Biodiversity and the Countryside

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Thursday 13th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, the UK has been described as one of the most nature-depleted countries on earth. My friend Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta wrote his famous The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review in February 2021, which starts:

“We are facing a global crisis. We are totally dependent upon the natural world. It supplies us with every oxygen-laden breath we take and every mouthful of food we eat. But we are currently damaging it so profoundly that many of its natural systems are now on the verge of breakdown”.


I thank the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, for initiating this debate—he is a fellow alumnus of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge—and for his opening speech.

To go back to Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta—who has just written a book this yearm On Natural Capital: The Value of the World Around Us—he says of nature that

“the demands we make of its goods and services far exceed its ability to meet them on a sustainable basis”;

the difference between the two is a measure of the human ecological overreach. Since 1950, the global economy has grown fifteenfold; absolute poverty has declined from 60% of the world at that time to 10% today, in spite of the world population going up from 2.5 billion to 8.1 billion people on this planet. In many ways, as he says, humanity has never had it so good. But our global success has come with an increasingly impoverished biosphere, including extinction of species. Currently, average extinction rates are 100 to 1,000 times higher than those that the world has seen for several million years.

In endorsing Sir Partha Dasgupta’s new book, David Attenborough, a national treasure, says:

“Partha Dasgupta provides the compass we urgently need… by bringing economics and ecology together, we can help save the natural world at what may be the last minute – and in doing so, save ourselves”.


When it comes to countryside policies, the reality is that urban authorities receive 41% more government-funded spending per capita while rural residents pay 20% more council tax per head. Would the Minister acknowledge this?

Evidence from the Dasgupta review in 2021 highlights the fact that biodiversity underpins rural productivity, food security and long-term economic stability. The United Kingdom Food Security Report 2024 found that biodiversity decline and climate shocks account for around 40% of food price inflation, demonstrating the economic stakes of countryside environmental management.

On taxation, as we have heard—the noble Lord, Lord Carrington, mentioned it—the change in the law whereby the Government have now, with their measures on inheritance tax relief, doubled the tax for family businesses and farmers means that it will be a huge burden on family farm transfers and rural business succession. The countryside and biodiversity policy agendas are increasingly interdependent.

With rural economy productivity, rural areas account for 21% of England’s population but only 15% of economic output. Environmental land management schemes, or ELMS, remain the UK’s primary mechanism for biodiversity recovery, but the SFI closure, funding uncertainty and limited landscape recovery scale threaten progress towards the Environment Act 2021 targets. Would the Minister agree with that, and that a more ambitious, stable and better funded higher-tier LNR programme is essential?

The BNG, which the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, mentioned in his opening speech, is one of the most important policy tools for reversing biodiversity decline, while maintaining development and growth. Yet, without stronger local authority capacity, coherent land use planning and robust enforcement, BNG risks falling short of its ecological potential. Strengthening, monitoring, supporting councils, and integrating BNG with broader ELMS and Landscape Recovery schemes will be essential. Does the Minister agree with that?

When it comes to protected sites in the nature recovery network and essential pillars of biodiversity, weak site condition, limited enforcement, fragmented landscapes and insufficient local delivery capacity threaten progress. We need to strengthen these areas. The UK’s species abundance targets are ambitious, but they are at risk as well. On the critical point of biodiversity recovery, policies exist but delivery remains slow due to funding gaps, workforce shortages and uncertainty around long-term land use planning.

On the issue of soil, I say that I took part in COP 26 in Glasgow as president of the CBI and I spoke at about 40 different events, but not one person mentioned soil. A few years ago, the Indian spiritual leader Sadhguru set off from Parliament Square to raise awareness of soil with the Save Soil campaign, so that 3% to 6% of organic content should be in soil.

I conclude with this: the biodiversity hit to economies is estimated at up to $25 trillion a year, reported in the FT last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change equivalent, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Tackling biodiversity loss, climate change, water scarcity, food insecurity and health risks in isolation is not only compounding those issues but driving spiralling economic costs.

I conclude with this: Sir Partha Dasgupta—who I started with—says in his report:

“We are part of Nature, not separate from it”.


We rely on nature to sustain us, yet we are degrading it faster than it can regenerate. Nature is our most precious asset.