Climate Change and Biodiversity: Food Security

Baroness Worthington Excerpts

Thursday 8th September 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Worthington (CB)]

My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Young. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, for securing this debate, and add my congratulations to the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, on her excellent maiden speech. I look forward to hearing more in the future.

As Peers will know, I am something of a climate change obsessive, but I tend to focus mostly on energy. However, I have become much more interested in agriculture, food and land use and how it relates to climate, because it is a fascinating area. It is one of those aspects of life that we tend to take for granted, but the way we manage our land will be severely affected by climate change. It is also a source of that change to our climate and, unlike energy, which—although let us see what happens—is largely a privatised system, with the Government providing guardrails to companies to make decisions on how we produce our energy, there is huge involvement of the public purse in agriculture. We have a very large subsidy that passes from the public purse—the Treasury—to the guardians of our land every year.

It has been really curious watching this evolution of policy, with Brexit coming into force and Michael Gove uttering the immortal words that we will pay only

“public money for public goods”

before departing the scene, leaving us slightly unclear as to what he actually meant by that, and what the detail will be in terms of knowing what we will be paying for in the future. I have a question for the Minister: can we press ahead with providing clarity for the guardians of our land and our agricultural stewards so that they can plan for the future?

It strikes me that farmers are a very isolated breed in general. They obviously have ways in which they communicate among themselves but, by and large, they are being guided by people in whose interests it is to keep them purchasing fertilisers, seeds and chemicals. The people who visit the farm regularly have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. I am not saying that this is true of all farming, but there is a need to think about whether this is right—whether we are providing farmers with the right information for them or the right information for those who benefit from this highly industrialised form of agriculture that has become a norm. I wonder whether there is more of a role for government to create an educational service for farmers to help them understand what they are likely to be facing—a destabilised climate in this country—and how they can expect things to change around them. They are witnessing it themselves but they may not be thinking 20 years hence, when we know that this is just the beginning of the impacts we are likely to see.

Coupled to that, can we be clearer about the payments that we will make to the guardians of our land to provide us with public goods? It strikes me that this subsidy is very good value for money, because we get a whole host of services from our land that are not accounted for or paid for directly. We could say to farmers that this is the minimum level of public money they can expect because of the stewardship role that they provide, and that we would increase it further if they could get to a point where they were helping not only to mitigate their own impact on climate change but acting as an active carbon sink. This would allow other sectors to continue to emit because farming and land use, and our land-use strategies, would deliver over and above, and we would become much more carbon-rich and store more carbon in our land than we currently do.

That is not easy, but it is not impossible. I looked at the greenhouse gas inventory: at the moment agriculture contributes around 5.5 million tonnes of CO₂ to the atmosphere, from agricultural tractors, transport uses and direct use of energy. Overall, however, our land-use area is a natural sink of around 3 million tonnes at the moment. We are not far from parity in terms of CO₂ emissions. Of course, that picture changes completely when we factor in other greenhouse gases, for which agriculture is largely responsible. Around 25 million tonnes of methane are emitted from the land-use sector into the atmosphere every year, and around 15 million tonnes of nitrous oxide. We have a long way to go to get this sector into a carbon-neutral position so that we can be ready for our net-zero targets.

We have a rather large amount of money available to us that we have been paying out for years and years in agricultural subsidies. It could be repurposed to deliver this increased carbon sink and will, I am sure, deliver increased biodiversity. To get there, we will have to embrace science and I endorse the words of the noble Earl, Lord Caithness: we have to allow modern technology and approaches into our agricultural system to allow us to spare the land. and let nature take a greater role in other parts of the land. We can do that only if we have a land-use strategy and framework that enables us to see where the use of science will be appropriate to increase yields, and where we can afford to allow land to return to a less productive state and deliver more social and environmental benefits.

I have come back from a summer holiday in the Brecon Beacons; it is a beautiful part of the world and I highly recommend it. There are about a million sheep there, however, and I was talking to local ecologists who said the carrying capacity of the area is probably about 100,000—nowhere near a million. We are by a factor of 10 overgrazing this part of the world, which is an incredibly important eco-system with all sorts of benefits. We have to find a way to help farmers move to a position where they are, yes, still farming the land and providing us with the things that society requires, but not encouraging them to keep with livestock that creates methane and is damaging our biodiversity, while probably exacerbating flooding and changing the way the landscape appears aesthetically.

There must be a way of doing this. We have the money and the intention, but we do not seem to have the plan. We need to open up a way of getting farmers to think creatively about how they can contribute. It could be done by setting aside a portion of the money into an auction, so that we pay people to deliver the outcomes we seek. I know some trials have taken place under the ELMS reforms, but that is an established way of helping people to find the best and least-cost solutions to reducing greenhouse gases. I am sure we have the capacity to do that; our carbon markets and carbon financing expertise in the UK are second to none. If we can harness them and help to unleash the creativity that I know is out there in our country, then we stand a chance of having agriculture neutralise its own emissions but then contribute to the reaching of net zero across the economy.

Although I am, in general terms, quite depressed and rather scared about where we are on climate, I think the UK is uniquely positioned. There is huge potential to lead the world in showing that this sector can not only reach a sustainable future for itself but assist us in solving climate change more generally. I look forward to hearing from the Minister and I thank my colleague and noble friend Lady Boycott, who I know will continue to champion these causes in this House. Thank you.