̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - RSPB

Pledge to phase out toxic lead ammunition in UK hunting by 2025 has failed

jg533 — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 09:14:35 +0000

̽��ֱ��pledge, made in February 2020 by the UK’s nine leading game shooting and rural organisations, aimed to benefit wildlife and the environment and ensure a market for the healthiest game meat food products.

But a Cambridge team, working with the ̽��ֱ�� of the Highlands and Islands, has consistently shown that lead shot was not being phased out quickly enough to achieve a complete voluntary transition to non-toxic ammunition by 2025. In a final study, published on 6 March in the journal Conservation Evidence, the team concludes that the intended transition has failed.

̽��ֱ��team has closely monitored the impact of the pledge every year since its introduction, recruiting expert volunteers to buy whole pheasants from butchers, game dealers and supermarkets across Britain and recover embedded shotgun pellets for analysis.

In 2025, the study - called SHOT-SWITCH - found that of 171 pheasants found to contain shot, 99% had been killed with lead ammunition.

This year, for the first time, the team also analysed shotgun pellets found in red grouse carcasses shot in the 2024/25 shooting season and on sale through butchers’ shops and online retailers. In all 78 grouse carcasses from which any shot was recovered, the shot was lead.

“Many members of the shooting community had hoped that the voluntary pledge away from lead ammunition would avert the need for regulation. But the voluntary route has now been tested - with efforts made by many people - and it has not been successful,” said Professor Rhys Green in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology and lead author of the report.

Eating game meat killed using lead shot will expose people unnecessarily to additional dietary lead. Lead is toxic to humans even in very small concentrations; the development of the nervous system in young and unborn children is especially sensitive to its effects. As a result, many food safety agencies now advise that young children and pregnant women should avoid, or minimise, eating game meat from animals killed using lead ammunition.

Discarded shot from hunting also poisons and kills many tens of thousands of the UK’s wild birds each year.

Despite proposing the voluntary change, many shooting organisations and some individual shooters do not support proposed regulatory restrictions on lead ammunition.

Green said: “Private individuals pay a lot of money to shoot pheasants on some private estates - and people don’t like to change their habits. It’s a bit like wearing car seatbelts, or not smoking in pubs. Despite the good reasons for doing these things, some people were strongly against using regulation to achieve those changes, which are now widely accepted as beneficial. ̽��ֱ��parallel with shooting game with lead shotgun ammunition is striking.”

Danish shooters now say that the legal ban on lead introduced in Denmark around 30 years ago was justified. They say it has not reduced the practicality or popularity of their sport, and has increased its acceptability to wider society.

“Although a few large UK estates have managed to enforce non-lead ammunition on pheasant shoots, some have had to be quite draconian in order to do it, with the estate gamekeepers insisting on loading the guns for the shooters,” added Green.

In the 2020/21 and 2021/22 shooting seasons, over 99% of the pheasants studied were shot using lead ammunition. This figure dropped slightly to 94% in 2022/23 and 93% in 2023/24, with the remaining pheasants killed by ammunition made of steel or a metal called bismuth, before rising to 99% again in 2024/25.

Retail pressure

̽��ֱ��researchers also checked up on a pledge made by Waitrose in 2019 to stop selling game killed with lead ammunition.

They found that the retailer had been largely let down by suppliers, and that some of their shooters continued to shoot using lead despite making assurances to the contrary. As a result, Waitrose did not sell oven-ready pheasants at all between 2021 and 2023. It sold pheasants again in January 2024 and the 2024/25 season, but the researchers showed that the majority had been killed using lead shot.

In 2022 the National Game Dealers Association (NGDA), which buys game and sells it to the public and food retailers, also announced it would no longer sell game of any kind that had been shot using lead ammunition. But this pledge has since been withdrawn. ̽��ֱ��researchers bought 2024/25 season pheasants from three NGDA member businesses and found that all had been shot with lead ammunition.

Inside influence

̽��ֱ��researchers also analysed all articles relating to the voluntary transition published in the magazine of the UK’s largest shooting organisation, the British Association for Shooting and Conservation. They found that articles near the beginning of the five-year pledge communicated clear, frequent and positive messages about the effectiveness and practicality of non-lead shotgun ammunition.

But by 2023, mentions of the transition and encouragement to follow it had dropped dramatically.

̽��ֱ��upshot

At the request of the Defra Secretary of State, the UK Health & Safety Executive (HSE) has assessed the risks to the environment and human health posed by lead in shot and bullets. Its report, published in December 2024, proposes that the UK Government bans the use of lead shot and large calibre bullets for game shooting because of the risks they pose to the environment and health. This recommendation is currently under review by Defra ministers, with a response due in March 2025.

Steel shotgun pellets are a practical alternative to lead and can be used in the vast majority of shotguns, as can other safe lead-free alternatives. But the results of this study indicate UK hunters remain unwilling to make the switch voluntarily.

Since 2010, UK governments have preferred voluntary controls over regulation in many areas of environment and food policy and have suggested that regulation be used only as a last resort.

“Shooting organisations did a lot of questionnaire surveys when the pledge was introduced in 2020, and the results suggested many shooters thought the time had come to switch away from lead ammunition. Those responses stand in contrast to what we’ve actually measured for both pheasant and grouse,” said study co-author Dr Mark Taggart at the ̽��ֱ�� of the Highlands and Islands.

Toxic lead

A previous study led by Green and colleagues found that pheasants killed by lead shot contained many fragments of lead too small to detect by eye or touch, and too distant from the shot to be removed without throwing away a large proportion of otherwise useable meat. This means that eating pheasant killed using lead shot is likely to expose consumers to raised levels of lead in their diet, even if the meat is carefully prepared to remove whole shotgun pellets and the most damaged tissue.

Lead has been banned from use in paint and petrol for decades. It is toxic to humans when absorbed by the body and there is no known safe level of exposure. Lead accumulates in the body over time and can cause long-term harm, including increased risk of cardiovascular disease and kidney disease in adults. Lead is known to lower IQ in young children and affect the neurological development of unborn babies.

̽��ֱ��studies were part-funded by the RSPB, Waitrose & Partners, and an anonymous donor. They were supported by a group of unpaid volunteers, who are co-authors of the reports.

References

Green, R E et al: ‘ ̽��ֱ��proportion of common pheasants shot using lead shotgun ammunition in Britain has barely changed despite five years of voluntary efforts to switch from lead to non-lead ammunition.’ March 2025, Conservation Evidence. DOI: 10.52201/CEJ22/EXYS6184

Green, R E et al.: ‘Sampling of red grouse carcasses in Britain indicates no progress during an intended five-year voluntary transition from lead to non-lead shotgun ammunition.’ February 2025, Conservation Evidence. DOI: 10.52201/CEJ22/YYWM1722

A voluntary pledge made by UK shooting organisations in 2020 to replace lead shot with non-toxic alternatives by 2025 has failed, analysis by Cambridge researchers finds.

̽��ֱ��voluntary route has now been tested - with efforts made by many people - and it has not been successful.

Rhys Green

Andy Hay, RSPB

Adult pheasant

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Cambridge conservation and sustainable business leaders prepare for COP16

plc32 — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 14:50:40 +0000

̽��ֱ��Cambridge Conservation Initiative and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) co-hosted a panel discussion featuring key industry leaders in the run-up to the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP16). Please read more about the panel here

CISL

Panel members from CCI and CISL discuss the upcoming COP16

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Sir David Attenborough's 'joy' on visit to Cambridge Conservation Initiative

plc32 — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 16:01:44 +0000

Sir David said of visiting CCI that he felt “an undercurrent of joy” whenever he came to the conservation campus, which is housed in the building bearing his own name.

̽��ֱ��campus was opened in 2016 and is the first of its kind, with over 500 conservation professionals and researchers, from 10 different organisations and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, all collaborating to stop the biodiversity crisis and build more hopeful futures for people and nature.

Read the full story: 'An Undercurrent of Joy'

Sir David Attenborough spoke of how he feels during visits to the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI) when he stopped by the CCI conservation campus at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge this week.

Cambridge Conservation Initiative

Photo of Sir David Attenborough on a visit to Cambridge Conservation Research Initiative

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At least 80% of the world’s most important sites for biodiversity on land currently contain human developments

cg605 — Thu, 23 Mar 2023 07:34:07 +0000

A study has found that infrastructure worldwide is widespread in sites that have been identified as internationally important for biodiversity, and its prevalence is likely to increase.

This is the first ever assessment of the presence of infrastructure in Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs): a global network of thousands of sites recognised internationally as being the world’s most critical areas for wildlife.

Infrastructure is one of the greatest drivers of threats to biodiversity according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It can cause natural habitat destruction and fragmentation, pollution, increased disturbance or hunting by humans, the spread of invasive species, direct mortality, and can have wider impacts beyond the development site.

Now, researchers from BirdLife International, WWF and the RSPB, in association with the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, have conducted an assessment of infrastructure in KBAs, finding that it is widespread and likely to increase. ̽��ֱ��results are published today in Biological Conservation.

“It’s concerning that human developments exist in the vast majority of sites that have been identified as being critical for nature,” said Ash Simkins, a Zoology PhD student at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge who led the study.

KBAs are sites that contribute significantly to the global persistence of biodiversity. For example, they may contain species that are under a high risk of extinction or are home to species or ecosystems that are found in only a small area worldwide.

Researchers assessed 15,150 KBAs on land and found that 80% contained infrastructure. Multiple combinations of infrastructure types occurred in KBAs with the most common being roads (75%), power lines (37%) and urban areas (37%).

They found that potential future planned infrastructure developments could lead to an additional 2,201 KBAs containing mines (from 754 to 2,955; 292% increase), an additional 1,508 KBAs containing oil and gas infrastructure (from 2,081 to 3,589; 72% increase) and an additional 1,372 KBAs containing power plants (from 233 to 1,605; 589% increase).

Maps of KBAs were intersected with spatial datasets of different types of infrastructure that researchers categorised as transport, dams and reservoirs, extractives (relating to natural resources), energy (power lines and power plants) and urban areas.

Energy and extractives were the only categories for which some global data on potential future planned developments was available.

“We recognise that infrastructure is essential to human development but it’s about building smartly. This means ideally avoiding or otherwise minimising infrastructure in the most important locations for biodiversity. If the infrastructure must be there, then it should be designed to cause as little damage as possible, and the impacts more than compensated for elsewhere,” said Simkins.

Researchers found that countries in South America, (for example 82% of KBAs in Brazil), Sub-Saharan, Central and Southern Africa, and parts of South-east Asia are amongst the areas with the highest proportion of extractive claims, concessions or planned development in their KBA networks. All of the KBAs identified to date in Bangladesh, Kuwait, the Republic of the Congo and Serbia have potential extractive claims, concessions or planned development.

“It’s also concerning to see that in the future, extensive mining and oil and gas related infrastructure is planned to be built in many of the world’s most important sites for biodiversity,” said Simkins.

Some of the technology to tackle the climate crisis, like solar panels and wind turbines, is also dependent on mining for precious metals. “We need smart solutions to the climate crisis whilst avoiding or minimising negative impacts on biodiversity,” said Simkins.

“At the UN biodiversity COP15 meetings in Montreal last year, governments committed to halting human-induced extinctions,” said co-author Dr Stuart Butchart, Chief Scientist at BirdLife International and Honorary Research Fellow at Cambridge’s Department of Zoology. “Widespread destruction or degradation of the natural habitats within KBAs could lead to wholesale extinctions, so existing infrastructure in KBAs must be managed to minimise impacts, and further development in these sites has to be avoided as far as possible.”

“Infrastructure underpins our societies, delivering the water we drink, the roads we travel on, and the electricity that powers livelihoods,” said Wendy Elliott, Deputy Leader for Wildlife at WWF. “This study illustrates the crucial importance of ensuring smart infrastructure development that provides social and economic value for all, whilst ensuring positive outcomes for nature. Making this happen will be the challenge of our time, but with the right planning, design and commitment it is well within the realms of possibility.”

Researchers say that infrastructure within a KBA varies in the degree to which it may drive a loss of biodiversity. More research is required to find out the extent to which infrastructure in a particular KBA affects wildlife within the site and what measures are needed to mitigate this.

Reference: A T Simkins et al, A global assessment of the prevalence of current and potential future infrastructure in Key Biodiversity Areas, Biological Conservation, DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2023.109953

At least 80% of sites identified as being internationally important for biodiversity on land currently contain infrastructure − of which more than 75% contain roads. In the future, more sites that are important for biodiversity could contain powerplants, mines and oil and gas infrastructure

It’s concerning that human developments exist in the vast majority of sites that have been identified as being critical for nature.

Ash Simkins

EduLeite / E+ via Getty Images

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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If you go down to the woods today…

lw355 — Tue, 10 Feb 2015 17:00:37 +0000

Soaring over the tree canopy of one of the most biodiverse forests on earth, a tiny unmanned plane buzzes quietly through the air. Its pilot stands 250 m below, controlling its flight remotely. This unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is gathering data essential to understanding and diagnosing the health of the rainforest below.

̽��ֱ��plane is one of a small fleet currently undergoing test flights in Indonesia. Each has been equipped with remote sensors. Their task is to image both the Harapan Rainforest – a 100,000 hectare area of formerly logged forest that is now managed for conservation by a group of NGOs including the RSPB – and a highly threatened forested area on the coast of Kenya.

Globally, around one billion hectares of degraded tropical forest like Harapan might be restorable, enabling them to continue to contribute to the planet’s biodiversity and its carbon and water cycles. But a major problem faced by conservation managers is how to survey extensive areas in which conditions can vary in just a few hundred square metres and are continually changing through natural regeneration.

A group of conservation scientists at the Department of Plant Sciences, RSPB and A Rocha International (which works in Kenya) has embarked on what it hopes is a cost-effective and high-quality solution, funded by the Cambridge Conservation Initiative Collaborative Fund. Lead researcher Dr David Coomes, explained: “Forest conservation activities often rely on airborne monitoring and satellite imagery to provide information but these are either expensive or don’t offer a fine-enough resolution. We’ve decided to use inexpensive sensors on UAVs to spot areas of the trashed forest that are showing early signs of recovery.”

̽��ֱ��researchers need to measure the health of the forest on a tree-by-tree basis – locating, identifying and counting key species indicative of recovery. Multiply this up by hundreds of thousands of hectares, repeated at time intervals in the future, and it becomes a huge imaging, computational and ‘big data’ challenge.

As the datasets grow, being able to manage and analyse the images automatically and with very high accuracy becomes crucial, and so a key part of the project is to develop the mathematical tools that will do this. This is the job of Dr Carola Schӧnlieb and her team of digital image analysts at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics.

̽��ֱ��mathematical tools have similarities to technology they are also developing for tumours. For the past year, Schӧnlieb’s group has been working on the VoxTox Research Programme – a five-year study funded by Cancer Research UK and led by Professor Neil Burnet at Cambridge’s Department of Oncology – which aims to reduce the ‘collateral damage’ toxicity that can arise during cancer radiotherapy.

About half of all people with cancer receive a course of radiotherapy, a form of treatment in which X-rays are used to shrink or destroy the tumour. With the benefit of advanced systems, it’s now possible to aim radiation beams at tumours more effectively than ever before, allowing increasing doses of radiotherapy with increased cancer cure rates, and also reducing side effects.

However, although clinicians use planning software to define the target area for treatment and deliver the optimal dose, any dose that falls outside the target area – for instance due to the positioning of the patient and their internal organs during treatment – can cause permanent and severe damage to normal tissues. VoxTox, which brings together cancer specialists, mathematicians, radiologists, physicists and engineers, is developing a set of tools that can be used to provide patients with the optimal dosage for their condition.

“ ̽��ֱ��similarity between what we are doing in VoxTox and forest mapping is the development of mathematical algorithms that combine datasets – a process called registration – and then segment them into objects of interest,” explained Schӧnlieb.

For VoxTox, imaging data gathered during the course of a patient’s radiotherapy is analysed mathematically pixel by pixel (or, in fact, ‘voxel by voxel’ because it’s in three dimensions) within the patient outline, and the dose is then re-computed at that point, each day, during treatment.

Airborne remote sensors for conservation, by contrast, gather data on which trees are in the forest, where they are and how healthy. “It’s like an airborne well tree clinic,” said Coomes. ̽��ֱ��data might include digital photography to record what can be seen; a three-dimensional laser scanner (or LiDAR) to measure the height of the canopy; and hyperspectral scanners to monitor the wavelengths of radiation each plant absorbs – these ‘chemical signatures’ can be used to identify species.

“Being able to bring these datasets together gives us a much fuller idea of the health of the forest than each of the datasets individually,” he added. “With the addition of GPS too, it means we can map the forest tree by tree, over time, in three dimensions.”

To develop the algorithms, researchers led by Schӧnlieb and Coomes are using test data previously acquired by Coomes’ group using manned flights over five European sites, as well as data recently gathered from 200 km2 of Malaysian forest as part of a project funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.

This is complex mathematical image processing, as Schӧnlieb explained: “As for VoxTox, the aim is to faultlessly match different types of sensing data as a hybrid dataset and then segment it based on the different levels of information present in each voxel. This sort of analysis hasn’t been done before with this kind of accuracy. It pushes over the boundaries of state-of-the-art methods.

“ ̽��ֱ��next stage is to see how far we can push the segmentation method, which is the part that identifies individual trees,” she said. “If we can maintain high levels of accuracy using cheaper and fewer sensors – like those being used on the UAVs – then you can take imagery that’s as good as it’s going to get and maximise the Meanwhile information gain from what you have.”

Meanwhile, by mid-2015, the UAVs will begin streaming data back to the researchers who, with their algorithms ready, will start mapping the voxel forest and feeding the results into its management. “ ̽��ֱ��appeal of this technology is you are dealing with individual plants and trees,” said Coomes, “it’s finally approaching what conservation scientists need to have: seeing the wood and the trees.”

Inset image – top: LiDAR image from Sierra Leone showing the Moru river along the border between Sierra Leone and Liberia; Credit: RSPB

Inset image – bottom: Dr Carola Schönlieb and Dr David Coomes; Credit: ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

Recent advances in medical imaging are being applied to airborne remote sensing of vegetation, enabling conservation scientists to see the wood and the trees.

It’s finally approaching what conservation scientists need to have: seeing the wood and the trees

David Coomes

Gaia Vaglio Laurin, published in PLOS One DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0097910

Airborne mapping of the tree canopy in a tropical West African forest

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