Biodiversity Loss

Caroline Lucas 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.

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right to raise the situation of migratory birds. There is one tiny glimmer of hope: in Ynys Enlli on Bardsey Island, which is in my constituency, we have had Europe’s first and only dark sky sanctuary since last year. One of the key actions was to replace the bright white light of the lighthouse with a red light, thereby saving thousands of birds’ lives—previously, in one night 2,000 birds had died. We must acknowledge those little glimmers of hope, while also recognising the larger picture and its seriousness.

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the right hon. Lady for her inspiring intervention, which shows that incredibly simple things can make a world of difference.

[Duncan Baker (North Norfolk) (Con)]

rose—

[Caroline Lucas]

Indeed, I anticipate an intervention in just a moment on one of my favourite subjects: swift bricks.

[Duncan Baker]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right to talk about losing 50% of some species. One of her favourite birds is the swift. For just £30, a swift brick can be installed in new build properties. The swift population has declined by 60% over the past 30 years, so I ask the Minister: why are we not legislating for such a simple way to protect the swift population?

[Caroline Lucas]

As the hon. Member knows, I could not agree more. I remember being in this room for that debate in Westminster Hall last year, as he was, talking about the importance of something as simple as a swift brick and hearing the Minister basically going through gymnastics in trying to explain why it would not be possible to legislate for swift brick use. This is not even £30 that the Government would have to spend; if the buildings were properly built and swift bricks put into them in the first place, the developers would only have to spend a tiny amount of money. In essence, we are saying to the Minister that a whole raft of actions need to be taken, but some are incredibly simple. Will she please start to take on some of those actions?

The loss of biodiversity is not only a tragedy for the species involved, but a disaster for us, too. The world is a lonelier place for human beings when the number of species that we have been privileged to share it with are declining on a daily basis. If people want to measure it in economic terms, a recent report found that biodiversity loss could cause a larger hit to the UK’s economy in the years ahead than either the 2008 financial crisis or, indeed, the covid-19 pandemic. Well, of course it could, because the bottom line is that our wellbeing is intimately and inextricably bound up with the wellbeing of nature. We are nature, and it is the false perception of a division between human beings and the rest of the world—that mechanistic assumption that the natural world is something for us to use, rather than to live alongside—that is at the root of so much of the ecological crisis around us.

To give one small example, Lawyers for Nature has started an inspiring campaign to change the definition of “nature” in the “Oxford English Dictionary” so that it includes humans. Currently, all dictionaries exclude humans from their definition. Words matter. Highlighting our connection and interdependence with nature matters, and that needs to lead to action.

The Government have made welcome commitments at a global level, including to manage 30% of the land and sea for nature by 2030, and at home, with the Environment Act 2021 setting legally binding targets, notably to end the decline in species populations by 2030. But we all know that what matters is not just the setting of targets, but the delivery of them. The latest assessment from the Office for Environmental Protection has been damning on that front, warning that the prospect of meeting key targets and commitments is “largely off track”. Dame Glenys Stacey, the OEP chair, went on to say that it is “deeply, deeply concerning” that “adverse environmental trends continue”. That statement is underlined by the evidence that our rivers and our seas are being polluted with a cocktail of chemicals and effluent, while ancient woodlands are being bulldozed to make way for roads and railways, and our fields are being doused in pesticides and fungicides. Our only home is on fire and being bulldozed before our eyes.

As State of Nature reports, two primary factors drive that decline on land: climate change and our intensive agriculture system. It is on those that I will focus the rest of my remarks. On our climate, rising temperatures are causing major changes in the natural world, leading to rain shifts, population changes and the disruption of precious food webs. Species that are well adapted to the warmth are likely to keep expanding across the UK, but montane species that are already on the edge of their ranges will tragically be squeezed out.

More broadly, nesting birds will be increasingly mismatched with peaks in invertebrate food sources. For example, more blue tit chicks will starve, because the caterpillars on which they depend are no longer available. At sea, primary and secondary plankton production is likely to be shifted northwards. There was widespread alarm at the extreme marine heatwave last year, during which seas off the coast of the UK reached up to a horrifying 5°C above normal.

Species that have adapted over thousands of years simply cannot keep up with this perilous, high-speed experiment that we are conducting. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment from Working Group II showed that climate change is already

“causing dangerous and widespread disruption in nature”,

so at the very least we need to stop pouring fuel on the fire: no new oil and gas licences, and certainly no new coal mines.

I am deeply concerned that the Government have not only issued licences for oil and gas projects inside our marine protected areas, making a mockery of that designation, but have been ignoring objections from the Joint Nature Conservation Committee to new licences on environmental grounds. Ministers need to rapidly speed up the transition to net zero, rather than delaying action in a desperate attempt to stoke a climate culture war. We need to work with nature to tackle this crisis by creating woodland, planting seagrass meadows and rewetting peatlands. That would not only restore vital habitats but lock away carbon.

According to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, those vital carbon sinks contain 2 gigatonnes of carbon—equivalent to four years of the UK’s annual emissions—and yet not only is two thirds of the store unprotected, but much of it is already damaged and degraded. Unforgivably, it continues to be destroyed. The Government have abjectly failed to deliver a complete ban on peat burning. Peat continues to be set alight each year simply so that a wealthy minority can engage in grouse shooting. If we needed a definition of absurdity, that would be one. We need to end that devastating practice, and we need real investment in nature-based solutions, which remain chronically underfunded. That should include a significant uplift to the nature for climate fund, and I hope the Opposition will urgently commit to renew it if they form the next Government.

When it comes to food production, our modern agricultural system, with its industrial processes, use of chemicals and monoculture fields stretching as far as the eye can see, is one of the main causes of biodiversity loss. It is driven by economic pressures and misguided views of so-called progress, which put a huge toll on farming communities and ecosystems alike. Author and farmer James Rebanks described it as like being “sucked into a whirlpool” and “slowly becoming exhausted” in an effort to keep up with so-called modern practices, while supermarkets squeeze profits to an extent that often makes it nigh-on impossible to make profit.

Farmers manage 70% of the land in England and have a vital role to play in addressing the climate and capture crises. The OEP observes that the

“Government will not achieve its ambitions without effective management of the farmed landscape”.

As it stands, the Government’s environmental land management scheme is failing both nature and farmers. First, the current structure of the sustainable farming incentive is leading to a pick-’n’-mix approach that risks directing funding into a very narrow range of low-impact actions.

Secondly, farmers are not being supported to enter the higher-tier schemes. One in five of those who applied for the countryside stewardship higher tier last year was turned away, including because of a lack of resourcing and an absence of a transition pathway for the thousands of farmers in previous agri-environment schemes, who now risk missing out. Thirdly, there is a gaping hole in minimum environmental protections, including for watercourses, soil and hedgerows, now that the cross-compliance regulations have come to an end and it is not clear what will replace them.

ELMs must be urgently reformed with a clear plan for how each scheme will deliver on the UK’s environmental targets and a proper regulatory baseline. The Government must deliver a pay rise for nature by doubling the annual budget for nature-friendly farming and land management. Going beyond that, we need a transformational shift to agroecological ways of farming so that food is produced in harmony with nature. That should include properly incentivising the transition away from harmful pesticides, fungicides and herbicides. I hope Labour will look again at its proposals for how we grow our food, because simply committing to make ELMs work falls short of setting out how the farming budget must be allocated if we are to restore the natural world and produce healthy and nutritious food in the context of the climate and nature emergency.

At sea, we urgently need a ban on industrial fishing in all marine protected areas. The current approach is far too slow and piecemeal to adequately respond to nature’s decline.

Finally, we must not only protect our most important sites but create new habitats and ensure that planning policy on land and sea properly takes nature into account. Despite sites of special scientific interest apparently being the crown jewels of the UK’s nature network, many are in poor or declining condition. According to a recent health check, just 6% of the total land area of our national parks is managed effectively for nature. Throughout the country, that figure reduces to as little as 3% of land and 8% of English seas being well protected for nature. That highlights the enormous gulf in delivering on the 30 by 30 target, regardless of the warm words we hear from Ministers.

If we are to have any chance of restoring nature and achieving our targets, protected landscapes can no longer just be paper parks; they must be thriving ecosystems bursting with life. The designated sites network should be strengthened and expanded, with funding increased and, crucially, targeted towards biodiversity regeneration. There should be a new statutory purpose for national parks and landscapes—formerly areas of outstanding natural beauty—to support nature’s recovery.

I welcome the proposal from the Wildlife and Countryside Link for a 30 by 30 rapid delivery project to ensure that the goal is delivered in less than six years’ time. We need to see better-resourced arm’s length bodies such as Natural England, as has been called for just this week by the chief executive officers of leading nature charities, to ensure that they can do their job for our critical assets and effectively advise the Government.

Lastly, we need to see more connectivity across landscapes, as nature’s decline is also being driven by the fact that those places that do exist for wildlife are too small and fragmented. A brilliant model for how that can be done has been shown by the hugely exciting Weald to Waves project, which aims to create a 100-mile nature-recovery corridor going from the Sussex kelp recovery project near Brighton to the Ashdown forest, with the Knepp estate at its heart. Many of us will have visited the Knepp rewilding project and heard the gentle purr of the turtle dove and the nightingale’s song.

The Green party believes we need to go further. We would introduce a new rights of nature Bill, to recognise that ecosystems have their own rights and to give a voice to nature in law. That would be enforced by a new independent commission for nature, so that the regeneration of nature was at the heart of all policy considerations. We need to look again at an economic model that has ever-increasing extractive GDP growth as its overriding goal rather than the promotion of a thriving natural world and increased wellbeing for us all. As the Dasgupta review urged, we need a change in

“how we think, act and measure economic success to protect and enhance our prosperity and the natural world.”

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member on securing the debate. It is extremely frustrating that the economic pack for today’s debate indicates that public expenditure and non-Government spending on UK biodiversity has increased in the past few years, yet many of the problems persist and some are getting worse. Does she agree with me that, in spite of increasing expenditure on the problem, it seems to be getting worse?

[Caroline Lucas]

The hon. Member’s intervention demonstrates that more resourcing is a necessary but not sufficient component of what we need to see. We need a far more joined-up approach to the natural world. As I have argued, our farming and food system is absolutely integral to making things properly connected.

I am aware of the time, so I will draw my comments to a close by returning briefly to our international commitments. As the Minister knows, countries must publish national biodiversity strategy and action plans ahead of the next UN biodiversity summit in Colombia. The UK’s plan is expected to contain four individual country strategies for each of the four nations, as well as strategies for the UK overseas territories and Crown dependencies. It is understood that the plan could be published and adopted very soon, but, concerningly, there are rumours that the country strategy for England could simply be a repetition of the environmental improvement plan. Such a move would be totally unacceptable given the widespread criticism that the EIP has received, including from the Office for Environmental Protection.

I have asked the Minister many things, but I want to summarise three in particular that I hope she will address in her response to the debate. First, will she confirm today that the Government will publish a bold, co-ordinated and well-resourced plan, with concrete steps to deliver on our international commitments ahead of that key meeting in Colombia? Can she rule out the idea that for England it will simply be a reiteration of the environmental improvement plan? Secondly, I hope the Government will bring the global commitment to reverse nature loss by 2030 into UK law—a move that would be delivered by a new climate and nature Bill. Thirdly, will the Minister outline what will replace the cross-compliance rules? Can she indicate how the gap will be filled?

It is easy to feel overwhelmed by nature’s horrifying decline, yet it is entirely possible to reverse this picture and ensure that our children inherit an earth that is just as rich and vibrant as the one that we once knew, where habitats are restored and biodiversity blooms. But to do so, we need to take urgent steps now, not only to protect what remains but to work to create new wild spaces, and finally to recognise that we are nature, and that what we do to the natural world we ultimately do to ourselves.

[Christina Rees (in the Chair)]

May I remind Members that they should bob if they wish to be called to speak in the debate? I intend to start the wind-ups at 10.25 am to allow Ms Lucas a couple of minutes at the end to sum up. If Members stick to around three minutes as an informal guide, we should get everyone in.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Rebecca Pow)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Ms Rees. You are keeping everyone to time—excellent.

I thank the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) for securing this debate. I expect no less of her: this is the kind of subject that we have heard her speaking about, certainly throughout the time that I have been in Parliament. Although we have our differences, we have certainly had a great deal in common over all these years, so I thank her for her work as she leaves this place.

We had an impassioned debate on biodiversity in Westminster Hall yesterday, in which a great many Conservative colleagues spoke. Like this debate, it was very full. Although we have our differences, we are all singing from the same hymn sheet of loving nature and knowing that it is intrinsically part of how we live. We know we cannot deal with the climate crisis and climate adaptation without tackling biodiversity and nature. That is a given, and it is something I have worked on since I have been in Parliament.

I was interested to hear that the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel) held the first debate on insects, because I held the first debate on soil, of which I am very proud. That is firmly on the agenda now: we are paying farmers to look after their soil. We have made so much progress.

We know that half the global economy depends on nature and biodiversity. There are many reasons for looking after it, but that one is important. We have heard some stark stats about the disaster—we know that—which is why we must do something about it. It is not a question of shall we do something about biodiversity; it is an absolute must.

The hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion called for a decade of action. She was suggesting that nothing had happened and that everything was terribly negative, but has she been listening? We have made enormous progress on that agenda in the past decade, at home and on the international stage—one cannot do one without the other. The critical thing is that the Government have done more than any other Government, which is to set the framework that we must have. We cannot tackle this with individual, itsy-bitsy pots; we need a framework. That is why it was so important to introduce the Environment Act—many of us present were involved in that. It is a globally changing Act, and no other Government have produced such an Act. That sets the framework.

We have passed legislation to protect our environment. We legislated and set a target for restoring nature by 2030. One can criticise that all one likes, but the target is challenging and legally binding. We have four legally binding biodiversity targets. We also have legally binding tree targets and we have targets in a number of other areas, such as water and air. The structure is there, as is the framework for how we will get there.

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the Minister for her kind comments, but a number of us have made the point again and again that targets on their own are not sufficient, if we do not meet them. It is not just us saying that; her own watchdog, the Office for Environmental Protection, says that we are only on target with four out of 40, and that the prospect of meeting targets and commitments is “largely off track”. I put it to the Minister that yes, some progress has been made, but overall we are massively off track. Her tone, frankly, strikes me as rather complacent.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas]

Which is not enough time to be able to respond to what I have heard, Ms Rees. I thank all hon. Members for sharing their concerns. Some key themes have come up again and again, one of which is around peatlands and why on earth we are still setting fire to peat, which makes no sense at all. Can we please take that away?

We have talked a lot about targets, but not about delivery plans to actually meet those targets, and as far as I could hear we still have no answer on what happens when legally binding targets are not met. I do not know if that means that we would have to take the Government to court again—that is becoming a bit of a routine, but if necessary I am sure that it will be done. I want to ensure that we do not have fossil fuel extraction in marine protected areas, and again, that just seems to be madness. At the end of the day, I want the Minister to take back to her Department and others across Government that this issue is so urgent, and while I know she cares about it, there is complacency. That needs to be addressed. We need urgent action, and we need it now.

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).