Please support this important campaign to defend the European laws that oblige governments to protect nature. The directives are regularly called upon to justify the protection of the species and habitats we value and consequently these laws are under concerted attack from organisations with vested interests in their destruction.
I am copying the last minute call for support that went out yesterday. To illustrate the level of support, the number of signatures in support of campaign has risen by 16,000 since yesterday. The EU Commission has also put back the deadline till 11 AM on Sunday - perhaps in anticipation that the campaign is likely to achieve the staggering half-million signatures target.
Please cascade this request to other birding/wildlife discussion groups if you can.
Many thanks
Dave
> From: Stowe, Tim [RSPB's director of international operations & perhaps more familiar to many of you for his work on the birds of Welsh upland forests]
> Sent: 23 July 2015 12:13
> To: _All_Users
> Subject: Defend the Directives - please act now
>
> Hi everyone
>
> Across Europe 470,000 electronic signatures have been collected in
> support of keeping the EU Nature Directives that underpin the
> protection of our shared nature. We’ve just under 36 hours left and
> we need 30,000 more people of sign up to get us to half a million!
> About a thousand an hour.......
>
> If you haven’t signed, please do so here.
>
http://www.rspb.org.uk/joinandhelp/campaignwithus/defendnature/
>
> If you have already, thanks but please pass this to a friend, relative
> or anyone who can add their name and ask them to sign here
>
> Together we can make it to over half a million – let’s do it
>
> tim
Thanks to Nick and everyone who stepped up to support this campaign. The half-million mark was substantially exceeded. The final score was:
Over half a million (520,325) people from across Europe, including over 100,000 people from the UK, have supported the call not to amend the legislation. This is by the largest public response to any consultation published by the European Commission. The consultation closed at 11pm on Sunday 26 July, 2015.
A continent-wide study demonstrating how effective EU protection has been in protecting birds has just been published in the scientific journal Conservation Letters (a stringently refereed, high profile international journal). This is available free from the journal's website:
