Global Warming

Earl of Devon Excerpts

Thursday 16th January 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Devon (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for calling this crucial debate. I note my interests in the register and the various capacities in which I wrestle with the challenges of climate change and nature restoration, as both a sustainable economy lawyer and a sustainable land manager in Devon. Given that climate change is so significant to future generations, I also note my interests as a father of two children whose own recent experiences of climate change warrant mention.

My kids have been privileged and challenged to spend their childhood in the south-west of two different countries, the United Kingdom and the United States. In the UK, they schooled at Kenton Primary School in Devon, which was inundated when a biblical deluge swept through the village on a Sunday in September 2023. The beautiful building in the middle of the village had hosted a village school for over 400 years. Given the devastation wrought by an unprecedented spate of five feet of water within an hour’s rainfall, it will never host a school again. A new school is promised on the edge of the village, but the excitement of schoolkids’ playtime voices will not be heard from the Triangle ever again.

Having moved to California to finish their education, they have enjoyed the delights of the Pacific Palisades Charter High School, replete with surf and beach volleyball teams, where my daughter is a senior and my son a sophomore. Until last week, that is, when the school burned down, victim, along with a whole community, of the Palisades fire, which still burns—it is only 22% contained. They are safe and evacuated, but over 50 of my daughter’s classmates are now homeless. They have lost everything: wildfire has taken back that whole hillside. The Apocalypse is here and it is now, and I speak today in tribute to that community and the remarkable bravery of firefighters, volunteers and public servants. While their experience is, thankfully, somewhat unusual, it will not be in the years ahead. Whatever we can do, we should have done it years ago.

Of course, it is not just these personal challenges that we need to bear in mind. Climate change’s impact on our natural ecosystems has devastated recent harvests. UK wheat production last year was 21% down due to those rains, and the Spanish fires around Barcelona massively disrupted supply of fresh fruit and vegetables. Bad weather has added over £350 to national food bills. Tree disease is rife due to unseasonable droughts, and pollinators are stressed by parasites encouraged by warmer weather. Similarly, our national infrastructure is threatened by rising sea levels, with the main railway line past my home now under constant vigil at high tide due to the threat of breach of the Exe estuary’s Powderham banks.

Nature, of course, will survive these challenges. The fires may be life-threatening to us, but the Santa Monica mountains will recover; this is their natural cycle, after all. Rewilding is not the option; the removal of productive farming and the local communities that steward the land is not the solution. That way lies hunger and increasing food insecurity. What we need to do is to listen to nature, not to fight it; to embrace it and to farm with it, sustainably harvesting our food and regeneratively intensifying production where appropriate. Around the River Exe, we should not seek to hold back the tide, like King Canute, but we should embrace its return and look to harness nature-based solutions to the challenges of coastal erosion and flooding. I have long requested that intertidal habitat play a more important role in our land management structures; thus I applaud the inclusion of this land type in the recently announced SFI options.

As a priority, the Government need to turn around their relationship with farmers and land managers. The APR inheritance tax reforms were simply a disaster for rural trust. Steve Reed recently announced fresh reforms at the Oxford Business Conference: a farming road map. I ask that the Government take care in uprooting and changing farm policy yet again. Farmers, and the soils and biodiversity on which they rely, require consistent, long-term and dependable policies, not constant chopping and changing. I echo the call by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, for us to honour the work of Professor Partha Dasgupta and his The Economics of Biodiversity. I happened to meet him yesterday at St John’s College in Cambridge.

In their tireless drive for economic growth, the Government need to recognise the cost of the natural capital that that growth will inevitably consume. If we do that accurately, and accurately measure what we consume, we may turn the tide on global warming and biodiversity loss.

To conclude on a positive note, both my children are passionate about the environment and hope to study it at university. They know that nature can provide a solution to these terrible challenges, if only we treat it with the deference and respect that it deserves.