Is there really a ‘butterfly emergency’?

Anyone else getting fed up with ‘emergencies’? There was a time when that word meant something, but not any longer now that every other quango or town council has declared a ‘climate emergency’, ‘housing emergency’ or ‘nature emergency’ (not that the existence of multiple emergencies seems to stop their staff cutting their hours to four days a week or expecting to work from a beach on the Med).    

But the latest declaration really will have the blue lights flashing. Apparently we now have a ‘butterfly emergency’. This one has been declared by a charity called Butterfly Conservation, on the back of its annual Big Butterfly Count which it claims observed a 50 per cent collapse in butterfly numbers since last year.

‘The butterfly data from from 2024 is an early signal of what lies ahead,’ Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England, tells the Guardian.