Climate and Ecology Bill [HL]

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 15th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I also congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, on bringing forward this Bill. I support it and will speak very much in favour of it.

I echo the words of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans on the extra health warning that it will be 40 degrees on Monday and Tuesday. They are temperatures that we have never seen, yet we know that the candidates to be Prime Minister have not mentioned this. It feels, yet again, as though parts of Westminster live in a parallel reality to the rest of the world—that makes me really frightened. This Bill is important, necessary and could not come any quicker.

The Bill—uniquely, I think—tackles nature and climate together. As we recognised at COP 26, the climate crisis cannot be solved without solving the nature crisis. Across the board, nature is our best way of mitigating catastrophic climate change. All the worst impacts have been mentioned, such as the flooding at the moment in Australia and drought in my home county of Somerset. I have friends who are not on the mains water; they have two springs, and their family has lived there for generations. They reported to me yesterday that the second spring has dried up; they are now effectively without water. These are unprecedented events which are becoming completely normal. The question of looking after our remaining areas of biodiversity could not be more important.

Scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Centre have identified nine planetary boundaries that allow a safe operating space for humanity, and climate change is just one of these. We have breached nine of these boundaries, including the limit on freshwater use—I just mentioned my friends in Somerset. Breaching one impacts on the others and risks dangerous, irreversible tipping points. They include, for instance, the Greenland ice sheet. I am sure we have all seen the situation in Italy, where glaciers are now slipping and killing people. This is a tiny fraction of what we are going to see.

In my remaining couple of minutes, I have some questions. We could talk about this subject for a long time. Considering the cascade of benefits that a dietary shift would have in the UK, including, as has been mentioned, improved food security, nature restoration, better public health and a huge boost to rural economies, will the Minister explain why the Government have not adopted the Climate Change Committee’s recommendation that we cut meat consumption by 20% by 2030? This would reduce emissions, including of methane, and free up lots of land for restoring ecosystems that absorb and store carbon.

As was mentioned, our Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, stated when he signed the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature that we must reverse biodiversity loss and increase finance. He said:

“We must turn these words into action and use them to build momentum, to agree ambitious goals and binding targets.”


Will the Minister explain why current legislation does not include the target to not only halt but reverse biodiversity loss by 2030? Our current net zero strategy recognises the importance of nature and the need for land use change but does not offer any transformative policies and it misses some of the opportunities to harness the power of nature. Does the Minister agree that we need joined-up legislation, such as this Bill, to provide a liveable future for our children? I am a member of the Environment and Climate Change Select Committee and we are looking at behaviour change and taking evidence across departments, across government. It is unbelievably patchy, not joined up and not thought through and there is no central intelligence, as such, or central policy guiding what the ministries are doing.

Finally, when the Office for Environmental Protection published its first report on 12 May 2020, saying that the key UK ecosystems are close to tipping points, the OEP’s chief insights officer, Simon Brockington, identified many things, one of which was seabed trawling, which destroys the integrity of ecosystems. He also identified the pollution of farmland and rivers with fertilisers. This issue has been raised in your Lordships’ House many times. It is something we could deal with, we have legislation to deal with it, but we underfund organisations such as the OEP and, in the meantime, rivers such as the Wye continue to disintegrate, lose fish and wildlife and, instead of absorbing carbon, become sources of carbon themselves.