Biodiversity Emergency

Lord Cameron of Dillington Excerpts

Thursday 22nd April 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Cameron of Dillington (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I declare interests as a retired farmer, a landowner and chair of the UKCEH.

We do have a crisis. We have made a total Horlicks of this issue over recent years. It will take decades to put it right. It will not be easy. However, we have to step back. These days, good land managers provide many outputs and services: food to keep us healthy and our nation secure; landscape and access for tourism and healthy exercise; renewable energy; buildings for rural businesses; timber for carbon capture and storage, and for buildings; and, yes, habitats and wildlife management for the biodiversity that we desperately need. In doing all this, we have to minimise our carbon footprint.

It is a tough call to maximise the services from your piece of land and still stay in business, but we must never again prioritise one output at the expense of all the others, which is what we have been doing. We must get everything in perspective and take a balanced view of what the land can produce. Every piece of land will have its own solutions. We will need to carry out research as well as prod, train and incentivise all land managers, both urban and rural.

On our Somerset farm, we have a 50-acre solar park. Some 10 years in, our FWAG officer visited the site and said that he had rarely seen 50 acres with more biodiversity, with every kind of insect and butterfly, voles, field mice, hares, barn owls, kestrels, partridge, plovers and even hen harriers. My point is that land can be multi-purpose. However, we need the research, training and incentives to maximise the possible outputs on all our land.