Biodiversity Emergency

Earl of Kinnoull Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Non-Afl) [V]]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, on submitting this Question on the biodiversity emergency for debate today. Like him, I believe that the climate emergency is the twin of biodiversity and that there is a symbiotic relationship between them, because one has an impact on the other. They cannot be addressed in isolation and require urgent and immediate attention.

Every Government, every business, every organisation and every individual must play a part in reducing greenhouse gas emissions; assisting in the adaptation to climate change; halting biodiversity loss; and restoring habitats and species through changes in laws and regulations, policies, behaviours and lifestyles at local and national levels. In my own local area, there is one company doing that through one individual at True Harvest Seeds, which is looking to ensure that the local, indigenous seeds of the island of Ireland are protected and allowed to germinate. It is trying to deal with a lot of the invasive species that are destroying our local biodiversity.

This is an extensive subject and I hope that the Environment Bill will give the Government the opportunity to deal with biodiversity loss and the biodiversity emergency. I would very much like to see the Minister give us answers today about the future content of the Environment Bill. Can he also indicate what actions will be taken to ensure that the national infrastructure bank is pivotal in facilitating the financing of nature restoration and nature-based solutions to climate change?

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (The Earl of Kinnoull) (Non-Afl)]

I call the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw. Lord Bradshaw? No. I regret that we will have to go on then. I call the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch.

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[Baroness Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Teverson for securing this debate and for his passionate introduction. I am currently reading James Rebanks’s book, English Pastoral: An Inheritance. The Rebanks family have farmed in Cumbria for over 600 years. His latest book details the massive change in farming practices and the devasting effect that such change has had on biodiversity. The removal of stone walls, destruction of ancient hedgerows and accelerated use of chemical fertilisers and weedkillers have all taken their toll on plants, insects and birds.

The Government have produced numerous plans to remedy the loss of biodiversity. In 2011, Defra produced a strategic plan for England, Biodiversity 2020. An evaluation in 2019 showed insufficient progress against its targets. In January 2018, the 25-year environment plan appeared. December 2020 saw the development of a new strategy for nature to replace Biodiversity 2020. The Environment Bill’s First Reading in the Commons was in January 2020; it will eventually arrive here. In March 2021, the Prime Minister said that tackling climate change and biodiversity would be his number one international priority. For all this rhetoric, there has been no actual progress.

The Woodland Trust has produced a report on the state of our woods and trees which finds that only 7% are in a good ecological condition. However, some local authorities have risen to the challenge. Bristol City Council has declared an ecological emergency and has a plan to redress the decline by 2030. We hope that others will follow suit.

It is estimated that 75% of the world’s land surface and 66% of the ocean has been significantly altered and degraded by human activity. One million species are threatened with extinction. Are we going to wait until we, as humans, are also threatened with extinction before we take this matter seriously? Will the Minister press the Government to declare a biodiversity emergency now and take stringent action?

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (The Earl of Kinnoull) (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, we have been able to reconnect with the noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, whom I therefore call.

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[The Minister of State, Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park) (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their thoughtful contributions to this hugely important debate.

It should not need to be said, but we cannot reasonably expect to be able to destroy the natural world in the manner that we are without paying a terrible price. There is no doubt that that is what we are doing. I will not rehearse all the facts and figures of destruction, as noble Lords will be depressingly familiar with many of them, but it is worth reminding ourselves that we are currently losing around 30 football pitches-worth of forest every single minute; that a million species face extinction, including two in every five of the world’s plants; that the grim illegal wildlife trade is now the fourth biggest criminal sector; and that, just as we are stripping the ocean of life at a terrifying rate, we are filling it with trash just as quickly. And all this against the backdrop of an increasingly destabilised climate.

There is an abundance of science telling us that we are heading for disaster. But you do not need to be a scientist to understand that these trends cannot continue without appalling consequences. When ecosystems fail, so too do the multitude of free but hopelessly undervalued services that nature provides—services that each and every one of us depends on. Turning this trajectory around is, without a doubt, the most important challenge that we face by far.

To some extent, that is already happening in relation to the low-carbon revolution. The cost of renewables has tumbled, and zero-emission vehicles are on the cusp of going mainstream. Who would have predicted that the cost of solar would fall by 90% in the 12 years since the banking crisis? To be clear, I am not suggesting complacency: we are asking every country in the world to ramp things up as we head towards COP 26. When it comes to attaching a value to nature and a cost to its destruction, we have barely left the starting blocks, and that has to change because technology alone will not save us.

To put it simply: there is no pathway to tackling climate change that does not involve protecting and conserving nature on a massive scale. Nature-based solutions, like trees and mangroves, could provide a third of the most cost-effective solutions we need to mitigate climate change, as well as helping species recover and helping communities to adapt to become more resilient to the impacts of climate change. But despite that huge contribution, nature-based solutions currently receive less than 3% of total global climate finance. That makes no sense.

It is right that we in this country have put nature at the heart of our response to climate change, domestically and internationally, through our presidencies of both the G7 and COP 26. We are leading by example. Very soon after entering Downing Street, the Prime Minister committed to doubling our international climate finance to £11.6 billion. More recently, just a few weeks ago, he committed to spending nearly a third of that—around £3 billion—on nature-based solutions to climate change. We are encouraging other donor countries to do similarly. On the back of that commitment, we are rolling out a pipeline of ambitious new programmes. There is a new £500 million blue planet fund, for example, which will help to protect fragile marine ecosystems, and we are growing our magnificent “blue belt” of marine-protected areas around our overseas territories, which now cover a protected area the size of India. There is a new £100 million landscapes fund to link threatened ecosystems, providing safe passage for wildlife and green jobs for people. We are trebling funding for our extraordinary Darwin Initiative to £90 million. With other donor countries, we are developing right now an offer for forest protection that exceeds anything that we have seen so far.

We are also investing £30 million to protect species from the grim illegal wildlife trade, which I hope reassures the noble Lord, Lord Jones of Cheltenham, who made this point very clearly. I share his concern about pangolins and was delighted—as I am sure he was—when the Chinese decreed recently that pangolins can no longer be used in traditional medicine. He may also be pleased to know that, in addition to funding via the Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund, the UK played a defining role in getting proposals past CITES in 2016 that ensured that all eight species of pangolin received the highest possible level of protection from international trade.

We know that change is possible and that nature protection works. It works for people and it works for the planet. Look at Costa Rica: it has doubled its rainforest in one generation, putting more than half the country under canopy and growing its economy alongside its nature. We are leading global alliances to protect at least 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030, and we are pursuing an ambitious new UN treaty to establish mechanisms to protect ocean beyond national jurisdiction.

In answer to a question put to me by the author of this debate, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, we are working as closely as possible with the Chinese as hosts of the next biodiversity conference in Kunming. Although our representation will be confirmed closer to the meeting, we are doing more heavy lifting than perhaps any other country. We are pressing hard for the highest possible ambition and, crucially, we are pushing for inclusion of mechanisms to hold Governments to the promises they make, which currently is lacking.

We know that public money alone is not going to be enough, so Governments need to identify and use the powerful levers that they uniquely hold to remove the perverse incentives that drive environmental destruction. Consider, for example that the top 50 food-producing countries spend $700 billion a year supporting often destructive land use. That is four times the world’s aid budgets combined. Imagine the impact if that public support could be redirected to help farmers transition to climate-friendly, nature-positive land management. In a world first, that is what we are doing in the UK, and we are building alliances of countries committed to doing the same.

Commodity production is responsible for the vast majority of deforestation, so we are building a global coalition of countries committed to cleaning up commodity supply chains. We are also calling on the large multilateral development banks to nature-proof their entire portfolios. There is no point in having bits of investments here and there in nature if the rest of the portfolio is taking us in the opposite direction. That point was made well by the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, in relation to the private sector, where the point stands just as strongly. We are pulling every lever we have to get private finance flowing, including by accelerating progress towards high-integrity carbon markets.

There is no doubt in my mind that we are driving the agenda internationally, and that is recognised by other countries around the world. However, as a number of noble Lords have said, we need to get our own house in order. We have seen shocking biodiversity loss in recent decades. Last year’s State of Nature review found that 41% of UK species are declining. We have seen an increasing intensity of flood damage caused at least in part by poor land use. We know that meeting our net-zero emissions obligation will require heavy lifting on a scale that we have never seen before.

I know that the noble Earl, Lord Devon, questions the need for us to declare an emergency but I hope that my opening remarks, as well as this bleak picture of declining biodiversity in the UK, persuades him otherwise. I could add that our indicator of pollinator distribution has fallen by 30% since 1980. Our indicator of farmland bird abundance has fallen by more than 50% since 1970. That case was made extremely well by the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Old Scone. As the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Dillington, said, no matter what we do now, improvements will take time to materialise. In answer to the noble Earl’s question, biodiversity is devolved; however, all the regions are in broad agreement on the need to act. That is a good thing.

We have a packed agenda. The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, asked for precise targets and a clear plan, a point also made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville. The recently published Dasgupta review provides an extraordinarily important backdrop, and we will be responding to it properly and thoroughly soon. Our plans to boost biodiversity and improve the environment within a generation are set out in the 25-year environment plan. We set the world’s most ambitious climate change target into law to reduce emissions by 78% by 2035, compared to 1990 levels, an announcement made just a couple of days ago.

We are setting out plans for a bold net-zero strategy to demonstrate how we will cut emissions and create new jobs across the whole country. Our upcoming Environment Bill will deliver improvements in waste, air quality, water, nature, biodiversity and more. It lays the foundation for the nature recovery network and creates duties and incentives, such as biodiversity net gain for all new developments, which is also a world first. The Bill establishes spatial mapping and planning tools to deliver nature recovery, creates new nature covenants for the long-term protection of land—another world first—and creates a new body to hold government to account.

The noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, asked about biodiversity targets in the Bill. It creates a power to set long-term, legally binding environmental targets, and we will want to ensure that for biodiversity these targets at least align with international targets to be set through the CBD. We are continuing work on that suite of targets, including in the priority areas of biodiversity and improving the state of nature.

We are switching our land-use subsidy system so that the payments are conditional on good environmental outcomes, just as we are asking the world to do. That, too, is a world first. Incidentally, the noble Baroness, Lady Miller of Chilthorne Domer, raised the underappreciated but hugely important issue of soil health. I can tell her that soil health has been identified as a priority for our environmental land management scheme. My noble friend Lady McIntosh of Pickering asked if the scheme would support farmers to play their role in reversing nature decline. Absolutely. That is the entire purpose of the environment land management system.

In another world first, we are legislating to require big companies to remove deforestation from their commodity supply chains to help shrink our international footprint. Again, we are asking other countries to do the same. We know that to meet net zero we need to establish record numbers of trees, so we have committed to planting 30,000 hectares a year across the UK by 2025, using the new £640 million Nature for Climate Fund. We want to unleash the extraordinary power of natural regeneration as well. Anyone who has seen the wonders of NEP will know why that matters.

In answer to my noble friend Lord Caithness—the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, also raised this—we will be investing in methods to control deer and grey squirrel numbers as part of our efforts to protect new and existing native woodlands. To further protect them, and in answer to my noble friend Lord Lucas, we will be emphasising the huge and critical importance of not only species diversity but genetic diversity. Incidentally, he raised the importance of educating children, and I could not agree more.

Alongside our tree commitment, we have committed to restoring 35,000 hectares of peatland. The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, asked about the use of peat in horticulture. I can tell him that we are committed to phasing it out in England. We told industry that if we had not seen enough movement by 2020, we would look at further measures that could be taken. We are now considering those future measures. We also have ambitious plans to protect our threatened pollinators, a point made well by the noble Lords, Lord Jones of Cheltenham and Lord Sikka. All this goes alongside plans to greatly improve the health and protection of our precious marine environment.

It is often said that we need to weave the environment into our economics but, as Professor Dasgupta’s seminal study explained, that is the wrong way round. Ultimately all economic activity is derived from nature. Without nature, we have nothing and we are nothing. Reconciling our lives and economies with the natural world on which we all depend is really the defining challenge of our age. I am absolutely convinced that this can be the year that change begins in earnest.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (The Earl of Kinnoull) (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, that completes the business before the Grand Committee this afternoon. I remind Members to sanitise their desks and chairs before leaving the Room.

Committee adjourned at 6.22 pm.