Firms asked to help rescue rare species

The Government is asking private companies to sponsor rescue programmes for British plant and animal species which are rare or in rapid decline.

Volkswagen may wish to give money to beetle conservation, and one of the big drug companies might be persuaded to boost wild populations of the medicinal leech. The idea is not far-fetched. Several companies are already involved in conservation, without the Government having to ask them - Land-Rover, for instance, sponsors butterfly conservation.

The request to the private sector came in the Government's response yesterday to a report from a "biodiversity committee". John Gummer, Secretary of State for the Environment, said the Cabinet fully endorsed costed action plans for saving 116 wildlife species and 14 types of habitat.

The list includes several well-known, much-loved species, such as the otter, red squirrel, dormouse and the skylark, whose numbers have fallen by 50 per cent in a quarter-century.

But there are also mosses, fungi, ferns, lichens and insects which will be known only to keen botanists and zoologists. Some of these species have not been seen in Britain for decades and may be extinct here. For these, the rescue plans consist of keeping a watching brief to see if they reappear, or survey work to try to rediscover them.

Mr Gummer said a few million pounds' worth of existing government spending programmes were being made more "biodiversity friendly" - altered to accommodate the new plans for species and habitats. But he did not announce any extra funds. English Nature and Scottish Natural Heritage, the Government's two largest wildlife conservation bodies, both had their budgets cut last November.

The total cost of implementing the plans is put at pounds 16.7m next year and the Government says it should pay for about half.

The plans, a follow-up to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, came out of a long collaboration between the Government and wildlife conservation bodies including the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Wildlife Trust. The Independent has been serialising them for the past five months.

Mr Gummer said the Government would make a progress report every five years, starting in 2000. "Don't think we're going to get there easily," he told a conference at the Natural History Museum, in London. "But it is we who are damaged, we who are less because of what we are destroying [in nature]."

Graham Wynne, head of conservation at the RSPB, said: "This endorsement is an excellent step." But he questioned the support from other government departments such as transport, and was concerned about the lack of extra cash.