Adapting to Climate Change: EU Agriculture and Forestry (EUC Report)

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, unlike the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, I will speak more about mitigation. However, I must agree with him, after that very serious and penetrating speech, about how important adaptation is. If we do not make sure that our agricultural systems and crops are far more robust than they are at the moment, there will be a real problem in food security globally, especially in Europe, in the future.

The thing that I liked about this report was that it brought focus on to the agricultural sector. I am someone who gets particularly involved in issues of mitigation. I can never really understand why, effectively, mitigation is in DECC and adaptation is in Defra. It seems to split an important policy area, but we should not get into that in this debate. Agriculture does not come over very strongly; it is a theme that is sometimes, but not often, recognised. The steel, aluminium, cement and aviation industries get top billing, and we often forget about agriculture and forestry altogether. Why is that wrong?

I am very glad that this report highlights why it is wrong. First, agriculture accounts for around 14 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. In Europe, as the report points out, it accounts for almost 10 per cent—9 per cent, I think. In the UK, the figure is 7 per cent. However, I ask myself: if 7 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK are from agriculture, what proportion of GDP comes from agriculture in the UK? It is close to 1 per cent. Perhaps that is an unfair comparison and ratio, but here we have an industry that, as a percentage, contributes seven times more to greenhouse gas emissions than to national product. For all those reasons, this is an important sector.

This is further highlighted in the report by figures that I found quite staggering. Nitrous oxide is, as the report says, 300 times more lethal as a greenhouse gas than CO₂, but in agriculture accounts for some two-thirds of emissions. Agriculture accounts for almost half the emissions of methane, which I thought was 70 times more potent than CO₂ but the report says is somewhat less so. That means that this sector is important, and it is one that I ask the committee to keep focusing on in the future. It is one of which we should take a great deal of notice.

However, that is as nothing compared with forestry. When one looks at forestry on a global scale—as the noble Lord, Lord Giddens, said, climate change knows no boundaries—one sees 30 million acres of deforestation per annum creating more greenhouse gases than motor vehicle and truck emissions worldwide. It varies between 15 and 20 per cent, depending on the rate of deforestation in any one year. The sector is crucial for the rate of global warming in future. I will return to the relevance of this for Europe, which has already deforested most of its land surface. However, in a small but perhaps quite important way, it could perform better and reforest more.

Another area of mitigation that worries me—again, it relates to points made by the noble Lord, Lord Giddens—is that agriculture plays an important role even in Europe with biomass and biofuels. It has been disappointing that after the introduction of regulations such as the renewable transport fuel obligation, and the enthusiasm for biofuels, we had a very negative analysis of the sector which reversed the view about whether it could help with climate change mitigation. I urge the Government to stick with making sure that we get the sustainability criteria right for biofuels, so that we do not throw away this opportunity for the advancement of the agricultural sector in terms of mitigation of climate change by saying that it is too difficult or controversial. As we have already heard in the debate, whether it is algae or growing biomass in areas where it is not grown at present, we have a great opportunity. We in Europe should not give that away, nor rely on imports from the rest of the world.

I come back to the strength that Europe can have—and has had in Cancun—because of its status in the negotiations on the reduction of emissions through deforestation and forest degradation. Europe is crucial to enabling that programme to succeed, both because of its political leverage and through its financial contributions to making sure that that will become possible. It is one of the most crucial short-term programmes that we have to make a significant difference to climate change. What is the current state of negotiations on this part of the United Nations procedures? The Government have taken a lead in this area, but do they feel that Europe is putting sufficient emphasis on global deforestation to make sure that it is kept high on the agenda? I know that there has been movement in this area, whereas in others there has not. It depresses me that Europe, after the Lisbon treaty, still has pillars in the agricultural sector and in the common agricultural policy. We got rid of them in justice, home affairs, the CFSP and other areas, but we still have them in agricultural policy.

Something in the report that I liked is the idea of the carbon contract and carbon compliance. This is fundamental to reform of the common agricultural policy. Will the Minister and the UK Government champion this concept when considering where the CAP should go in future?

This is an excellent report. I hope that there will be renewed focus on this area, and I look forward to the Minister's responses on the crucial issue of the management of our climate for the future.