Natural Environment

Earl of Selborne Excerpts

Thursday 15th January 2015 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Selborne (Con)]

My Lords, the whole House will be grateful to my noble friend Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville for giving us an opportunity to hold what I predict will be a wide-ranging debate on the natural environment. I would like to look at the implications of environmental change in the widest sense, not just climate change, remembering of course that the United Kingdom’s natural environment is the product of centuries of management. Whether it is agricultural land, woodland, forest, heaths, moors, coasts, green spaces or urban areas, all are products of our management. The only area of wilderness in the United Kingdom is perhaps the flow country of Caithness and Sutherland, an area of blanket bog. If we look at the steady loss of biodiversity in most habitats, it is evident that we have much to do to stabilise wildlife populations.

Increasingly, we are recognising the importance of protecting ecosystem services on which we ultimately depend, whether for food production, flood prevention, pollination of crops, air purification, raw materials recycling and much else. The United Kingdom National Ecosystem Assessment was carried out between mid-2009 and early 2011. It was the first analysis of the United Kingdom’s natural environment in terms of the benefits that it provides to society and its continuing prosperity. This assessment should set the agenda for future consideration as to how we monitor, conserve and enhance ecosystem services.

A particularly interesting issue, although it is difficult to grapple with, is the extent to which we rely on or could benefit from the correlation between human health and the environment. It is a statement of the obvious to say that we benefit from a contact with nature, but it is not easy to measure the relationship between green space and the health of population levels. Here, if anywhere, is an area where much more research is needed on the positive aspects. There is much research on the negative consequences: it is easy to demonstrate that degraded and contaminated environments impact adversely on our health, particularly our mental health.

Another aspect that states the obvious and of which we are all well aware is that since the Second World War there has been a dramatic change in United Kingdom land use. It is because our national priorities changed with the intensification of agriculture, urbanisation and transport development. Some 90% of semi-natural vegetation has been converted to arable use. You cannot change the use of land without dramatic and major impacts on ecosystems, and therefore the delivery of ecosystem services. Unless you are very careful you will cause the disruption of flood regimes, river basins and coastal wetlands. These are the issues with which we must deal. They are related not just to climate change but also to land use and the impacts of an expanding economy, which of course we welcome.

It is easy to cast gloom and doom over the natural environment, but we should also remember some positive aspects during the period since the war, about which I have been talking. There are the Clean Air Act 1956, the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981, and EU directives such as the 1979 birds directive and 1992 habitats directive. These have all played an important role in helping us to take our responsibilities more seriously and with a degree of continuity.

In reference to the Clear Air Act, while cleaner air can be described as a success story, it remains at the regional level a serious issue, especially in urban areas. Ambient air quality has improved but diffuse sources of atmospheric pollution remain a challenge. As our Motion today identifies, transport is a major source of pollutants, as are power generation and industrial emissions. Air quality needs to go up the environmental agenda. The Government could lead the way in raising the priority attached to air quality in all government departments. In another place the Environmental Audit Committee calculated that poor air quality will reduce average life expectancy in this country by an average of seven to eight months, and that up to 50,000 people a year may die prematurely because of poor air quality.

On our record on national biodiversity loss, there is good news. Some species have done really rather well. There is the reintroduction of the red kite, a bird with which we are now all familiar; at one time, it was isolated in Wales. There are also buzzards, deer, badgers, otters and some non-specialist butterflies, for example. They have all expanded their range. These tend to be generalist species. The specialist species have done far less well. Since 1995, 70% of butterfly species, 50% of bird species and 28% of plant species have declined in abundance. Those are sobering figures and need to be considered against a background of some over-optimistic targets to which we have signed up, at national and international levels. As a result of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, we became a signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity. There were also millennium development goal 7.B and the EU targets for 2010. All have been a history of failure to meet targets. They had good intentions, but without thinking through how we might reduce our impacts we will never meet these targets. At present we are signed up to the Aichi targets, which were set in Japan, for 2020, but it would be a brave person who predicted that we were going to meet them.

The key to this will be when we ultimately work out how we determine the ownership and distribution of property rights for natural capital assets, which is a highly contentious issue but one on which the Natural Capital Committee, which provides advice to government on the state of England's natural capital, is giving advice. If we could get into our national consciousness and the balance sheets of each and every company in the country an assessment of what impact for better or worse they are making on our natural capital, it would be something of a game-changer. There would be lasting benefits to the United Kingdom if we could demonstrate the value to society of our natural capital and reward those who protect and enhance the desired ecosystem services. This does not have to be done with new subsidies or grants from government; it can be done by adjusting the tax system to reward those who are looking after future generations.

I return to transport, which is mentioned in the Motion. My second game-changer would be to look at the development of hydrogen. We are already there: we have cars, buses and boats fuelled by hydrogen. The problem is, of course, the high cost of fuel cells and the absence of a refuelling infrastructure. The Government recently announced an £11 million investment in United Kingdom hydrogen vehicle infrastructure and £2 million of funding for public sector hydrogen vehicles. I think it is quite realistic to think that in 10 years’ time hydrogen will be competitive in price with petrol and diesel. It will certainly reduce pollutants in the air and, provided the electricity which produces the hydrogen is from renewable sources, it will make a contribution to a reduction in greenhouse gases. There is a challenge: if in the run-up to the general election any political party can commit itself to travel only by hydrogen-fuelled vehicles, it will be doing us a service.