Biodiversity

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Wednesday 28th April 2021 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Baroness Boycott]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the economic value of biodiversity and the report The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review, published on 2 February.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I thank my colleagues on the Cross-Benches for choosing this debate. I am delighted. It means that many others are as concerned about this issue as I am. Sadly, we live in a society that respects wealth more than issues of contentment and well-being, so much of which is provided by the world around us: our air, clean water, abundant oceans, the minerals from the earth, out of which we make more or less everything we have, and the fertility of the soil, which grows all our food and, indeed, everything else. This is provided entirely for free and is taken entirely for granted, but it is essential for life as we know it on earth. It is often quiet, silent and completely invisible to the naked human eye.

The Dasgupta report was commissioned by the Treasury, which is why it is so important. There is nothing fluffy or sentimental in it. It is not about Easter bunnies; it is about money. For the first time, we are putting a value on nature and asking the hard, tough questions about what natural services we have taken for granted for so long and for free.

Since I was born, just about 70 years ago, the world has changed beyond recognition. The number of people in poverty has reduced from 60% to 10% while populations have exploded. Life expectancy has increased. I do not mourn that, but I mourn the fact that this progress has been at the expense of the world around us. If we are to think of nature and progress as assets, we paid for progress by taking an overdraft out with nature, and we are almost at bankruptcy. Economists often say that we need to live within our means, and this is definitely the case with our biosphere. There is only one. You cannot order another online.

Globally, the pandemic has devastated economies and lives. Its cause was our faulty interaction with nature. Some 96% of all mammals on earth are now either us or the animals we chose to eat—60 billion of them fretting in feedlots and cages, fed on food grown on monocultures. It is not a good system in any way. Some 30% of the world is still hungry, 30% is getting fat and 30% of all the food grown is wasted. In 2019, the global assessment report on biodiversity concluded that 25% of species in animal and plant groups are threatened with extinction in the next few decades and more than 85% of global wetlands, which store huge amounts of carbon, have been lost.

Professor Dasgupta estimated that as a planet we spend about $500 billion a year on environmentally damaging subsidies. He also acknowledges that this is probably an underestimate. In contrast, subsidies considered to be biodiversity positive total just $890 million a year and subsidies considered beneficial stand at just €2.6 billion. If we include other public finance expenditure associated with the conservation of biodiversity, it gets us to just under $68 billion, so, even at a conservative estimate, environmentally damaging subsidies are dwarfing the protection of the environment at a rate of 7.5:1. We are losing this battle. We can still win the war, but we need to act now.

What are the hidden costs? Let me give the Committee a couple of vivid examples. The first has always stuck in my mind. It is a picture of a vast Chinese apple orchard where the workers are laboriously brushing fluffy paint brushes across apple blossoms to pollenate them. They are doing this because they have managed to kill all the bees by the increasing use of pesticides.

In India, which we see so much of right now, vultures used to keep the streets clean, but they have fallen foul of the anti-inflammatory drugs injected into cattle and buffalo. Now, when you drive through villages, there are piles of rubbish; there is more illness. At the towers of silence, where the Parsis bury their dead—they used to have their bodies picked to pieces by the vultures—they have actually had to install solar panels to shrivel and desiccate the corpses.

Closer to home, our vast fields of wheat and cereal crops grow in endless acres. It might look good, but what happens when you smell or listen? You will hear nothing—no birds and no insects—and there will probably be no trees. In short, what you are looking at is a factory—one loaded with chemicals to enable the crops to grow as fast as possible, and in the process destroying the soil beneath them. As that soil weakens, denied the chance to form new life forms in its natural cycle because of the deep ploughing and intensive farming, more money needs to be spent on chemicals to make those crops grow. It is a vicious cycle.

We have always thought that we can do better than nature, that human ingenuity could overcome shortfalls, and that we could bust through the natural limits imposed by nature’s constraints. In the process, we never asked the simple question: “What does nature do for us?” Now is the time for that question. Now is the time when we need to understand that we live in a world which is brilliantly organised and interconnected, full of different life forms which, together, enable species—including us—to flourish. From the act of photosynthesis, which combines sunlight, carbon and water to create the plants we live on, everything—until now—has had a place in this complexity, doing its bit for the community of life. Now we are literally pulling it apart, believing that it is, for instance, more productive to tear down a rainforest and plant a monocrop to feed ourselves. The results are clear: fires, floods, changing rainfall and temperature, and it is getting worse.

The future does not need to be like this. The Government have committed to this being the first generation to leave nature in a better condition, but we need to have policies in place to make this a reality. We could live in a country that does not use chemicals or practice monoculture farming, and which has adopted agroecology and agroforestry. It could be a country with nature corridors between wild areas, where the flora and fauna we have relied on could flourish. We could have communities with local food networks, with clean rivers we could swim in and beaches we could be proud of. Very importantly, it could be a country where children are educated as to the power of nature and the environment, and where citizens are empowered to understand these issues and make the right choices, and, in turn, purchase products safe in the knowledge that no orangutans have been hurt or habitats compromised.

The Treasury has posed three big questions: what are the economic benefits of biodiversity; what are the economic costs when biodiversity is lost; and what practical actions can be taken to enhance economic prosperity and biodiversity. Last week, the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park, said in a debate on biodiversity:

“Ultimately all economic activity is derived from nature.”


I could not agree more. He went on to say that he was,

“absolutely convinced that this can be the year that change begins in earnest.”—[Official Report, 22/4/2021; col. GC 416.]

I hope that this is the case, but if we do not accept this report’s recommendations and we continue running roughshod over nature, this will not be the year of change. Nothing other than a decisive steer off our current trajectory will do the trick. To take this crisis seriously, the Government need to adopt the recommendations of this report to ensure that what the Stern review did for climate change and energy, the Dasgupta Review can do for biodiversity loss.

What can we do? It is a question that I often ask myself: how best can we affect change? Globally, the problems are immense, but that is not to say that there are not huge improvements that must be made here. For many reasons, countries still look to the UK as a bellwether or indicator, so implementing the best policy here at home will have ramifications abroad. We did it with the Climate Change Act and we can do it with this. We must send out a clear message through our foreign policy and our trade policy, and through our financial markets, to lead the world by valuing the economics of biodiversity.

When the Environment Bill comes to this place next Session, we must work together to include a robust and legally binding framework that will ensure that we keep to the targets. Some are calling this a state of nature target. We need to push other countries to do the same. On this, the Minister said last week:

“We are pressing hard for the highest possible ambition and, crucially, we are pushing for inclusion of mechanisms to hold Governments to the promises they make, which currently is lacking.”—[Official Report, 22/4/2021; col. GC 414.]


He is, of course, completely correct, but so far we lack this mechanism, and we cannot ask others to do something we will not do ourselves.

With the competing priorities of government it can sometimes be easy to put something off, if it is not absolutely immediate, but it falls to all of us to hold the Government’s feet to the fire to make the case for policies to stop the twin threats of climate change and biodiversity loss. If the Government are serious, then implementing the report’s contents is too good an opportunity to pass up. This is about saving not just the planet but humans’ place on it. It is 100% in our self-interest to mobilise everything at our disposal to stop what will otherwise be inevitable.

I say to finance ministries around the world: the future is genuinely in your hands. Only you can charge other ministries and create domestic budget oversight bodies ensuring environmental compatibility with spending. If we are to have truly sustainable economic growth and development, or at least a good life, then we have to understand that our long-term prosperity relies on balancing our demands on the planet. We have to account for what our impacts on nature really cost. It is a balance sheet—one in which economics and ecology must stand side by side. Nature is not separate from the economy, a drag on growth or an expensive, luxurious distraction. It is not, as I said, about fluffy rabbits or nice animals on TV. It is, essentially, our economy; it is where we get everything from.

This is such a crucial year. We have the G7 and COP 26 ahead of us, as well as the CBD meeting. It would be a waste and a mistake to confine climate change to COP and biodiversity to the CBD. They both come from the same source: our failure to understand the interconnected nature of our world. They must be solved together. This is the year that we have the chance; please let us seize it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

I thank everyone who spoke and the Minister for that detailed response, which managed to cover a great many of the points that were raised. We have an emergency—I noted that the Minister did not use that word in her response. I thoroughly applaud the Treasury for producing this report. At the beginning of her reply, she mentioned the “thought leadership” approach and said that it was thought leadership for the world. The important thing is that this becomes much more than thought; it has to become action and that has to happen in the Environment Bill, with a lot of detail. It is not enough to just make general sweeping decisions that we have to take nature into consideration; this needs money and attention to detail.

As various noble Lords have pointed out, it is relatively simple to figure out how to lower our carbon emissions because they are measurable, but measuring biodiversity and natural capital is a whole other ball game. I would plead that this huge and fantastic report does not end up on a shelf, as the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, implied that it might—because many reports do—but instead really becomes a call to action.

I thoroughly endorse the plea of the noble Lords, Lord Carrington and Lord Lucas, and the noble Earl, Lord Devon, for this to get into education. At the end of the day, this is our home and we are asset managers. In the same way that we are lamentable in teaching schoolchildren how to look after their finances, it is now time that we taught them how to look after their larger world. I am also grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, for bringing up the subject of consumption, which I had not talked about. The consumption habits and patterns of our world are quite unsustainable if we want to make radical change. I cannot respond to every single point, but I thank everyone very much.

I will leave the Committee with one last story. This is not the first time that this has happened, and it has had disastrous consequences. Some 15 years ago, I found myself in Leptis Magna on the north coast of Africa—in a desert with a wonderful old Roman city in it. It had an extraordinary market where they pulled the water down from the mountains and kept it underneath the market to keep the vegetables cool. You look around and think, “Vegetables? What are they talking about?”. But the Romans went to north Africa because it was the bread-basket of the Mediterranean at that point. It was so fertile and extraordinary that they could get three wheat harvests a year.

They sustained their civilisation but did not know what they were doing: they planted the crops too often and planted monocrops, and it all fell apart. It was fine then because you just packed your suitcase and went to find another place. We do not have another place. There is no room on Mars—that is a super bad idea, and I wish Elon Musk would spend his money on protecting the environment rather than looking for somewhere else to live.

On that note, I thank everyone very much for the debate and the Minister for her response. I hugely congratulate the Treasury on undertaking this report and publishing it. We all hope that we will see real action in this regard in the months to come.

Motion agreed.