Excerpts for my fellow click-skeptics who are also uninitiated into UK beaverdom, emphasis mine:

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“Beavers are a native species with lots to offer in terms of landscape resilience, boosting biodiversity and climate change adaptation and mitigation. It would be crazy not to look at wild release as a key tool for the government.”

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“It’s really important releases are done responsibly, under licence and to a strategy – then we can maximise the benefits that beavers bring through their damming and habitat modification.”

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Debbie Tann, the chief executive of Hampshire and Isle of Wight Wildlife Trust, said: “We’ve got beavers living wild quite happily and quietly [across southern England] and yet to get a licence to release a native animal back into its natural habitat we’ve got to do this 100,000-word application to assess its impact on every single aspect of everything.”

The trust has been working since 2019 on an application to release free-living beavers on to the island. Tann said: “The science of how important they are, what they do to revitalise rivers, boost biodiversity and minimise flooding are very well evidenced. We’re hoping the new government will honour previous commitments and open the application process so we can just get on with it.”

She added: “This isn’t about beavers per se. It’s about the restoration of ecosystem function and resilience in terms of drought and flood management, biodiversity recovery and soil health. This will tick loads of different boxes, and there are tourism benefits too and getting the public excited about this idea of nature restoration.”

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