A COALITION of conservation charities is urging the Government to uphold its pledge to ban fracking at protected sites, saying it could have a "disastrous impact" on the best known landmark in the Tees Valley.

Yorkshire Wildlife Trust has united with the RSPB, Campaign for Protection of Rural England and the Campaign for National Parks after identifying 31 of its reserves were fully or partially within areas licensed or set to be licensed for shale gas exploration and extraction.

It also found an additional 35 nature reserves were within 500 metres of another area awaiting further assessment and 91 Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in Yorkshire were within or intersecting with the fracking licensing blocks.

They said threatened protected areas in North Yorkshire included Roseberry Topping, a rare grassland habitat at Brockadale, Little Smeaton, featuring magnesian limestone which only exists in a narrow band to Durham, and rare hay meadows at Horse Field, Gilling, near Helmsley.

While the Government said in January it would exclude protected areas from fracking, in July the Department of Energy and Climate Change laid draft regulations in parliament confirming that exploration for shale gas would no longer be prevented in SSSIs.

Under the plans, shale firms would also be permitted to build rigs outside a national park and drill horizontally underneath it.

After the announcement, a Government spokesman said the number of SSSIs would have an adverse effect on the development of the shale gas industry.

He added: “We consider that the SSSI’s protections are adequate under the planning system.

"Developments won’t normally be permitted if they were going to have an adverse impact on a SSSI.”

The charities said the U-turn and the publication of proposed fracking sites had put some of the country’s most sensitive and precious wildlife sites, such as Farndale, in the North York Moors National Park, at risk.

A Yorkshire Wildlife Trust spokesman said it was deeply concerned that shale gas extraction was an untried technology in the UK, where the effects on hydrology and the geology of oil shale may be different to fracking sites in the US.

He said: "Allowing this activity could have disastrous impacts on European Protected Sites, European Protected Species, Sites of Special Scientific Interest and locally designated sites.

"Once the damage is done there will be no rescue package, we could lose everything.”