Climate and Nature Bill

Jess Brown-Fuller Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 24th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Dr Savage]

I very much agree with the hon. Gentleman that the right thing to do is to be much more intelligent in our use of water, which will reduce the demand for clean water and reduce run-off from rainfall, which is becoming increasingly heavy as climate change kicks in.

The most significant addition that the Climate and Nature Bill would make to the existing strategy is its joined-up approach. Of the words in its title, perhaps the most important is “and”. Many people are aware that a changing climate is damaging nature. The wildfires in California this year have claimed millions of trees and thousands of homes. We see expanding deserts, melting ice caps and British moorlands on fire. We see natural cycles getting out of sync, so that newly hatched birds, insects and amphibians no longer find their favourite foods available when they need them.

We are less aware of how the loss of nature, the cutting down of forests, the warming of the oceans and intensive agriculture affect climate. It is a two-way relationship. Forests, oceans and soils are some of our most effective allies for natural carbon capture and sequestration. Healthy soil, along with trees, re-wiggled rivers and water meadows, helps to mitigate flooding and run-off, which are on the increase with ever more intense rainfall. Nature’s ability to perform this moderating role and regulate climate is being compromised by the rate at which we are destroying it. We are damaging nature’s capacity to self-regulate by killing, reducing, polluting and compromising natural ecosystems. Activities such as deep-sea mining threaten to make extinct species that we have not even discovered yet—species that we may one day find to be enormously useful to humanity.

We often hear that the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. “Nature-depleted” is a rather sterile phrase. What does it actually mean? Many of the alarming stats on nature use 1970 as a baseline—just a couple of years after I was born. I remember a time when if we put bread out on the back lawn, within a minute, dozens of starlings would be squabbling over the crusts. I cannot even remember the last time I saw a starling.

Heading off on holidays in my father’s Triumph 1200, we would have to stop while he cleaned squashed insects off the windscreen. We do not have to do that any more. We often saw hedgehogs. Okay, they were mostly squashed on the road, because it turns out that a fear response of curling up in a ball is not all that effective when the threat is an oncoming car, but I ask you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and the House: when did you last see a hedgehog? The collapse in the hedgehog population is not entirely due to roadkill. They lost their habitats, their sources of food and their ability to range and forage as woodlands were cut down and urban gardens were fenced in.

If the first half of my life—perhaps the first two thirds, on a less optimistic estimate—has seen such huge damage inflicted on our natural world, I hope that in the rest of my life I will see nature put well back on the path to recovery. One of my team members is expecting a baby in May, and I would like to commit to Poppy’s future daughter that by the time she is five years old we will have halted the degradation of nature and that at least 30% of land and coastal waters will be protected. I would like to promise that unborn little girl that by the time she is 25, we will have reversed nature loss and will be living in harmony with nature, as stated in the global biodiversity framework.

[Jess Brown-Fuller (Chichester) (LD)]

I thank my hon. Friend on behalf of those on the Liberal Democrat Benches for her truly impassioned speech and for her work on the Bill. Chichester harbour has lost 58% of its saltmarsh since 1946—the equivalent of three football pitches every year. Does she agree that that needs to stop today to ensure that that national landscape and site of special scientific interest is protected for generations to come?

[Dr Savage]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention. I know Chichester harbour well and absolutely agree that this is vital work.

There is hope. Nature is enormously resilient and has an amazing capacity to regenerate when we give it a chance. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds’ appropriately named Hope farm has demonstrated that food production can coexist with benefits to wildlife: breeding bird populations there increased by 177% over a 12-year period. We need to encourage people to get involved—a new kind of land army working together for nature. We need to unlock the local knowledge, energy and passion for nature that I see every day in my constituency of South Cotswolds. I am sure every hon. Member in the Chamber has seen it, regardless of whether their constituency is rural or urban.

One of my especially passionate constituents, Jonathan Whittaker, put together the “Shroud for Nature”, an art piece made of 13 double bedsheets covered with heartfelt messages about the Climate and Nature Bill. I have chosen a few of those messages to read out today. They are:

“Care for the planet. Not just for this generation but the next ones. It’s your responsibility to make sure I have a home. I am twelve years old.”

“We all come from nature, by destroying it we are destroying ourselves.”

“When will those in power listen and commit? No nature, no us!”

and

“What you do today will change my life forever.”

That is from William, who is 10 years old. They continue:

“We have the solutions; we have the skill. Are we willing to make the change?”

and

“Leave politics aside. Make changes for humankind.”

Now we have a little poem dedicated to the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

“Secretary of State Steve Reed, do us a good deed”—