RSPB issues fresh Barrage warning

Tuesday, 09 February 2010

A planned barrage across the Severn Estuary to generate up to 5% of the UK's electricity could be "devastating", the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) said Tuesday following a study of a similar barrage in the Netherlands.

Speaking to the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, RSPB conservation director Mark Avery said a storm-surge barrier across the Scheldt estuary in the Zeeland region of the Netherlands had resulted in flooding and the loss of wildlife habitats.

"If the same thing happened in the Severn, then mudflats would disappear, bird populations would go down, fish would suffer; but there's also increased flood risk, which was something that the Dutch didn't realise when they started and built this barrier," Avery told Today presenter James Naughtie.

Avery said the Severn was a valuable resource and there were ways of capturing its energy without damaging wildlife.

"We're in favour of tapping the Severn Estuary's renewable energy resources ... if we're going to do it, we ought to learn lessons from elsewhere and get it right," Avery said.

An expert at the Cardiff School of Engineering said on the programme that the two schemes could not be compared.

Water management professor Roger Falconer said the planned Severn schemes were very different from the Scheldt storm-surge barrage and the hydraulic conditions in the eastern Scheldt were different.

Falconer said that a report in the Netherlands Journal of Sea Research concluded after a four-year study that the eastern Scheldt ecosystem "had shown a resilient response to the changes in environmental factors".

Avery said he was basing his comments on an official government report that two Dutch civil servants would present to the RSPB in London and Bristol today.

The report showed that what happened in the eastern Scheldt was "devastating to the ecology of the estuary", Avery concluded.