World Biodiversity

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Grand Committee

[The Earl of Selborne (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Blencathra for giving us the opportunity to debate this very important subject. I declare an interest as patron of the National Biodiversity Network trust.

Both of the speeches that we have heard so far have given us some stark information on biodiversity losses. We must accept that with the human population expanding, and with the standard of economies by and large increasing, there are bound to be competing demands for land use and maritime resources, hence the conflict between conservation and other interests. We have to tackle the question of how industries such as agriculture, which is a large land user, fisheries, mineral extraction and forestry can coexist with the requirements of conservation. Realistically, if you can achieve 15% of land cover around the world protected in some form, you are doing well. You are certainly not going to get vastly more; that is probably near the upper limit. We have to recognise that habitat destruction is not the only cause of the loss of biodiversity; there is also climate change, and we have heard about the introduction of alien species. These are the issues that have to be addressed.

What instruments are available to us that could be rolled out on a global scale? The UK has some quite interesting tools that it has developed, and it needs to think carefully about how it can pursue them further. In 2011 we published the UK National Ecosystem Assessment, which was started under the Labour Government of Gordon Brown and has been pursued with some interest by the coalition Government and the present Government. It gave us an idea of how to take an overview of the state of our natural environment, including biodiversity, and how to value our ecosystem services.

The second instrument, which again is a first in global terms, has been the Natural Capital Committee, which gives advice to government and others on how to value our natural capital, including biodiversity. The Government’s response in September this year to the third State of Natural Capital report, said that they agreed with the underpinning premise of recommendation 3, which was:

“Organisations should create a register of natural capital for which they are responsible and use this to maintain its quality and quantity”.

The government response continued:

“We support the NCC’s work on developing an approach to corporate natural capital accounting. We will continue to work with the Natural Capital Coalition and the Natural Capital Declaration as they develop an internationally agreed approach to valuing and accounting for nature in business and finance … Once a domestically and internationally agreed approach to natural capital accounting has been established, we will look at appropriate mechanisms to support further adoption of this approach”.

That seems thoroughly realistic and it represents quite a sea change in how we construct our balance sheets, and how we put values on businesses and their impact on the environment. We have to make progress on this. There is a danger that this will get bogged down in interminable committees. It is a significant contribution that we should make so that every organisation, ultimately, has to account for its impacts, for better or worse, on natural capital, including biodiversity.

The UK assessment exercise was massive. Many scientists were involved. It took place between 2009 and 2011 and had the great advantage that this country has a wonderful heritage of recording—any number of people go out recording birds and butterflies as volunteers. But scientists, government agencies, NGOs and others also do it. That gave us a head start. This information, particularly the long-term databanks, is absolutely critical. I draw attention to the National Biodiversity Network, which is bringing together all these records held by any number of agencies. We now have more than 110 million biological records and they are accessible to anyone online. That is the key. There is no point recording where you find one particular plant or see a bird if that is not available online in order to inform policy-makers. That was a great springboard from which to build up the information required for monitoring, valuing and accounting for natural capital, as well as identifying the required investment and management programmes—the risks, the costs and benefits. Those are what was really meant by developing programmes in order to protect biodiversity.

An investment programme has to be based on the strongest evidence of economic benefit. That could include woodland planting, peatland restoration, wetland creation, the restoration of commercial fish stocks, urban green spaces or improving the environmental performance in farming. These are, of course, happening in some instances. There is a feeling that these must be funded by government grants, but that will not happen, particularly when we hear the news tomorrow. We need to be a little more inventive about sources of funding that might include a wealth fund derived from rents from non-renewable resources and compensation payments from developers.

Other parts of the world clearly do not have access to the same amount of records as we have. But we should not minimise the amount of information that we can get from remote sensing. I do not know whether other noble Lords heard, as I did, Professor Kathy Willis of Kew describe recently on Radio 4, Oxford’s local ecological foot-printing tool for mapping remote sensing, which gives specific information on biodiversity, which, of course, has to be supplemented, ultimately, by fieldwork. But she made the point that using this tool they were able to provide information that had escaped people on the ground.

I am rather cynical about the United Nations targets—the Aichi targets—the five strategic goals and 20 targets. If you read them, you cannot dispute them. For example, by 2020, the extinction of known threatened species will have been prevented and the conservation status, particularly of the most in decline, will have been improved and sustained. Likewise are the sustainability goals agreed at the General Assembly of the United Nations just this September. Quite frankly, when, as happened in 2010, we come to assess the targets that were set at Rio, such as the Convention on Biological Diversity, surprise, surprise, we have not met them. I fear there is a real danger with a lot of these rather woolly targets set at Aichi that the same thing will happen.

Let us assess what we have that we are proud of in this country and what we need to improve. We should be very proud of the Darwin Initiative, which has been going since Rio. It has done excellent work. Now, it is much more funded by DfID than by Defra. That means that there must be a human well-being content, thereby excluding some of the environmental projects that were supported in the past. Nevertheless, we are proud of it. We have managed some excellent UK-based conservation schemes. Referring back to the IUCN red list, we succeeded in taking the bittern and the nightjar off that list, which is a small plus. I agree that it does not outweigh some of the other cases referred to by my noble friend.

We have been active participants in the international programmes, such as Ramsar for wetlands, CITES for endangered species, and the Convention on Biological Diversity. Therefore we have pulled our weight there. However, quite frankly, I am not sure whether we have brought the devolved Administrations in very successfully. When somebody from Defra goes to these meetings, there does not appear to be very good dissemination of outcomes, which certainly needs looking at.

Lastly, I make the point that historically we are bound to recognise that we have a key role. If you go to Kew, the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh or the Natural History Museum, there you have the type specimens—the collections to which just about every other country where these collections come from will need access to make their biodiversity plans. Again, we should be enormously proud of the resources that are available there. I note that the science strategy from Kew, in spite of the funding difficulties it is facing, is very positive.

Scotland is to be congratulated on the online publication last year of the Atlas of Living Scotland, an online biodiversity database built to inform the world of just what biodiversity, soils, climates and habitats can be found in Scotland. I much look forward to the day when England can do the same.