Managing Flood Risk

Debate between Graham Stuart and Caroline Lucas

Monday 3rd March 2014 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

I have given way a lot, and I fear that Mr Speaker will tell me to wind up.

We need better soil management as well as better water management, not least because that reduces the silting up of river beds further downstream. Approaches that help more water to remain in the uplands, where there may be peat bogs, rather than going downstream into people’s living rooms, can seriously improve water quality and have the potential to cut water bills for households.

Finally, on climate change, I regret that the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government is not here because his comments during the debate last week were complacent at best and reckless at worst. If he were here, he could clear up the basic matter of what he thinks is man-made and what is natural when it comes to the increased risk of extreme weather. In the same breath as he mentioned the Met Office, he said that there “might” be either short-term or long-term trends. On what basis does he query the long-term trend, let alone its seriousness? The Met Office states:

“There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events.”

If the Secretary of State has the evidence, let us see it. The only supposed authority he offered in support of his views is Lord Lawson—not a scientist of any sort but a staunch defender of the fossil fuel industry and head of a campaign group that lobbies against the Government’s climate change policies.

When talking about what he knows about climate science, why does the Secretary of State choose not to quote a climate scientist? When he has read Hansard later, perhaps he will confirm whether he has read the recent joint report by the leading UK and US scientific institutions—the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences—which finds that man-made climate change is more certain than ever and will post severe threats to society and infrastructure. Will he agree to meet Sir Paul Nurse and the authors of the report to ensure that his approach to defending the realm takes account of the realities and the risks of climate change?

I accept that the Secretary of State said last week that

“the risk is there to our nation”.—[Official Report, 26 February 2014; Vol. 576, c. 335.]

Let us therefore keep to the theory of risk rather than uncertainty, which, as we all know, is a well-known tactic of obfuscation and delaying action used by those with vested interests, from the tobacco to the fossil fuel lobbies. If we talk about this in terms of risk rather than uncertainty, it is like thinking about what is more important, risk or certainty, when we decide whether to get on a plane, vaccinate our children, or insure our homes and valuable belongings, or even whether to cross a busy road. Does a rational and responsible parent say, “I’m not 100% sure that my child will definitely get a really serious disease, so I’m not going to vaccinate them”? If one has just bought a new house, is the sensible approach to say, “I’m not 100% certain that my house will burn down, so I’m not going to bother with home insurance”? No. Unless we have a science and risk-based approach to protecting UK homes and businesses from future flood risk and extreme weather, the Secretary of State will be failing in his aim to ensure that our citizens are safe.

I also object to the Secretary of State’s view that the climate debate is polarised, as he claimed, between sceptics and zealots. Organisations such as the World Bank, the International Energy Agency, insurance industry bodies, the World Economic Forum and PwC have clearly paid a lot more attention to the science than he has. These organisations, which are not in any way environmentalist, are all warning that if we continue with business as usual and fail to make radical cuts to emissions, we are on course to seeing 4°, if not 6°, of climate change within our children’s lifetimes.

[Mr Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

I think the hon. Lady takes issue with the Secretary of State on the wrong point. There is a danger of hectoring. Given such overwhelming scientific evidence, it should be a straightforward matter to bring people on board in seeing that there is a risk that needs to be managed, but the debate has somehow become partisan and divided. Perhaps she, and all of us, could think about how we get our language right so that we create an inclusive approach, and then we can argue about the best response, not divide on the basis of belief.

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the hon. Gentleman. I suggest that the Secretary of State is one of the first people who ought to be trying to generate that inclusive approach to climate change. Instead, he has been doing exactly the opposite in referring to people as zealots and saying that those who promote a risk-based approach to climate change are completely off the agenda. I entirely agree that we could look at our language, but let us take the fight to where it starts, which is with the Secretary of State’s response to the flooding debate last week.

I can tell, Mr Speaker, that you would like me to conclude very shortly, so I shall be brief. I find it extraordinary that although this debate is about something we can agree on—we all want to reduce the impacts of flooding on the communities we represent—many of us are not prepared to look at the likely causes of extreme weather events of the kind that we have been seeing in recent weeks. If I sound frustrated, that is where my level of frustration is coming from. As the Secretary of State spoke only of adapting to climate change rather than turning off the fossil fuel tap to prevent more climate change from reaching dangerous levels in the first place, perhaps he would like to explain to the House what 6° of climate change might look like, or even what 4° of climate change would mean for the UK, and exactly how he would adapt to those changes. So far we have seen only 0.8° of climate change, but perhaps some people in Somerset, let alone communities elsewhere in the world, might argue that the situation is already dangerous.

If this Government want credibility as regards protecting the UK from the increased risk of flooding and other climate risks, we need radical action to cut emissions in line with both science and equity. That means leaving about 80% of known fossil fuels in the ground, not handing out tax breaks to companies to find and exploit yet more reserves of oil and gas that we cannot afford to burn. It means not just accepting but strengthening the fourth carbon budget in line with the science, to secure the economic and employment benefits of leading the transition to a zero-carbon economy. It means leadership to ensure that action on climate change is not just an issue for the Department of Energy and Climate Change, but a top priority for all the Government.

The flooding has led to many words being spoken in the House about resilience, and the importance of taking the right long-term decisions for our future and that of our children, but action, not just words on climate change, is the litmus test of whether or not they are meaningful.

Natural Capital (England and Wales)

Debate between Graham Stuart and Caroline Lucas

Monday 21st October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this important debate. Oscar Wilde famously spoke of those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. If valuing nature in the way suggested will halt the current decline of our precious wildlife and habitats, it is to be welcomed, but does the hon. Gentleman agree that we need very strong safeguards, including in the planning system, to ensure that by putting a pound sign on priceless ecosystems such as ancient woodlands we do not inadvertently open the door to their destruction?

[Mr Stuart]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for her intervention and she is right to sound a warning note. This whole area is embryonic and it needs to be treated very carefully to make sure that we do not end up with the exact opposite outcomes to those we seek by introducing such thinking in the first place.

In setting up the NCC, the Government said that their ambition was that this should be the first generation to leave behind a superior natural environment to the one it inherited. During the 20th century we placed unprecedented demands on global ecosystems. World population grew by a factor of four. Carbon and sulphur dioxide emissions increased by a factor of 10. Fish catch escalated by a multiple of 35. This has had serious consequences.

In 2011, the first UK national ecosystem assessment found that one third of the UK’s ecosystem services were declining. It showed that if the UK’s ecosystems were protected and enhanced, they could add at least an extra £30 billion to the UK economy. By contrast, neglect and loss of ecosystem services may cost as much as £20 billion a year to the economy. As the NCC report says:

“The risk is that rather than underpinning future growth and prosperity, degraded natural capital assets will act as a break on progress and development.”

The situation is worse in many places overseas. The World Bank estimates that in 2008, the costs of natural capital loss could have been as high as 5% of national income in Brazil, 8% in India and 9% in China. It found that the UK’s natural capital losses stood at just over 2% of national income, although that number is almost certainly incomplete.

The NCC report concludes:

“Until this is addressed, our national accounts will continue to provide erroneous signals about future economic prospects.”

To that end, the NCC recommends that the work being undertaken by the Office for National Statistics to embed natural capital in the UK’s environmental accounts should be given the “greatest possible support” right across Government.

The NCC’s report also recommends that the Government should initiate a programme to provide high-quality evidence on the economic value of changes in natural capital to inform cost-benefit analyses. Let us consider land use change. That may involve alterations in agricultural outputs, which have market prices, but it may also lead to changes in other factors which do not, including outdoor recreation, carbon storage and water quality. The best way to compare changes in such vastly different goods and services is to compare them in common, monetary terms. Developing a system that can achieve that reliably will not be straightforward.

There has been recent progress in this area. The Government’s 2011 natural environment White Paper made a welcome commitment fully to include natural capital in the UK environment accounts, with the first changes coming into effect this year. On the international stage, the adoption by the UN Statistical Commission of the system for environmental economic accounts has been a major step forward.

The prize is considerable. Measuring and accounting for changes in natural capital assets, and improving the valuation of those changes, would help to support better economic decision making. It would improve the delivery of major public policy goals, such as food and energy security, climate change mitigation and adaptation, and public health and well-being. In saying that, it is crucial that natural capital accounting is explained as a way of providing detailed information for better management of the economy. That needs to be done in a way that is coherent internationally but that resonates at home with a public who are concerned about seeing the more immediate benefits of economic growth.

This is not some doom-laden call for us to trade off economic growth for environmental protection. Pre-Victorian England was a low-carbon economy, but it did not deliver too much by way of prosperity. Rather, this is about demonstrating that better policy can result from integrating the value of natural capital into decision making, especially in a world whose population is rising inexorably.

That applies to Government and the world of business. The NCC report calls on the Government to work with leading companies, accounting bodies, landowners and managers to develop and test guidance on best practice in corporate natural capital accounting. As the chief financial officer of Unilever, Jean-Marc Huët, has said:

“The current financial reporting model only tells half the story about a business’s true performance and potential. The numbers say little of its reliance and impact on natural capital, factors that will increasingly influence competitiveness in a resource-scarce world.”

The NCC report is therefore an important document at all levels of policy making: national, local and commercial.

It was particularly welcome that the publication of the NCC report coincided with the launch earlier this year of the GLOBE International natural capital initiative. That is an international policy process driven by national parliamentarians, with the aim of incorporating the valuation of natural capital into policy and economic decision making.

In June this year, legislators from 20 countries participated in the first GLOBE natural capital legislation summit in the Bundestag. The summit considered the international context of the forthcoming UN post-2015 sustainable development goals, and how natural capital accounting should be addressed as a specific goal as well as a cross-cutting theme that affects the delivery of all development goals. For those who are living on less than $2 a day, half of all GDP comes from the environment and its biodiversity. It was therefore encouraging that goal 9 of the recent report of the high-level panel of eminent persons on the post-2015 development agenda, which was co-chaired by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister, emphasised the importance of the sustainable management of natural resource assets to poverty eradication.

The GLOBE summit in June called on Governments everywhere fully to incorporate the value of natural capital into national accounting frameworks by 2020. It saw the publication of the first GLOBE natural capital legislation study, which reviewed the measures that eight countries, including the UK, are taking to integrate natural capital into policy and economic decision making. Unquestionably, there is a long way to go before natural capital is incorporated in national and corporate accounting across the world. However, the GLOBE study shows that the direction of travel is clear and that the eight countries covered, including the UK, are leading the way.

Embedding the concept of natural capital could mark a milestone on the road towards a more nuanced and complete understanding of our nation’s resources and the impact of our management of them. I congratulate the Government on the letter sent by the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the former Economic Secretary to the Treasury, my hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) in response to the report. I welcome its statement that

“The measurement, valuation and good management of our natural capital is crucial if we are to achieve sustainable economic growth and enhanced wellbeing in future.”

However, is that to be the only response from the Government, other than in this debate? My Select Committee insists on a formal Government response to each recommendation that is made in each of its reports. Surely these annual reports deserve just as serious and thorough a response.

Do the Government agree that there is a need for a framework with which to define and measure natural capital? If so, do they think that progress is being made quickly enough? Will they set up a risk register for natural capital, as is recommended in the NCC report, and if so, when? Will they give the Office for National Statistics the “greatest possible support” in its efforts to incorporate natural capital into the nation’s accounts, as recommended by the NCC?

The valuation of natural capital goes to the heart of the biggest question facing humanity: can we adjust our behaviour so as to live within the constraints of living on one planet? Can we live in balance with the natural world, or will we insist on testing its limits?