The Environmental Improvement Plan: Background and the Key Points of Influence
By Nina Pindham
Following a not-so-rapid “rapid review”, we now have the latest iteration of the Government’s Environmental Improvement Plan. An EIP is intended to be the roadmap for restoring England’s environment. It should set out measurable commitments which the Government can then be held accountable for meeting over the following years. Having an EIP is required by law: s.8 of the Environment Act 2021 mandates the Secretary of State to prepare an EIP for significantly improving the natural environment in England. The EIP also feeds into decision-making across Government.
So, it’s hugely important. And from this massive document we can also see it was taken hugely seriously within Defra. We are facing a deluge of new policy and consultation announcements next week, so to prevent the EIP from getting lost in this deluge, while also enabling me to have the time to actually read and research the contents of the full EIP, I’ve split the EIP contents into three blog posts. First up is the general background in the context of a survey of the key points of influence of the EIP going forward. There are many commitments but there is equally an awful lot of background context to get through first.
What the EIP will inform
To best understand the contents of the EIP it helps to look ahead at what the EIP will inform. Of critical importance will be how it shapes the content of three forthcoming flagship strategies: the Land Use Framework (to be published imminently, we are told), the farming roadmap (to be published in 2026), and the food strategy (no publication date announced).
One aspect I hope to see tackled in the food strategy is a head-on plan to fix the awful statistics (as set out in the latest s.19 Agriculture Act 2020 Food Security Report) that no income group meets dietary recommendations, with the worst statistic saved for the poorest 10% of society. That part of our community is eating on average 42% less fruits and vegetables than recommended, compared to the richest members of society who eat 13% less than the recommended amount.
The remarkable s.19 report (kudos to the civil servants who wrote it) also found that between 2015 and 2019 the amount of land globally reported as being degraded increased from 11.3% to 15.5% – in effect, 1% of the entire earth’s land is being removed from productive use annually due to the climate, biodiversity, and pollution crises. Further, we should all be worried by the s.19 report’s conclusion that three of the UK’s largest suppliers of fresh fruit, Brazil, South Africa and Colombia, are all within the low to medium climate readiness category.
The looming food security crisis is no better in our oceans: marine heatwaves, using existing data on GHG and temperature levels (which have only worsened in the years since this data was collected), are projected to result in biomass decreases in more than 75% of fish and invertebrate species by the 2050s (Cheung et al, 2021).
The s.19 report also cites a report from the Global Commission on the Economics of Water which suggests that half the world’s population already faces water scarcity. Here at home EA projections from 2020 show rivers could have 50% to 80% less water in summertime by 2050 due to drier summers. Particular areas are already being badly affected by water shortage. Since 2010 there has been a 40% increase in water usage due to irrigation in the Anglian area, compared to an overall reduction in irrigation intensity overall across the UK. The east of England is now already experiencing stress from high irrigation intensity (UK Irrigation Association, 2020). One issue with this data is that abstraction licences are not required for those abstracting less than 20 cubic metres per day. This means that small agricultural businesses using low volumes of water on land are not captured in the data, so in fact we have no idea how prevalent existing or potential water stress due to agricultural usage is.
These trends can be reversed: for example, from 2011 to 2020 Costa Rica made progress of 48% towards reaching its national goal of restoring 1 million hectares by 2030 (Nello, Rivera and Putzeys, 2023).
The UK government is also legally committed to restoring nature – among a number of other laudable environmental goals. This takes us to the EIP contents itself.
First, I want to commend Defra on their entertainingly spiky insistence on maintaining their integrity and relying on actual evidence when developing policy: “Nature is not a blocker of economic growth, instead it is essential to underpin it.”
The EIP uses that contentious word, blocker, a few times: “We must manage competing pressures on our limited land and water, and show nature is a vital component – not a blocker – to achieving the current government’s Plan for Change.”
I can’t help but compare this language to the Chancellor’s speech in my home county of Oxfordshire on 29 January 2025:
“We are reducing the environmental requirements placed on developers…so they can focus on getting things built, and stop worrying about bats and newts…we are changing the rules to stop blockers getting in the way of development…”
Hmm.
If anyone could still be at a loss as to where Defra stands, the EIP confirms “[t]o achieve the ambitious goals set out in the EIP, we need a whole-economy approach. A healthy natural environment provides benefits to us all. It is only right that economic sectors and businesses which benefit from nature should share responsibility for restoring it.”
The economic case for nature recovery
As Defra rightly says, environmental degradation risks our nation’s economic resilience and security. “In an era of supply chain disruption and conflict, protecting and restoring nature strengthens our resilience.” The catalogue of risks includes declining soil health, water scarcity and biodiversity loss. Defra points to research from the excellent GFI which shows these risks would shrink our gross domestic product (GDP) by 3% over the next decade if we do not act (Nature Related Risks, Green Finance Institute UK 2024).
They back the healthy environment = growth narrative up with statistic after statistic. We are told England’s nature services provided benefits exceeding £37.1 billion in 2022, it is pointedly noted this was more than any single manufacturing sector (Nature at work for people and the economy, Defra, 2025). Natural assets in nature-depleted England alone are valued at £1.3 trillion (ONS 2024). In 2022, England’s woodlands removed 8.3 million tonnes of CO2, valued at £2.3 billion, while nature in urban areas provided health benefits worth £823 million through air pollution removal (Defra, 2025). The private sector is rising to the challenge. There were 900 nature-related businesses in 2024, employing more than 21,000 people and generating more than £2 billion in revenue (Bloomberg NEF, 2025). Defra confirms that they are “championing the development of new international nature markets” (so we look forward to the government’s consultation responses on BNG for small sites and NSIP development then confirming the government’s commitment to the BNG market).
Protecting nature and ensuring we all benefit from a healthy environment safeguards the UK’s prosperity and security by building resilience into the complex international supply chains that businesses, our jobs and economic growth depend on. The direct link between national and international security and a healthy environment has led to the NATO Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence being established in May 2024, now housed by the Canadians in Montreal.
The EIP continues:
- Nature enables economic growth: nature supports stronger local economies, improves public health, builds climate resilience and enhances people’s lives(European Commission 2025). We must work with nature to build 1.5 million homes, deliver clean power, secure our food supply, and meet our environmental goals.
- Nature drives economic growth: we are leveraging public and private investment in green industries to raise living standards, create good jobs, and boost productivity. £104 billion is being invested by the water sector into critical infrastructure, and industry estimates that £10 billion is expected from new recycling systems under circular economy reforms (Environmental Services Association 2023).
- Nature protects economic growth: nature-related risks could reduce UK GDP by up to 3% over the next decade (Green Finance Institute 2024). The World Economic Forum ranks biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as the third most severe global risk (World Economic Forum 2022).
Global leadership is also rightly mentioned. The government’s perception that it does, and can, play an international leadership role on nature is an entirely accurate perception. This leadership was last best seen when UK negotiators were amongst the leading problem solvers during development of the Montreal-Kunming GBF. BNG is a model now copied across the whole world. Defra commits in the EIP to playing a role in the strong global leadership needed to tackle the climate and nature crises and push for an integrated approach to international action, including through the UN, G7 and G20. “We will lead by example” is a promise the environmental sector will be carefully monitoring.
There are demonstrable opportunities for co-benefits. Under the Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, we are told government is embedding nature recovery into new energy infrastructure, such as rewetting lowland peat soils beneath new solar farms or creating new wildlife corridors alongside or underneath power lines. I would add to this the obvious nature recovery benefits of mandatory BNG for NSIPs.
For those following my River Run series on LinkedIn, you will know how delighted I was to see the government committing to creating nine new river paths, in addition to the planting of three new national forests.
On the less encouraging side, research proves what we have all worried about – young people in more deprived areas, and people from ethnic minorities, are often least able to access nature (The Health Foundation, 2024). There is robust evidence demonstrating access to nature – both greenspace and natural waterbodies – improves health and wellbeing ,and even supports cognitive development in children and young people (Nguyen, l., and Walters, J., 2024, cited in the EIP).
Next up will be the “measurable” commitments (in many cases measurable is taken to mean has it been done or not), to be covered in the next article/blog.
About the author
This article was authored by Nina Pindham. She has a wide-ranging planning practice specialising in environmental law matters in the context of planning applications, including infrastructure, energy, controversial minerals development, hazardous substances consent, waste, EIA, SEA, agriculture, water, air quality, and nature conservation issues (with particular expertise in relation to the Habitats Regulations). Nina has represented clients before the High Court, Court of Appeal, Supreme Court and the United Nations, and is the author of the book A Practical Guide to Biodiversity Net Gain, published by Law Brief Publishing.
