Biodiversity Loss

Debate between Duncan Baker and Caroline Lucas

Wednesday 15th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[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.”