Environment Bill

Baroness Boycott Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 6th September 2021 Lords Chamber

This is exactly the right time for the Government to make such a declaration. We have this potentially landmark legislation going through the House, which will be completed—we hope—before COP 26. It is time to bring us together and confirm our leadership, and it is also the opportunity to recognise something that is real and happening now. At COP 26 we have the opportunity not just to have the presidency but to take global leadership. I believe passing this amendment would be part of that, and I beg to move.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I am very happy to support this amendment. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, I joined up a little too late.

Biodiversity is all too often seen as the poor relation of climate change and somehow less important. It is not. It is just as important and life threatening as any weather patterns, droughts or floods—and they are indeed all connected. So what is it? In essence, it is the variety of life on earth and all its interconnectedness. But it is also the product of millions of years of learning—of trial and error—by all the creatures, flora and fauna on earth to arrive at a system where this planet flourishes and where we can exist on it. Everything is in its place and everything is doing its bit—sometimes large, sometimes microscopic—and it keeps our planet in the healthy state that we want to preserve.

I have heard what we are doing now described as “burning the library of earth”. To take something really complex that we have made, let us think of an aeroplane going to New York, carrying 600 people. Out falls one rivet—not too bad. Out come two—maybe not a big deal. But suppose 10, 20 or 30 come out; at some point that aeroplane is going to come crashing down to earth—and that is what we are doing now with the complex world of our biodiversity. We do not know quite when we will pass the tipping point, but we are clearly very nearly there.

I have a few examples relating to the insect world, which is endlessly dismissed, but—as Einstein, apparently, famously said—the planet would survive without us, but it would not survive without insects. They are essentially the unseen rivers that keep the planet functioning, yet we have not managed to identify them all—and yet we are cutting down their environments. As I said, no one knows how close to the edge we are, but in China they are pollinating apples and pears by hand. In Bengal they are doing the same for squash plants. In Brazil it is passionfruit, and it is blueberries in Canada. Even the French beans in Kenya are now having to be mechanically pollinated because we have trashed the insects.

Clearly, many parts of the world—and, indeed, under the oceans; we have the temerity to think that we should destroy the ocean bed like we have destroyed the land above—have a huge value: trillions of dollars, or around double the world’s current GDP. In Europe alone it costs the 3% of GDP that we get from our natural services.

I thoroughly support the amendment. This is an emergency. That message needs to come from the Prime Minister and it needs to be made clear to everyone that we have only one planet and that we have to protect it. Biodiversity is extraordinary and amazing. It is up to all of us in this House to ensure that this becomes part of the Bill.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I support both these amendments: Amendment 1, so ably introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and backed by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, to which I am pleased to have attached my name; and Amendment 21 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and signed by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott.

In introducing his amendment, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, looked at what happened in the timeframe from when we last debated the Bill to today. I will take a different timeframe and go back to when the Bill was first introduced on 15 October 2019. A lot has happened since then. Obviously, we have had, and still have, a global pandemic, which is related to our biodiversity and climate crises, but in reaction to it we have seen enormous, massive and rapid change. We have seen the invention from scratch of highly effective new vaccines from a range of technologies. We have seen billions of doses of those vaccines already delivered. We have seen transformation on an almost daily scale of our entire way of life. The previously obscure word “lockdown” has become daily currency. International travel has almost stopped. “Zoom” has become a verb.

What has happened to the climate in those two years? Emissions fell in 2020, chiefly because of the pandemic, but a lot less than people expected. They then started to rise again. We have seen Extinction Rebellion out on our streets regularly and the climate strikers have become part of the national life of countries all around the world. But we have yet to see the scale of reaction that is needed to these emergencies, which are on the same scale as the pandemic. Just look at the contrast between those two scales of reaction and the fact that the Bill was written two years ago. In the age of shocks, with time moving so fast, that is an age. Amendment 1 would update the Bill to be fit for today, as it must be, and create the frame for it to be fit for the future.

I will briefly address Amendment 21. It is particularly important because we are starting to see the word “resilience” in news coverage, which was once an extremely rare occurrence. It is starting to rise up the news agenda. I speak as a former journalist. Amendment 21 seeks to address the risks, identify them and report on them.

I will focus in particular on proposed new subsection (2)(c), which would ensure that the views of 11 to 25 year-olds in the United Kingdom are continuously engaged in debating these risks. I reflect on that because yesterday I was in Sheffield, where I joined the Young Christian Climate Network, which is on a deliberately very slow pilgrimage from Truro to Glasgow, stopping in as many communities up and down the land as it possibly can to engage communities, particularly young people, on this issue. Climate strikers, young pilgrims and Extinction Rebellion are leading. The amendment would ensure that the Government and the Bill are at least in the right place to catch up.