Climate Change: Nature-based Solutions (STC Report)

Lord Kakkar Excerpts

Thursday 9th February 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Kakkar (CB)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Brown of Cambridge, for the thoughtful way in which she has introduced this report and my noble friend Lord Patel for the thoughtful, imaginative and determined way in which he chaired your Lordships’ Science and Technology Committee in undertaking this important inquiry.

It is particularly appropriate that we take this debate a few weeks after the Royal Society published its report Multifunctional Landscapes: Informing a Long-Term Vision for Managing the UK’s Land. It is an interesting and informative report that identifies the opportunity for a data and science-driven approach to ensuring that we understand the capacity of UK land, the competing demands on it and how they might be addressed. Of course, as we have heard from noble Lords’ contributions during this important debate, this is a critical issue. Nature-based solutions are not a panacea for achieving net zero and addressing the climate change challenge, but they offer an important opportunity to make a fundamental contribution to achieving those net-zero targets.

Do we really understand the nature base? Are we properly informed about the sequestration capacity of different habitats? Do we understand the impact that our adjacent land use behaviour in total currently has on these different environments? Do we understand how much carbon is already stored in these habitats? Do we understand what behaviour and activity are doing to degrade these habitats and subsequently release carbon? These are all important issues that need to be informed through an appropriate knowledge base, database and science base. Of course, the technology for us to be able to do this in a systematic fashion becomes increasingly available.

I should declare some specific interests in that I was a member of your Lordships’ Science and Technology Committee and that I serve as a member of the advisory board of the Royal Society and chairman of the 1851 commission. In your Lordships’ report and in that of the Royal Society, it is recognised that we need common standards, an approach to appropriate metrics, a data standard, methodology protocols and, potentially, the development of a common evidence platform available to inform all land use in our country. That would subsequently help us to understand where nature-based solutions sit.

Beyond that, we need more fundamental research to characterise those different habitats. Do we really understand the nature of our forests? Do we really understand the interplay of the age those forests’ different tree habitats, the broader biodiversity attending the soil and the importance of the different species of trees available in those habitats? Are we properly informed about the true stored carbon content and the ultimate sequestration capacity of peatlands and wetlands? What do we really understand about the marine environment even in our own coastal waters? It is a protected environment that we are proud of, but only 5% of it bans trawling of the seabed. How can that be logical and why is it tolerated? Do we have a science base that helps us properly to understand the implications of that?

When we think about broader land use, are we conscious of the impact of land use adjacent, for instance, to a protected marine environment? What impact does land use for building and for other purposes have on that environment, its biodiversity, its potential destruction and therefore the erroneous assumptions that we might make about that environment making an important contribution to sequestration and ultimate storage of carbon?

Is the Minister content that His Majesty’s Government have a proper, whole-government, holistic approach to establishing a research and evidence base that helps us to best understand the true potential and capacity of our nature base to provide nature-based solutions for net zero and address the climate challenge? In supporting the establishment of an appropriate science evidence base, are we also cognisant of the opportunity to drive innovation in this area—innovative technologies that allow us to map these environments appropriately, bring those data together and make them readily available for all who are responsible for land management? Are we clear that that science base will be used to develop government policy appropriately? We pride ourselves on having an informed science base informing the development of policy. Are we content that is happening with regard to policy to drive the opportunities for nature-based solutions?