Our new government is going to be facing huge challenges — from financial turmoil to ash-spewing volcanoes. While I am writing this we do not know who will be running the country. We do know that we have a hung parliament and, however it goes forward, the government will be based on some form of coalition. That may not be bad news for the natural world.

In the run-up to the election there was a lot of discussion about how the main parties differed from each other, particularly in their approach to the economy, but behind the scenes there was a quiet consensus emerging on their approaches to the environment.

As well as being an election year, 2010 is also the International Year of Biodiversity. Many people find the branding of years, weeks or days irrelevant, but the decision to focus on biodiversity — a word that is used to cover the wealth of the world’s wildlife — in 2010 is not accidental.

Internationally, a target was agreed to halt the decline in biodiversity which scientists have been highlighting for many years.

We are going to miss that target . . . in a big way. Recent research published in the eminent journal Science has demonstrated just how dramatically we are going to fail.

The focus tends to be on the large, charismatic species that face global extinction — like cute and cuddly pandas and majestic tigers — but closer to home our own wildlife continues to disappear, and many people simply have not noticed.

We cannot afford to continue to be blind to this loss though. Wildlife is not just a pretty part of our pleasant scenery, but is intricately and inexorably entwined with a healthy environment.

And we need our environment to be healthy; from viable insect populations that pollinate our crops to working floodplains that soak up heavy rains, we depend on wildlife.

Just looking at the butterflies. Over the last 20 years we have lost three of our most charismatic species in Oxfordshire. The pearl-bordered fritillary and its relative, the small pearl-bordered fritillary, have disappeared completely from our woodlands.

The marsh fritillary — a dramatically beautiful butterfly that used to be easy to find in meadows of Oxfordshire — has also gone in the last decade.

That story of lost species occurs across all the different types of wildlife, from flowering plants to bumblebees. Natural England, the Government’s conservation advisors, published a report in March that highlighted more than 500 species that have disappeared from England in the last two centuries.

Almost a thousand species, those that are declining most dramatically, have recently been listed as priorities for conservation action, including animals like the hedgehog that we used to think of as common.

The reasons for these losses have been well documented. They include the slicing up of habitats into small isolated areas by development, the pressure on farmers to produce more food in the countryside, and the lack of management in woodlands as the market for forest products has declined over the years.

Added to all of that is the threat of a changing climate. Whatever the cause, there is agreement that change is coming in the not-so-distant future, and wildlife will be on the frontline.

There has, of course, been a lot of action to try to slow down those losses, and in some cases to try to reverse them.

From protected areas and nature reserves, to schemes to encourage wildlife-friendly farming, all kinds of people have been involved, including conservationists, farmers and policy makers. But it has become increasingly clear that these actions just do not go far enough to even halt the decline of biodiversity, let alone to start to encourage back some of the wildlife that we have already lost.

The politicians are starting to get the message though. BBOWT and the other British wildlife trusts have been campaigning for years for an approach to the countryside that creates ‘living landscapes’ — areas where people and wildlife can thrive together, and where habitats are restored and connected to make them robust in the face of a changing climate.

Last year, the Government began a review of our protected areas, to look at how we can change the way we look at the countryside to promote this living landscape vision.

In the run-up to the election, we wrote to the leaders of the three main parties asking them to commit to seeing that work through, and to bring forward a White Paper to address this issue of reconnecting the countryside. All three responded, and both the Conservative and Labour parties made firm commitments to a White Paper. Chris Hannington, BBOWT’s head of conservation and education in Oxfordshire, said: “Wildlife has had a tough time in the county over recent years, but it is encouraging to read the election commitments made by the three major parties. BBOWT will continue to work with central and local government to ensure that the needs of our wildlife and landscapes are not squeezed out by competing demands from other sectors.”

Of course, promises are easy to make in the heat of the election campaign, and if we believe the predictions about public finances, the new government will have to look closely at their priorities.

We need to make sure that they make good on their pledges about the natural environment; we simply cannot afford to go on losing wildlife the way we have been.

I do believe though that the message is getting through to the politicians that this is a problem that is becoming increasingly urgent. There is agreement that work needs to be done, so let us use the natural environment as a great example of where politicians working together across parties can make a fundamental difference to our future.