ramsar designation’.

So far, one colonial wetland has made it through the Whitehall maze
and become listed under Ramsar. It is a large mangrove swamp in the Turks
and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. Covering 54 000 hectares, it is an
important habitat for iguanas, green turtles and the threatened West Indian
whistling duck.

British conservation groups, notably the World Wide Fund for Nature
(WWF), are helping to found local environment groups in the Caribbean’s
Dependent Territories, which could pressurise their governments into protecting
wildlife. The UK Dependent Territories Conservation Forum, a coordinating
body chaired by Oldfield, last year won a grant from Britain’s Darwin Initiative
to help conservation groups in the Dependent Territories.

But the problem, says Oldfield, is that the WWF and its allies are having
to do Whitehall’s job for it. The Turks and Caicos Islands – 40 coral islands,
six of them inhabited – are typical. The Biodiversity Action Plan records
that the islands have ‘virtually undisturbed wetland and reef habitats’
where ‘rapid development is increasing the need for comprehensive conservation
measures for the island’. But passages in the draft that promised British
assistance for developing such measures were dropped from the published
document by British officials.

The territory’s government wants to encourage ecotourism, and in 1992
set up a system of protected areas, including the Ramsar site. But with
a local population of barely 8000, it needs outside funding and scientific
expertise. ‘What are needed now are species surveys and management plans
for the sites,’ says Oldfield.

But it is the WWF rather than Whitehall that has stepped into the breach.
As well as funding the launch of the Turks and Caicos National Trust, the
WWF has helped pay for the survey that identified the credentials of the
islands’ Ramsar site, and is currently paying for the Ministry of Natural
Resources there to prepare a management plan for its national parks. ‘I
think the WWF has put more into the Turks and Caicos than the British government,’
says Oldfield.

The story is similar for all Britain’s Dependent Territories: the environmental
buck passes round Whitehall, says Oldfield, who has spent the past seven
years trying to find where it stops. The Department of the Environment defers
to the Foreign Office, except on technical matters. The Foreign Office has
overall responsibility for the territories – but that doesn’t extend to
environmental protection, according to a spokesman, even though the office
now has its own environment division. ‘If there is no local government,
then yes, we are in charge,’ the spokesman says. ‘If there is one, then
the British government is there to provide help. That help is through the
ODA, so you should talk to them.’

The ODA says: ‘We treat the Dependent Territories like any other Third
World country. No different. They can apply for aid, but we are not responsible
for the environment.’ That applies even when the government signs the territories
up for conservation legislation. ‘We sign because we are responsible for
external affairs,’ says the Foreign Office. ‘But they are responsible for
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When New ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ asked both the ODA and the Foreign Office for briefings
with officials in charge of environment policy on the Dependent Territories,
they each replied that no such official exist. It shows.