Insect Population
Debate between Ben Bradley and Alex Sobel(5 years, 8 months ago)
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Alex Sobel
I have seen Professor Hill’s work. She is a credit to this country. Our UK academic research community is brilliant, and the Government need to take more notice of its work.
Ben Bradley (Mansfield) (Con)
On the point about pollinator corridors, I withdrew my private Member’s Bill on pollinators last year, because the Government agreed to fund Buglife and Matt Shardlow—the hon. Gentleman has mentioned them already—to complete their mapping of those corridors across the country, with a view to using the environment Bill to look at planning regulations to force local authorities to plan for them in new developments, which would be welcome. Does he agree that the charities already doing that work have a huge role to play, and that the Government should support them with funding to continue? There does not need to be a massive revolution in policy.
Alex Sobel
The hon. Gentleman will be unsurprised to hear that I absolutely agree, and I would like that to be legislated for in the environment Bill, particularly as he lost his piece of legislation on that proviso.
I will move on to ecosystem services. On top of the loss of invertebrates, the loss of species generally means that we do not have a lot of other services, such as natural pest control, natural decomposition of pollutants and natural nutrient cycling. Without those, we will increasingly have to intervene in ecosystems to provide them. A good example is that trees draw carbon down from the atmosphere really well, and have done forever, but because we have lost the part of the ecosystem that does that, we are now talking about engineering artificial means of carbon drawdown.