Rio+20 Summit

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

I congratulate and thank the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley), not only for initiating this important debate, but for chairing the Environmental Audit Committee so expertly and brilliantly for the two years since the election. She has done extraordinary things with the Committee.

Every single environmental indicator that matters is heading in the wrong direction. It does not matter which area one looks at. A number of Members have spoken about what is happening to our forests, so I will not dwell on that but simply say that since 2000, just 12 years ago, the equivalent of the land space of Germany has been lost. That should not have been so difficult to say. [Laughter.] I should not be laughing, because it is a staggering and appallingly depressing statistic. We have also learned that 80% of the world’s fish stocks have either collapsed or are on the brink of collapse. That is 15 of the world’s 17 major fisheries. We know that most if not all of the world’s bread baskets are shrinking rapidly. The Gobi desert is growing by roughly 10,000 sq km every year—I could go on and on.

All that results from a growth model that effectively involves cashing in the planet and the natural world for short-term consumer goods. What is that actually achieving? In the 20 years since 1992, the year of the first Rio summit, we have seen a 162% rise in world GDP, but apart from the devastation that that has caused to the natural world around us, what has it actually delivered for the world?

According to the UN, 1 billion people live in urban squalor and more than 1 billion are described as living in conditions in which they are chronically undernourished —that is a UN Food and Agriculture Organisation figure. Between a quarter and a third of the world’s population live in a state of persistent deprivation. Just last week, KPMG produced a brilliant report—I wish I could remember the title—predicting among other things that food prices will rise by up to 90% by 2030. For most people in this country that would not necessarily be a disaster, because if we spend 5% to 10% of our budget on food, even a 100% increase would still allow some wiggle room; but for somebody living in a country where people spend 60% of their income on food, such an increase would be absolutely devastating.

I will not dwell on climate change, other than to say that even if it is not happening, those other trends are real. They are mathematical observations, and there is no doubting them. If even the most conservative predictions about climate change are accurate, those problems will be massively compounded. One has to wonder what is the purpose of an economy that is so utterly divorced from basic reality that it is still growing even as it is eroding the very basis of life. We know that change is going to happen. The current trends clearly cannot continue for ever—primary level mathematics tells us that they have to end at some point, and it is unlikely to be a happy ending. Change is going to happen either through our choice or because it is forced upon us.

I accept that if we were to ask people to list their top priorities and concerns nowadays, the environment would not feature at the top for many or even most of them. Someone at the bottom of the pecking order in this country worries about food, shelter and what school to send their children to—concerns that, unfortunately, are affecting more and more people in this country as a result of the economic conditions in which we find ourselves. However, that does not take away from the fact that, logically, the environment is still the biggest priority of all. Environmental concerns are neither a luxury nor a frivolity.

I believe that we are going to have a debate on Greece tomorrow, and the Chamber will be packed. I will be here myself, and I certainly do not want to imply that what is happening in Greece is not a disaster on a significant scale, but it does not compare to the problems that we face in our relationship with the natural world. Future generations, perhaps our own children, will live with an enormous cloud of incredible uncertainty hovering over them.

My hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes) listed a number of concerns—I believe he was citing research by Christian Aid. I will not repeat them, but I will say that they are not abstract concerns for people around the world. We would do well to take note of that.

In questions to Foreign Office Ministers today, a number of Members discussed Somalia. They talked about action on pirates, what we are going to do to police the borders and how we are going to prevent the problems from recurring. What is too often left out is the unavoidable correlation between the emergence of pirates and the exhaustion of the oceans around the coast of Somalia—the hoovering up of the very last fish, unfortunately by European trawlers. Fishing communities lost their access to fish and their livelihoods and took to an activity that, unfortunately, is so much more financially attractive that we are unlikely to get them out of it without the use of police. That is one illustration of what happens when we undermine basic ecological systems and destroy ecosystems. The world’s poorest are the first in line to suffer, because they are the most likely to depend on the free services provided by nature.

What are we to do? Resource scarcity will define the world from now on. That is not a matter of opinion; it is a matter of basic mathematical fact and there is no avoiding it. Businesses will have to design out of their business model waste, pollution and the use of scarce resources. We will have to rearrange our economy and break the link between economic growth and environmental devastation. We will have to learn to live within our means. Like others, I hope that Rio will, among other things, provide an opportunity for real solutions to be showcased.

No country in the world is doing all the things that are necessary to drive us towards a sustainable future, but there are shining examples in most countries. Japan, for example, has an enormous amount to teach us about waste. It is much closer to achieving zero-waste status than we are. Costa Rica has done extraordinary things with marine protected areas to boost the viability of its fishing communities, and it is succeeding. Denmark has done extraordinary things with its decentralised energy infrastructure. The list goes on.

I shall not dwell on the natural capital work that the Government in this country have done, other than to say that it is pioneering. That work puts us in front with, strangely enough, South Korea which has done a lot of work on valuing natural capital. I hope that we can take that work to Rio and showcase it as an area in which Britain is taking the lead.

The Government are not just valuing natural capital. They have been bullish in trying to ensure that within the Rio agenda there is proper discussion of the need to phase out fossil fuel subsidies. The International Energy Agency figure for how much we spent subsidising the consumption of fossil fuels last year is $409 billion. Clearly, the world cannot become less dependent on fossil fuels without our tackling those subsidies.

Finally—this relates to the Minister’s work—I hope we can ensure that marine issues feature heavily in the discussions at Rio. I believe we are responsible, through our overseas territories, for around 10% of the world’s oceans. There is an amazing opportunity for us to create a network, as I know we are already doing, of marine protected areas and vast nature reserves that will benefit not only biodiversity, but coastal fishing communities, who are running out of fish and things to catch. That will probably entail taking on vested interests and some of the industrial mega-trawlers, but those types of organisation and operations are not compatible with a sustainable future.

Not only are countries showing us what can be done, but companies are also doing so. Companies in the most polluting sectors, such as construction, are showing what can be done. Uponor, based in London, has become a zero-waste company. Construction is responsible for about a third of this country’s waste, so if that company has managed to become a zero-waste company, the hope must be that other companies will do the same. We must take the best practice today and roll it into the norm tomorrow. We do that only by looking at what others are achieving.

Big energy companies—I cannot bear to name them—have shown that they can buy tens of times more solution per £1 by saving energy than by making energy. I will name E.ON, which spent £250 million as part of its energy company obligation and saved the equivalent of 2.3 Kingsnorth power plants. What would it have cost the company to build 2.3 Kingsnorths—20, 30, 40 or even 50 times more? That is the rate of return for investing in energy efficiency—I can see the shadow Minister doing the maths, so I have probably got it wrong, but we cannot argue that energy efficiency does not pay.