Environment and Climate Change Committee Report: An Extraordinary Challenge: Restoring 30 per cent of our Land and Sea by 2030

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 11th September 2024 Grand Committee

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I was a member of the committee that produced this report, under the superb chairmanship of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, which made it a most enjoyable experience. I welcome the Government’s commitment to 30 by 30. I suggest that the best way of getting there, because it will not be easy, is to involve the public on a large scale. Conservation should be everywhere, not over there. It should not be something which is done in reserves that you never visit and in places managed by other people; it should be in green spaces in towns and cities. We want people to develop a close connection with nature, at scale. It is good both for nature and for people. Access to nature is a key policy, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Norwich said, and it should be a very strong government objective to move in that direction.

The concept of OECMs—other effective area-based conservation measures—provides a route for doing that. They are defined as:

“A geographically defined area other than a Protected Area, which is governed and managed in ways that achieve positive and sustained long-term outcomes for the in-situ conservation of biodiversity, with associated ecosystem functions and services and where applicable, cultural, spiritual, socio-economic, and other locally relevant values”.


As my noble friend Lord Gascoigne said, an obvious place to start is the National Education Nature Park, so I urge Defra to reach across to the Department for Education and find ways of being supportive of that initiative, which has a very strong Civil Service team associated with it and has made a good start. It is hugely important that we build back an understanding and appreciation of nature. Children are the right place to start, not just for their own sake but because they involve their parents. It is much the easiest and quickest way to do it.

Beyond that, the Department for Education is—or at least was—building on the idea of a natural history GCSE. It seems, from what has been said to date, that nature might form a greater part of the 11 to 16 curriculum. We have a very strong base for the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award in schools, a substantial part of which is about getting children out into nature—not just trekking around the countryside but, in truly urban schools, doing things in urban environments. Please can Defra make links with these organisations? They would really benefit from the skills, experience and contacts Defra can bring.

A corner of a school’s grounds is a perfect example of a potential OECM. We can move from there to bits of park, riverbanks, patches of green, graveyards and belfries—for the bats, if nothing else. Indeed, my wood in Kent, which the public have access to, would be an excellent OECM—as, indeed, would my noble friend Lord Gascoigne’s garden, I expect. We ought also to focus on the commitments made by developers under biodiversity net gain. There is a huge potential for them to be promised on the day and neglected for years afterwards and never really looked at.

We need to make sure that 30 by 30 becomes part of everyone’s lives. We need to set up a structure, in a way that is easy to use and understand, to register an OECM, so that it is easy to volunteer and there are structures for insurance, training and getting the authority to operate. We need to provide public data on what the OECMs are so that everybody knows what is where and what is going on.

Please can we make much better use of the amateur workforce to monitor and judge what is going on? There is a huge resource out there. I was part of it in my teens, and I am again now—and if the Government’s plans go ahead, I will have a lot more time for it. It is a huge and expert community; it produces dictionaries of what is going on, with what kind of species, across the UK. We ought to be involved in monitoring SSSIs. The equipment is there. Everything is electronic these days: you record what you have seen, it all goes into a common database, and what you have seen is verified and accompanied by pictures. Why do you have to wait six years to monitor an SSSI? Just ask the local botanical recording society or whoever is relevant to look at it every year. Get yourself a real flow of data. We would love to do it; we just do not get asked. We must make sure that data collection is happening in a way that produces a flow of data into a common data source, as many of these things do. It needs a bit of organising, and public effort, and then the Government can devote their resources to auditing to make sure that that public effort is achieving what it should. There is real potential there to do much better, using people who would just like to be asked.

To change subjects, I think there is also a very big opportunity for raising biodiversity in lowland broadleaved woodland. We have got a pattern of declining biodiversity, which has been documented by, for instance, the Rothamsted Insect Survey and the British Trust for Ornithology. A pattern of declining use is probably responsible for that. Look at what is happening worldwide. I visited the forestry authorities in Japan, where there is very much the same pattern. It is due to people not spending as much time as they did earning their living in the woods. However, there are ways of bringing woods back into use that will create a much more biodiverse woodland structure, resulting from woodlands being a source of concentrated carbon. If we are going to replace fossil fuels in the chemical industry, we are going to need to use every potential source of concentrated carbon, and in woodlands we have such a source.

What we do not have at the moment is a really strong organisation to collect that resource. There are bits of it there; there are organisations such as the Environmental Farmers Group and effective collective organisations of farmers, which could deliver enough product in enough volume consistently. There are potential technologies that could make use of that wood: woodchip is beginning to be used to create jet fuel, for instance, but it is at an early stage. We would need to create a system of contractors to collect the woodland material and deliver it to those who would use it. We have promised to do this by 2050. That is not a long time, and we need to be thinking about how that structure would work.

Something that did that would also offer a solution to what we do with the contents of farm slurry pits and other farm waste, because anything with concentrated carbon in it is going to have a value and a place in our economy. There are ways that we can get to 30 by 30. Defra is at the centre of this, and I very much hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, has a very enjoyable five years helping us get there.