The final intact hedgerow in England, a 400-metre stretch of hawthorn and blackthorn along the B4309 near Market Harborough, is to be removed next month to make way for a distribution centre. In its place, planning authorities have approved a biodiversity net gain credit worth 3.7 habitat units, which will be stored as a database entry on a Dell PowerEdge server in a data centre off the Slough ring road.
The hedgerow, which has existed in some form since the enclosures of 1764 and currently provides habitat for eleven species of bird, four species of small mammal, and an estimated 2,000 invertebrates, will be grubbed out on the morning of February 3rd. By that afternoon, according to documents filed with the local authority, the biodiversity credit will be fully uploaded and accessible via a secure portal requiring two-factor authentication.
Graham Whitfield, senior ecological consultant at EnviroBalance Ltd, the firm which brokered the offset, said the arrangement represented a significant improvement on traditional conservation methods. “The physical hedgerow was vulnerable to disease, required ongoing maintenance, and occupied valuable land that could be put to more productive use”, he said. “The credit, by contrast, exists in perpetuity, cannot be damaged by agricultural machinery, and takes up merely 4.2 kilobytes of storage space.”
The offset credit will, in theory, fund the creation of species-rich grassland at a location yet to be determined. Planning documents indicate three possible sites, though two of these are currently under consideration for housing developments of their own, and the third is a municipal car park in Swindon that the council has expressed reluctance to relinquish.
Local resident Patricia Moorhouse, who has walked past the hedgerow twice daily for thirty years, said she was struggling to adjust to the new arrangements. “I’ve been given a login to view the credit on the database, which is kind of them, but the blackbirds don’t seem to have been issued with passwords”, she said. “I did try explaining to one this morning that his nest would be replaced with a comprehensive Excel spreadsheet tracking habitat value over time, but I’m not sure the message got through.”
A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said biodiversity net gain was a vital tool for balancing development needs with environmental protection. The spokesperson confirmed that the government was exploring options for making offset credits more tangible to the public, including the possibility of augmented reality apps that would allow users to point their phones at concrete and see a simulated hedgerow rendered in real time.
The server in Slough already hosts offset credits representing four ancient woodlands, seventeen wetlands, and what was once described by Natural England as an internationally important chalk grassland. It has a backup generator and an uninterruptible power supply rated for six hours, after which the nation’s biodiversity will depend on the speed with which the facilities manager can source diesel.
