Environment and Climate Change Committee Report: An Extraordinary Challenge: Restoring 30 per cent of our Land and Sea by 2030

Debate between Baroness Jones of Whitchurch and Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

Wednesday 11th September 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, who was very generous in what she said. I agreed with everything she said—particularly that part.

I congratulate the committee on putting together a really valuable report and will focus, at least initially, on the international role of the UK in agitation and in leading by example, where the UK has a particular role to play.

It is an obvious thing to say but, logically, there is nothing more important than mending our relationship with the natural world. Absolutely everything we have, everything we need, everything we do and our entire economic system is based on nature, which is why the damage we are doing to it, all around the world—to our rivers, mangroves, corals and forests—is just so mad.

If I more or less keep to my time now, by the time I have finished and sit down we will have lost the equivalent of nearly 400 football pitches-worth of forest. That almost defies belief and imagination. These are forests that are home to four-fifths of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, around 1 billion people depend on them for their survival, and, as we know, the forests regulate so much, not least our climate and rainfall. The Congo Basin alone is believed to generate more than half of the rainfall for the entire continent of Africa. This is not just an issue of biodiversity, and it is certainly not just an academic discussion we are having.

The reality is that there is no technological substitute for these systems: the only solution, and the ultimate challenge, is finding a way to protect what remains and restore what we have carelessly lost, and then to do everything we can, through all of our decision-making, to reconcile ourselves, our cultures our civilisations and our economies with the natural world, on which we depend. It is an obvious thing to say—and I am certain that, for this Room, it did not need to be said —but it is an argument that needs to be made repeatedly.

The reason for that is that, far too often, when we hear debates about the environment, or when the environment is discussed as a political issue, we are not actually talking about the environment; we have reduced the whole thing to a very narrow focus on carbon and climate change. It is an extraordinarily one-dimensional discussion that we are having most of the time. The reality is that we could put all the solar panels in the world on all the rooftops around the planet, and invest 10 times more in energy efficiency, but if we do not massively ramp up our efforts to protect and restore nature then it is all pointless. There is no pathway to net zero and there is no solution to climate change without forests, and I think it is really important that we keep our conversation as broad as possible. Climate change is an overwhelming threat, but it is a symptom—just one symptom—of the underlying and abusive relationship we have with the natural world.

I do not want in any way to sound like I am discouraging efforts to accelerate the much-needed clean energy transition. It is crucial, I think, that we ramp up our focus on preventing nature loss. By the way, we know that we can do it; there are examples all around the world. I had the privilege of being a Minister for the international environment, and I saw with my own eyes initiatives on a tiny scale and a huge scale—and sometimes on a national scale, where countries have managed to break the link between productivity, prosperity and environmental destruction.

I have just come back from Indonesia a couple of days ago. I hate flying—I have to be drunk to get on an aeroplane, so I am probably not making as much sense now as I would like to be. I can tell you that Indonesia, a country that has taken a lot of flak over many years for high rates, historically, of deforestation, has got its deforestation under control. It does not get the credit for it but it has—the data does not lie. It has broken the link between palm oil production and deforestation. There is still some deforestation, of course, but it is nothing compared to what it was. If all the great forest countries behaved in the way that Indonesia has, we would be having a very different discussion. We know that it can be done.

Noble Lords will remember that, a few years ago, we had the privilege of hosting COP 26 in Glasgow, which we made an effort to turn into a nature COP. We wanted a broader focus, and we delivered the Glasgow leaders’ declaration on forests. We got 145 countries, representing 90% of the world’s forests, to commit to end deforestation this decade, and secured $20 billion to support those countries to do it. We persuaded the multilateral development agencies to align their policies and portfolios with that aim. It represented—in theory, at least—an unprecedented package of support for forests. I put on record my thanks to the extraordinarily talented people in the invisible part of government—the people who do not normally take part in these debates but who do the real work. Without any doubt, that was a consequence of an extraordinarily effective diplomatic effort.

Since then, we attempted to take that same energy, approach and momentum to Montreal, which was about a year later. In order to have an impact and to be able to influence the debate, we protected those diplomatic networks that we had created. We remained co-leaders of the High Ambition Coalition and the Global Ocean Alliance—organisations designed to extract maximum ambition from countries with which we get on well. We spearheaded, with Ecuador, the Maldives and Gabon, a programme that suggested how countries might club together in order to fund what is needed for nature restoration. It was a programme that was, more or less, adopted at Montreal, in the Kunming-Montreal protocol.

There is no doubt that the UK played a very important role. I am grateful for what the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, said earlier, but the truth is that I had the honour of being the front of much of this work; the real work was done by hundreds and hundreds of people in government who were up all night, four or five days in a row. I thought some of them might be knocking on the door of madness by the end of it, relying only on coffee, but they did an extraordinary job and went way beyond what I, certainly, was expecting at the time. I am very grateful to them.

What was agreed at Montreal was seismic. It was an action plan that will put the world on a path to recovery. We are here to talk about the 30 by 30 target, and obviously that was the headline achievement that was secured at Montreal. But it was also agreed—and this is hugely important—that the wealthier countries will provide at least $20 billion a year by 2025 to help countries rich in nature but economically poorer to deliver their part of the bargain.

A lot has undoubtedly been achieved since Montreal. We have targets, agreements and treaties. In basic terms, we have the tools that we need, if we are serious about it, to turn the tide on nature destruction, but if we do not use those tools and properly do our part then the targets are academic. They would just be targets on paper.

The truth is that, globally—I include the UK in this—we are not living up to the commitments we made. We are less than one year from that $20 billion a year target. By the end of next year, the rich countries are supposed to be contributing $20 billion between them. A report produced by the ODI and commissioned by the brilliant Campaign for Nature, based entirely on OECD figures, shows that just two countries are contributing what they regard as their fair share of that finance. The UK is not one of them. I am certainly not blaming the new Government, who have only just taken their seats, but the UK is not one of them. The UK has a hugely important role to play in turning those grandiose commitments into something approaching reality.

We have been at the heart of this debate for some years now. It was a colossal error of judgment on the part of the most recent iteration of the Conservative Government just to walk off the stage. We were not there at the big events; we were fiddling the figures to make it look like we were spending more money than we were, and we were letting down allies. I think we did the UK’s reputation an enormous amount of damage. This Government have the awesome responsibility of turning things around, rebuilding our reputation and showing that, when we make a promise on these issues, we stick to it and keep our word.

That matters financially, for the reasons I have just explained, but it goes far beyond finance. It is also about politics. We have a history of being able to agitate in negative ways, but also in very positive ways internationally, persuading the world to do what we think it ought to be doing. When it comes to nature, our voice has counted for something. There have been many events and times in the last few years when regional groupings have gathered to talk—for example, about the Amazon. You would have all the Amazon countries there and the UK. We have had similar events in Asia, when leaders from Asian countries have gathered to talk about their biodiversity, and the UK has been the only non-regional member there. We have a voice, and it is essential that we use it.

We have to get our rich-country friends to step up and pay their fair share. We have to mobilise the private finance that we need, because there is nothing like enough public finance to do the job. We have to make sure that the forums that we are part of, such as the G7, honour the commitments that they made. If your Lordships remember, at the last G7 there was a commitment that all international aid—not just climate or nature, but all international aid—would be aligned with the global biodiversity framework. That has not happened—it has not happened in the UK or elsewhere.

I am running out of time, so will make one final point. The biggest challenge that people talk about when it comes to restoring our relationship with nature is finance. We are told that there is a $500 billion black hole annually; that is needed every year to turn things around. By coincidence, that is also how much the top 50 food-producing countries spend each year in subsidising often highly destructive land use. The UK is one of the few countries, possibly the only country, that has really got to grips with this challenge of reforming our subsidies, such that we are paying public money in return for public goods like the environment. I know others will be talking about this in due course, but it is really important that the new Government seize that agenda, recognise the opportunity and do not in any way yield to the vested interests that undoubtedly will be trying to pressure them to water down our commitments on land use subsidy reform. It is too important internationally and for the UK.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (Baroness Jones of Whitchurch) (Lab)]

My Lords, I gently remind your Lordships that, although it says an “advisory” Back-Bench speaking time of nine minutes, it is slightly more than advisory. We have a lot of speakers here today, so I hope that noble Lords will keep an eye on the clock and keep to the time limit, as far as possible.