Biodiversity Emergency

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Jones of Whitchurch (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for tabling this timely and important debate. As has been said, it fittingly coincides with Earth Day, when global citizens are taking a stand right across our world on the climate and biodiversity emergency.

Today, noble Lords have provided a depressing indictment of the Government’s record on biodiversity. We are now more aware than ever of the fragility of our own ecosystems. By their own admission, the Government are failing to meet two-thirds of the biodiversity targets agreed at the Convention on Biological Diversity in 2010, while 41% of our species are in decline and 10% face extinction. But here in the Lords, we have a real opportunity not just to talk about biodiversity but to act upon it.

Amendments to the forthcoming Environment Bill could allow us to introduce legally binding targets to halt and reverse declines in nature by 2030. The Bill could allow us to set meaningful baselines against which progress could be measured but also enforced. It could enable us to determine that biodiversity net gain should be a fundamental principle running through all future government investment, without exception. It would enable us also to put the biodiversity crisis on an equal footing to the climate crisis, recognising that action and resources on both are necessary to deliver a sustainable planet.

If we take these actions now, and provide the resources to make them happen, we can go to the CBD in China later this year with credibility to ask others to follow our lead and deliver a radical global programme for action. I hope that the Minister can confirm that he is indeed ready to deliver a more radical version of the Environment Bill which can reverse the decline in nature and produce bold new targets and deliverables by 2030. I look forward to his response.