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

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what assessment he has made of the effect of climate change on the albatross population.

The UK’s seabirds are an important part of our natural heritage, and their protection is a high priority for this Government.

The UK is committed to the conservation of albatrosses through its membership of the Agreement on the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels (ACAP). The UK ratified ACAP in 2004 and ACAP action plans have been developed and formally adopted for each UK South Atlantic Overseas Territory (SAOT). The Action Plans currently focus efforts at coordinating actions and research to mitigate known priority threats to ACAP species, including incidental mortality in commercial fisheries, introduced predators, pollution and climate change. To assess these threats, the population status of ACAP species across the UK SAOTs is regularly monitored, with comprehensive demographic studies undertaken at a number of sites.

The 2019 Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services Report identified climate change as one of the leading drivers of biodiversity loss, including as a key threat to species. The Convention on Biological Diversity is the global treaty on biodiversity aiming to tackle these drivers. The UK is playing a leading role in developing an ambitious post-2020 global biodiversity framework under the Convention, and we are calling for ambitious global targets to bend the curve of biodiversity loss by 2030. This includes targets to ensure at least 30% of the land and of the ocean globally is protected, ecosystems are restored, species population sizes are recovering and that by 2050 extinctions are halted.