Biodiversity: Aichi Targets

Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts

Monday 20th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park [V]]

The Agriculture Bill is winding its way through Parliament as we speak, being expertly delivered by my noble friend Lord Gardiner. The concern about putting food security as a public good is that we are trying to move away from a subsidy system based on rewarding landowners for converting land into land that can produce food. While on the surface, and when it was developed, the old system may have made perfect sense, it has proven to be disastrous. It is clear that the new system has to be designed to ensure that no public money is handed to landowners without a return of some form of public good. We have to be slightly careful about how we define public good and that work is under way. We certainly recognise the value of food production but, on the whole, that is recognised by the market, unlike the environmental benefits that we know landowners, more than anyone else, provide.

[Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB) [V]]

My Lords, with just 14% of UK species having had their conservation status assessed, but 21% listed as threatened, what are we doing to increase the collection of data and to accelerate remedial measures, not least for restoration, of at least 15% of degraded ecosystems, including peatland and woodland, as we are urged to do in Aichi target 15?

[Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park [V]]

Measurement is crucial to understanding and delivering good policy, but it is not as important as the policies themselves. If you look at what the Government are doing as a whole, we have probably the most ambitious environmental agenda of any Government to date. We have the first Environment Bill in over 20 years. We have ambitious measures, including restoring and enhancing nature. We have just announced a £40 million green recovery challenge fund to help charities and environmental organisations to start work on delivering much of that environmental gain across England, restoring nature and tackling climate change. We are going to use the new nature for climate fund to deliver woodland expansion, peatland restoration and more. We have announced a tripling of Darwin Plus to protect our precious Overseas Territories. We are replacing the disastrous CAP system, as I just explained, with the new environmental land management scheme, which will be revolutionary for our countryside, and we now have 25% of the UK’s water in marine protected areas. We are making progress.