Biodiversity Loss

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered biodiversity loss.

It is a real pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Rees, and to open today’s debate on biodiversity loss.

It is now less than six months until COP16 takes place in Colombia—the first summit since the Kunming-Montreal global biodiversity framework was agreed in 2022, when countries committed to

“halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.”

The meeting will be a crucial opportunity for global leaders to demonstrate how they are delivering on the commitment to restore our depleted natural world, and it is a moment for our own Government to step up as well.

When the then Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the right hon. Member for Suffolk Coastal (Dr Coffey), gave her statement to Parliament following the Kunming meeting, she promised to

“make this a decade of action”.—[Official Report, 19 December 2022; Vol. 725, c. 47.]

But what have we seen since then? Raw sewage continues to pour into our waterways, including for more than 4 million hours last year, according to the Environment Agency statistics. There have been repeated so-called emergency approvals of neonicotinoids, a poison so powerful that a single teaspoon is enough to kill 1.25 billion bees. And just this weekend, it was reported that the Government are poised to row back on their commitment to ban the sale of horticultural peat this year, and are seemingly content to see precious peatlands further degraded. It is hardly a reassuring picture.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I absolutely agree with what the hon. Lady is saying. She mentions COP16. Later this year, the world will meet in Colombia for the biodiversity conference, which is of critical importance. She will be aware that Colombia has joined the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, yet the Government of the UK—a similar-sized oil and gas producer—have not. Does she believe that one of things we should be doing before the biodiversity COP is to join Colombia in the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance?

[Caroline Lucas]

I agree wholeheartedly. I will come to that issue in a moment, but joining the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance does not mean that we will end oil and gas tomorrow. It is a commitment over time, and it sends out a massively important signal to the rest of the world. Frankly, the fact that we have not signed up tells its own story, unfortunately.

The “State of Nature” report, published last year, shone a spotlight once more on the horrifying decline—let us call it what it is: the wanton destruction—of biodiversity across our four nations. It showed that, in that well-worn formulation, the UK is now one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth. In the course of my lifetime alone, the abundance of species studied across the UK has fallen by almost 20% on average, meaning that just half of the animals, insects and plants with which we are privileged to share our home now remain—from the mosses and the lichens in our woodlands to the internationally important seabird populations that breed on the cliffs and rocky islands of the coastline.

This is a disaster so extreme that, frankly, it is hard to contemplate. Imagine if we lost half our population, or if half the country was swallowed by the sea, or if half the country’s financial wealth was squandered; and yet we have sacrificed, seemingly with few regrets, half our natural inheritance. Scientists are now warning of what they term “acoustic fossils”, as the natural world falls silent and once familiar sounds, such as the dawn chorus, grow quiet or are lost altogether. It could not be clearer that nature is in freefall. Without urgent action to not just halt but reverse its decline, species risk being lost forever from our skies, land and waters. That is a disaster for the individual species concerned, including my favourite bird, the swift, which can fly an extraordinary 1 million miles in the course of its lifetime.