Craig Bennett's Letter

To my grandchildren,

What do you see when you step outside? Do swifts still scream through summer skies? Do bees and butterflies dance through your garden as they do through mine? I hope so. I hope that we weren’t too late to save them. That you and your friends can walk through woodlands rich with birdsong, or swim in clear seas free of waste and full of life.

As I write this, humanity faces an unprecedented crisis of climate and nature. Both people and wildlife are losing their homes, their lives. We’re at a tipping point, teetering on the brink. Time is running out to avoid catastrophic warming above 1.5C and we still haven’t done enough to stop it. Protecting nature is essential, as well as cutting emissions. Investing in nature reduces the impact of climate change on people. I hope you look back on this decade as the moment things changed, the moment that our government finally took action to save wildlife and the world as we know it.

Maybe you step outside and see bison roaming through woodland glades, or beavers splashing into rivers and streams. Perhaps you even glimpse a lynx stalking through dense woodland. That’s my biggest hope – that yours is a world where we haven’t just stopped nature’s decline, but we’ve reversed it. We’ve brought nature back.

With love,

Craig Bennett - CEO, The Wildlife Trusts