Climate Change

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, yesterday I received a letter from four children called Bamba, Louie, Oscar and Jakson, from year 6 at the Rofft Primary School in Marford, near my home. They are learning about climate change and are concerned that polar bears are losing their habitat. They have questions for the Government which I will come to later. To help me reply to the children, I turned to scientists at one of our leading Welsh universities, Bangor. They told me about the increasing rate of decline of the sea ice in the Barents Sea, and the feedback loop which will mean that within a decade the limit of the Arctic habitat may have moved a great deal further north. As mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Brown, there is little we can do to stop it—it is going to carry on. This indicates the danger of the 1 degree of warming we already have, already affecting our climate in the UK. Last year’s “beast from the east” may very well have been caused by it, so polar bears are not the only ones affected by loss of sea ice—we are too.

The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, may not, but 97% of scientists agree that greenhouse gas emissions are the cause of our warming climate. The Paris accord and government policy were based on estimates of how quickly we need to reduce emissions to avoid the dangerous 1.5 degree rise. However, a recent article in Nature magazine quoted evidence that current predictions may be too conservative and we could get to dangerous levels as early as 2025. The Government’s target of 2050 may sound a very long way off—though it is not for the children of the Rofft school—but 2025 is a great deal nearer.

Far away from the polar bears’ habitat, but also related to warming oceans, Dr Gareth Williams of the School of Ocean Sciences at Bangor drew my attention to the effect of the more severe climate change estimates on coral reef regeneration. His conclusion is that in some areas it is much more severe than previously predicted. The warming effect that would result, even if all the Paris Agreement pledges are realised, would not allow corals sufficient time to regenerate between bleaching events.

Why should we in the UK care about coral reefs? The answers are: biodiversity; new medicines; fishing to feed millions; that the loss of low-lying islands means the relocation of people; and that the UK has several overseas territories with coral reefs. Is the UK prepared for increased frequency and intensity of coral bleaching events? What if we start to lose some of our overseas territories due to the erosion of coral reefs? Many of these places support human populations and some house military bases that we share with allies. Will the Government respond to the latest research and revise their emission targets to halt the speed at which ocean warming events are occurring? I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Rees, that the Paris Agreement is not enough—it will be too little too late.

Moving from sea to land, every sector must reduce its impact on climate change. Agriculture accounts for 9% of UK greenhouse gas emissions. Another paper, from Professor Chadwick of Bangor, showed that greenhouse gas emissions from global agriculture are increasing at around 1% per year, yet substantial cuts in emissions could be achieved. His group assesses the mitigation potential of land sparing: increasing agricultural yields, thereby reducing the area of farmland needed and at the same time actively restoring natural habitats on the land spared. Restored habitats such as broad-leaved woodlands, wetlands and peatlands can sequester massive amounts of carbon and offset emissions from agriculture. The study showed that planting mixed broad-leaf woodland is much better at sequestering carbon than monocultures of fast-growing conifers, as well as promoting biodiversity. As has been said, it also contributes to cooling, prevents soil erosion and flooding, and slows down the release of fertilisers into waterways. Combining this approach with strategies to reduce food waste and meat consumption could help the UK achieve its climate objectives.

Higher yield potential could mean 30% to 40% of current farmland being used for carbon storage, with numerous biodiversity and social benefits. The researchers concluded that if this “spare land” was used to increase UK tree cover from 12% to 30% by the middle of this century and to restore 700,000 hectares of wet peatland, the farming sector could deliver its contribution to the legal target of cutting carbon emissions by 80% from 1990 levels.

The most promise was shown by improved crop plants that are more efficient at capturing nutrients from the soil, using water and photosynthesising. This requires investment in non-medical life science research, which had only a minor role in the Government’s industrial strategy, so I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Selborne, about the potential improvements that we could make through agriculture. Will the Minister say what work is being done in this area? Might our revised agriculture environmental support strategy, aimed at payments for delivering ecosystem services, result in displacing food production overseas unless we improve our own yields at the same time? There is a danger that, unless we increase yields, we could reduce our own emissions at the expense of those of other countries where there might be worse environmental and animal welfare standards.

Is Defra looking at land sparing? What government support is being given to efforts to plant more trees? As for the children, they ask what the Government are doing to get companies to reduce their emissions since only 10% of companies have a strategy for doing so. They are going to write to some local companies to ask them. They also want the Government to encourage more use of renewable energy. I think those are very sensible questions and I hope the Minister can answer them.