Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, how many of the species in the UK's Overseas Territories have had their conservation status assessed.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office recently funded a project led by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) to carry out the first ever stocktake of species in the UK’s Overseas Territories (UKOTs). The study, completed between January 2013 and March 2014, brought together all known species records and conservation assessments. It found that there are at least 1,500 endemic species in the UKOTs and that 145 (9%) of these have had their global conservation status assessed.

The report of the study’s findings, ‘The UK’s Wildlife Overseas: A stocktake of nature in our Overseas Territories’, was published on 5 June 2014 and can be found on the RSPB’s website at:

www.rspb.org.uk/whatwedo/projects/details.aspx?id=369443