Biodiversity and Conservation

Baroness Willis of Summertown Excerpts

Thursday 13th March 2025 Grand Committee

[Baroness Willis of Summertown (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Grayling, for opening this debate, which I very much welcome. Following on from his many detailed points, I am going to speak more broadly about the UK’s national biodiversity strategy and action plan, launched in Rome last week.

I am going to speak broadly because, to me, if we have this strategy, at least we know the direction in which we are going. In any strategy to reverse and halt nature loss, we have to be clear on three things: first, the aspirational outcomes; secondly, the actions that we will take to achieve those outcomes; and thirdly, a way of measuring progress towards achieving them. I believe that, in the UK, we currently have the first and second in place through domestic legislation and international commitments, as well as the policies that they have borne, but we are still a long way off the third—namely, measuring progress towards achieving these outcomes and understanding the most critical question in saving nature: what works?

In the 120 years since the first nature reserves and national parks were created—we have been trying to do this for 120 years, so it is quite easy to look at this as an historical timeline—three different strategic aspirations associated with reversing and halting nature loss have developed, all of which are in use today. The first aspiration, which emerged around 120 years ago, was to save and protect the most rare, vulnerable, threatened and iconic aspects of nature, be they species, habitats or landscapes. Historically, this was done by creating national parks and AONBs; the modern equivalent is absolutely our 30 by 30 commitment. That is what we are trying to do. In the past two years, many statutory instruments have come through under the Environment Act. We know where we are with them. Broadly speaking, we also know how we are doing; in most cases, it is not very well, but at least we can measure how we are doing.

A second framing emerged in the 1990s. This had a strategic aspiration to reverse and halt the loss of nature by conserving and restoring the ecological processes that underpin biodiversity. It was argued that, without these, we would not have thriving, resilient nature. Here, I am talking about rewilding, restoring large herbivores as ecosystem engineers—beavers, even—and creating wildlife corridors. However, as far as I can tell, we still do not have in the UK the metrics for measuring the success of the measures that we have put in place.

I give noble Lords one example: the rewilded Knepp estate. I do not how many noble Lords have been there but, if you visit it, you really understand what a thriving, biodiverse environment looks like, as well as how we have halted nature loss and restored after its decline. However, if the estate’s success is measured using the BNG tool and/or the species abundance list, as we are supposed to do and as people have done, it comes out as a low-quality habitat full of obnoxious weeds. So we do not have a way of measuring it.

The third and final framing came out in the early 2000s, with the strategic ambition to halt the loss of and restore nature that provides important ecosystem services that are essential to human well-being. This includes things such as creating wetlands to clear nitrates from rivers and creating a carbon market. Policies associated with this include ELMS and, in cities, policies focused on restoring green spaces for people’s health and wealth-being. We have signed up to this aspiration. Target 11 of the global biodiversity framework is:

“Restore, maintain and enhance nature’s contributions to people”.


However, as far as I can tell, we are not measuring that either. We have no metrics in place to look at this issue.

We have all of these strategies, ideas and aspirations in our most recent UK national biodiversity strategy and action plan, which is great—it was celebrated in Rome last week—but, at present, we are simply unable to determine how two out of three of these aspirations are working. That is a big problem. I urge the Minister to come up with new ways of measuring progress on those two framings because, anecdotally, two of the ecological processes—ELMS rewilding and corridors—are working a lot better right now than protected areas. So we really need to understand what works and how we should move forward.

I have one final point. I know that I am over the time limit, so I will soon be quiet, but I really welcome the Government’s statement this morning on AI. It is a tool that we should be using in nature, such as using datasets to work out what works. We should use this as an opportunity.