Climate Change

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, in declaring my interest as a vineyard owner, I am intrigued by the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Chesterton, that vineyard-based solar panels are a practical idea. I see that he is not in his place at the moment but I will take this up with him when he returns. The idea of clambering over the panels when pruning or harvesting is definitely a challenging one.

On a serious note, I believe that one of the worst threats of climate change will be to our agricultural systems, because of extreme weather events. Reports from Australia today show record temperatures of 46.6 degrees. One of the results is that 2,500 camels have been culled—camels are used to hot conditions, so that is pretty severe—and wheat yields are down by one-third to a half. Perhaps more insidiously threatening is that soil moisture is at an all-time low. That is important because it makes recovery much harder. If noble Lords think about how difficult it is to get a totally dry sponge to absorb water at first, that should give them an idea as to why totally dry soil has problems reabsorbing water. Equally disastrous, of course, is too much rain too fast, flooding out newly planted seeds, for example.

Recently the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Agroecology had a meeting on agriculture and climate change. We had a presentation from Professor Gideon Henderson, which was especially memorable. Usually climate change discussions leave you feeling depressed—as my noble friend Lord Teverson said in his excellent introduction—and full of fear for the next generation. However, Professor Henderson’s message was different. He had just finished chairing a working group for the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society, and the resulting report is an ambitious plan for how the UK can lead the way in deploying greenhouse gas removal technologies to achieve net zero-carbon emissions by 2050. His conclusions were very land-use based: ramping up forestation, habitat restoration and, crucially, soil carbon sequestration. His emphasis on soils as a major part of the solution was especially interesting to me. Our soils have an extraordinary capacity to absorb and hold carbon if land is farmed and used in the right ways. We could turn the agricultural sector from a major greenhouse gas emitter to a really effective carbon sink.

When Professor Mark Kibblewhite from Cranfield gave evidence to the same all-party group three years ago during the soil inquiry that we held, he made the point that soil research should be fully integrated with other areas of research, such as climate change, but that was not really happening. Given that that was three years ago, I ask the Minister: is such research now better integrated?

We need to change the way in which we produce food and, to some extent, our diet. However, I assure the noble Lord, Lord Bethell—one of the meat lovers among your Lordships—that he will not have to give up his fillet steak; he just needs to change the sort of steak that he is eating. Luckily, production methods that are high in animal welfare and low in greenhouse gas emissions can coincide. For example, the meat from pasture-fed livestock in the UK, where grass grows in abundance, is more nutritious and more welfare-friendly, as the animals spend more time on pasture, and avoids imported soya, which may well have caused deforestation in somewhere such as South America.

Pasture-fed livestock is one example of a win-win-win situation. One thing that the Government could do to help it is a simple labelling regime. At the moment you can label your meat “pasture-fed” if it is fed on pasture only 51% of the time, but it needs to be fed on it 100% of the time to gain those benefits. I hope the Government will support the Pasture-Fed Livestock Association and make that small change.

Another example of a win-win-win situation is agroforestry. A much more forested landscape, with all that carbon capture, offers less soil erosion and more shade and windbreaks for animals. Under CAP rules you can have such a scheme but so far the UK Government have refused to implement it. Whether or not we end up with Brexit, we must ensure a much more positive policy on agroforestry.

This is about how we use our land. When the Agriculture Bill comes to your Lordships’ House, we should make sure that we have some provisions in it for ensuring that in future our agriculture is better aligned to dealing with climate change as well as food production, because at the moment that is missing.