State of Natural Resources Report 2025 - interim report summary (2024)
Wales’ natural resources underpin our well-being and quality of life. They fuel and provide the raw materials for our industries, provide our food, clean air and water, create jobs and wealth and contribute to our personal health and well-being. The State of Natural Resources Report (SoNaRR) examines how Wales is managing its natural resources. It gathers together the best available evidence to assess whether we are using natural resources sustainably, and how we can improve our management of them.
The report is written by experts within Natural Resources Wales (NRW), a Welsh Government Sponsored Body, with collaboration and advice from experts from across Wales and beyond. We are now working on the third full report, due to be published at the end of 2025. This ‘Interim Report (2024)’ outlines our plans for SoNaRR2025, highlights key new evidence on what has changed since SoNaRR 2020, and the main messages that are emerging from that evidence. It shows that we face urgent challenges to address nature loss, climate change and pollution. Whilst some progress has been made on responding to these challenges, much remains to be done. However, if we act together and act now, with the right responses we can repair the damage to our natural resources for the benefit of current and future generations in Wales.
Background
SoNaRR is our assessment of the sustainable management of natural resources in Wales. It is a comprehensive and unified evidence base which is used by Welsh Government, public bodies, and other groups to inform policy, planning, and wider decision-making.
It is written into Welsh law that NRW must publish a full State of Natural Resources Report in the year before a Senedd election, with an Interim Report in the year before that.
We have published two full reports so far: SoNaRR2016 and SoNaRR2020. The first report described the state of our natural resources, and examined how pressures on our natural resources are impacting our well-being. The second report introduced a new way of thinking about SMNR by breaking it down into four interconnected aims. These four aims collectively seek to maintain and enhance natural resources, build ecosystem resilience, achieve healthy places for people and a regenerative economy that addresses nature loss. The report concluded that we must make transformational changes to our food, energy, and transport systems in order to achieve these aims for the sustainable management of our natural resources.
How we will present SoNaRR2025
We will structure the report into three levels to help people get to the type of information that they need. The report will make clear the links between our key messages and the underpinning data and evidence. There will be infographics to visualise key messages, and interactive graphics will enable users to explore further details where they want to.
- Summary – key messages and summaries of the main conclusions.
- Assessments and evidence – our experts’ assessments of SMNR and the evidence underpinning their assessments. These will cover the four aims of SMNR at an all-Wales level and for three key natural resources (air, soil, water), and the eight broad ecosystems in Wales (coastal margins, enclosed farmland, freshwater, marine, mountain, moorland and heath, semi-natural grassland, urban and woodlands). There will also be a biodiversity assessment and evidence on drivers of environmental change such as climate change, invasive non-native species, and land and sea use change.
- Data and evidence sources – links to specific data sources, relevant primary literature, and evidence synthesis reports.
How we assess Wales’ sustainable management of natural resources
The Environment (Wales) Act 2016 says that the objective of SMNR is to maintain and enhance the resilience of ecosystems and the benefits and ecosystem services they provide. We must do this in a way that can meet the needs of present generations of people without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. In this way, SMNR directly contributes to the achievement of the 7 Welsh well-being goals.
The SMNR objective has been broken down into four aims, as shown in Figure 1. In SoNaRR we use the four aims to assess Wales’ management of natural resources and to identify opportunities for achieving SMNR.
Figure 1 The interconnected aims of SMNR illustrating the links between environmental, social / cultural, and economic well-being
To assess Wales’ sustainable management of natural resources against these four aims, we need to be able to measure the pressures on natural resources, and the state of natural resources, including ecosystem resilience. We also need to understand the benefits, or services, we get from them and how changes in the state of natural resources impact on well-being. And we need to better measure and understand what actions (or responses) work to help improve our management of natural resources.
Challenges
The evidence is clear that we are facing three major and interconnected environmental challenges: nature loss, climate change, and pollution and waste.
Globally, around 1 million species of plants and animals are now threatened with extinction. Reflecting this global trend, Wales’ wildlife is continuing to decline, mainly because of the way we manage our land for agriculture, the effects of climate change, pollution, over exploitation and invasive species. This loss of nature threatens ecosystem resilience and nature’s ability to support our society and well-being, and nature’s capacity to adapt to and mitigate against climate change.
We have now reached 1.1 degrees C of warming, unequivocally caused largely by human activities. In order to limit that warming to 1.5 degrees C, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that we must achieve a 43% reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, compared to 2019, and net zero by 2050. Despite the urgent need to cut emissions, current national plans fall well short of what is required. The United Nations estimate that national action plans will only deliver a 2.6% decrease in global emissions by 2030. Wales is making progress in reducing emissions, but we need also to take urgent action to adapt to the risks that climate change is bringing.
Pollution of our air and atmosphere, waters, and soils presents significant risks to human health and nature across the world and within Wales. Air pollution has a significant effect on public health and on ecosystems. Pollution is also a significant issue for river basins in Wales, particularly from wastewater, towns and cities, transport, rural areas and abandoned mines. Contamination and inappropriate management of waste can also pollute our soils and threaten human and ecosystem health.
Ultimately, these three challenges have a common driver: an extractive and degenerative economy which uses resources and creates wastes at a rate that cannot be supported by our one planet. Despite reductions to our global environmental footprint in the last 20 years, Wales continues to use more than its fair or sustainable share of global resources. If the entire population of the world lived like Wales, humanity would require 2.08 Earths.
Responding to the challenges
We can rise to meet these challenges if we work together across sectors, at scale and act now. Because the challenges are intertwined, we must act in an integrated way that addresses environmental and human health. All of us in Wales that have duties under the Environment Act and all of us in Wales that care about or rely on natural resources (that is all of us in Wales) must act together and act now to change how our economy and society works so our natural resources can start to recover for the benefit of current and future generations in Wales.
This means we must embed the value of nature in decision-making and transition to nature positive economies that finance nature recovery. The UK and Wales committed to being nature positive by 2030 via the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature, and to take urgent action to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 via the Convention on Biological Diversity Global Biodiversity Framework (CBD GBF). To deliver on these commitments, Wales has set out a range of recommendations via its Biodiversity Deep Dive. SoNaRR2025 will support Wales’ approach to Nature Recovery, align with the CBD GBF, and inform statutory users such as the national Natural Resources Policy and Area Statements.
In 2021, Wales committed to achieving Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. This is set to be achieved via a mix of emissions reductions and sequestration, for instance via nature-based solutions such as tree planting. The Welsh public sector has more ambitiously committed to reach net zero by 2030, through a range of priority areas, including land use and procurement. Wales has made some progress in adapting to the risks it faces from climate change and in October 2024 published the Climate Adaptation Strategy for Wales.
Actions are taking place across Wales to tackle pollution and waste. In February 2024 a new law came into force in Wales which seeks to improve air quality and soundscapes and so reduce harm to human health, nature and the economy. The Welsh Government has also set targets to reduce waste by 33% overall, with no waste to landfill and a 60% reduction in food waste by 2030.
The need for an integrated response is increasingly being recognised. The health sector is a priority area for such integrated action, using the ‘One Health’ approach which reinforces the links between the health of our planet and human well-being. Integrating the value of nature into decision-making forms one of the ten well-being objectives of the Welsh Government and part of Wales’ commitments under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Many of these commitments emphasise the need to understand that the value of nature is not purely in terms of pounds and pence; that nature is an asset that contributes to our social and cultural well-being in many ways.
We need to transform our economic system so that it works better to regenerate nature and human prosperity. The Dasgupta Review on the economics of Biodiversity commissioned by HM Treasury sets out a range of systemic changes needed for such a transition. These include nature-based solutions; green finance; empowering citizens; education; and equitable governance, especially with respect to just access to a healthy environment and just transition. The businesses and the finance sector are increasingly recognising the need to better manage nature-related risks by better integrating nature into their planning and decision making. For instance, via The Task Force for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD).
We hope to be able to evidence more positive changes in the 2025 final report, showing that we in Wales have accelerated action in this most urgent of decades. That is how fast our collective action needs to be if we are to deliver on our aspirations and commitments for the sustainable management of natural resources.
Evidence needs
SoNaRR2025 will include new Wales-wide evidence from across the sciences, social sciences, and economics. Where we do not have the evidence we need for our assessment, we will make this clear in the report. Most evidence needs that we identified in the last report (SoNaRR2020) were within the themes ecosystem resilience, biodiversity, land use and soil, climate change, healthy places, and regenerative economy. Around half of the SoNaRR2020 evidence needs have seen some progress. These needs from the 2020 report will be prioritised alongside the new evidence needs that our experts are identifying. These priorities will be published in the full report in 2025, helping us to work within NRW and with partners to try and improve our evidence base and make progress towards achieving SMNR in Wales.