Climate and Ecology Bill [HL]

Lord Randall of Uxbridge Excerpts

Committee stage
Friday 18th November 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Redesdale (LD)]

My Lords, In moving Amendment 1, I shall speak also to Amendments 2 to 18. I thank the Minister for turning up to answer today, although he is a Climate Change Minister, but he will notice that my amendments remove most of the climate change provisions from the Bill. This is not because I do not believe they were valuable measures. The problem with Private Members’ Bills is that you have to make sure that you have something that could pass the House of Commons. I am very hopeful that at the end of proceedings today, the Minister will see the value of what we are proposing and might even suggest that it be adopted as a government Bill and go forward to the Commons.

I shall give some background to the amendments and why we have tabled them. I plan not to make a Second Reading speech, but because I am speaking to 18 amendments in one area, I want to set out our position.

The UK is one of the most nature-depleted nations on earth. That is a horrendous thing to say in this House, when we are so proud of our green and pleasant land. More than 40% of UK species are in decline. More than 600 million birds have been lost from our skies over the past 40 years, which is a staggering statistic, and a quarter of UK mammals are threatened with extinction, including many once common species, such as hedgehogs and, in particular, red squirrels—an issue I have been looking at for a long time. Not only are they directly affected by climate change, they have also been affected by invasive species such as the grey squirrel. I know that this is an issue on which the noble Lord, Lord Benyon, has spoken on a number of occasions.

Therefore, as my amendments make clear, we should scale up actions that protect and restore the natural world. As the Government have themselves agreed on dozens of occasions over recent years, we need the right targets to drive action to reverse biodiversity loss and deliver a nature-positive UK by 2030. The problem is that when we lose elements of the natural habitat, including ancient woodlands, we will not be able to reverse that loss in our lifetime. We need to ensure that any actions we take are taken extremely seriously. Without action, we will be unable to tackle the joint nature and climate crisis that we face. Biodiversity is also critical to solving the climate crisis, as the Government, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee, the Climate Change Committee and countless businesses, NGOs, scientists and campaigners are telling us.

I am sure the Minister will welcome that this will now be a very simple Bill. Since Second Reading, we have focused on making it an ecology Bill, which would require the Government to do just one thing; namely, to require the Secretary of State to achieve a nature target for the UK—a target that would ensure that the UK halts and reverses its overall contribution to the degradation and loss of nature by 2030.

We have had many debates on the loss of nature, but the problem I have here is that we are talking about a halt only by 2030, yet we are seeing a massive degradation of species going forward. So how does the Bill set out how the targets should work? First, by increasing the health, abundance, diversity and resilience of species, populations, habitats and ecosystems so that by 2030, measured in against a baseline of 2020, nature is visibly and measurably on the path to recovery. Secondly, by fulfilling the Government’s existing obligations under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the commitments set out in the Leaders Pledge for Nature.

This is a straightforward, one could say almost procedural matter, reversing nature loss by 2030. With COP 15 around the corner, the Government would surely welcome this. The importance of this Private Member’s Bill is that it is oven-ready and the Government could give time to it and adopt it in law, so that it can be presented at COP 15 as the UK’s commitment.

I am certain that the Minister will not welcome a Private Member’s Bill with open arms—Ministers very rarely do—but I thank all the organisations, including Zero Hour and many faith groups, for their work on the Bill and for spreading the message. Whatever reaction I get from the Minister, the aim of reversing the decline in nature should be taken very seriously. I beg to move.

[Lord Randall of Uxbridge (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my conservation interests as a council member of the RSPB, a trustee of the Bat Conservation Trust and quite a few others; they are all on the register. I am delighted to see the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale. I was not able to speak at Second Reading, but the amendments have improved the Bill by concentrating the mind on ecology. One of the problems we face is that, although we hear from some people about the biodiversity crisis, it can often be subsumed by the much bigger climate change crisis. I am sure noble Lords realise that the two are interconnected, but we have got to concentrate on ecology, the environment and so on.

My noble friend, who is a very generous and warm-spirited gentleman, may not be entirely happy with some of these things, but he will try to be as nice as possible, as is his way. However, I shall give some encouragement to the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale. Back in 2000, I think it was, in the other place, I introduced the Marine Wildlife Conservation Bill. I was number one in the ballot, and I was overenthusiastic. I had this wonderful Bill, which passed through the Commons—and was then scuppered in this very Chamber. What eventually came from the Commons to the Lords was a much reduced Bill, and then it did not pass, as the phrase has it. In fact, it led to the Marine and Coastal Access Act, which was much harder and harsher in the view of those lobby interests that tried hard to stop it. Sometimes, it is not a bad thing for a Government to let something go, so they can tick a box—not that any box-ticking exercise is going on here. There is a chance that, even if this Bill is not accepted, it will be a further reminder; it knocks the whole issue up the political agenda. In fact, the Government are not slow in trying implement a lot of measures. I am sure we will hear about them shortly from my noble friend.

We are talking about stopping the loss, but we should be increasing our biodiversity at the same time. Someone used a wonderful expression the other day: we are looking at biodiversity but if we are not careful, we will end up with bio-uniformity. We will have a lot more of the same species, and if habitats are not looked after properly, there might be—God forbid—a lot more grey squirrels, for example.

We must do something. This is a very important Bill. Many people have written to me about it, passionate people who want it to succeed. I feel a bit guilty, because they are probably being a bit optimistic about this Parliament’s processes. I hope I am wrong; we will see. They have my assurance, and I am sure that of many other noble Lords, that this issue will not disappear from the political agenda.

[Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint (CB)]

My Lords, I support the intention of this Bill to concentrate our minds on ecology. I declare an interest in environmental degradation, having the great privilege of being chair of the Natural History Museum, as listed in the register of interests.

Everyone knows that the Natural History Museum is one of the greatest visitor attractions of this nation. I am delighted to report that in fact, we were the most visited museum or gallery in the whole of the UK last year—and yes, we do have dinosaurs. Less well known is that we have a unique and huge collection of specimens from the world’s environment, and that we are a major scientific research institute with 350 full-time scientists and 170 doctoral students all working on that unparalleled database and in the field.

There is a problem. We know that life on earth started around 3.5 billion years ago and that life has spread to every corner of the land and sea. The fossil record also teaches us that over that vast period, there have been five occasions when almost all life on earth has disappeared. We call these “mass extinction events”: five occasions when dramatic changes in the environmental conditions—warming, cooling, ocean acidification—have wiped out almost all existing species, most recently, some 66 million years ago, when we lost the last of the dinosaurs.

The problem is that the evidence is telling us that we could be heading towards a sixth mass extinction—and this time an extinction that we are causing. The causes are quite well understood and are uncomfortably reminiscent of the last but one extinction event, some 200 million years ago, when exceptional tectonic activity created enormous emission levels of carbon and methane in the atmosphere and led to the loss of at least 80% of all species then on the planet. Does this sound familiar? This time, the emissions are again the root cause of dangerous climate trends, but this time, it is humans who have caused those emissions.

The loss of biodiversity has other causes too. Factors such as land use and pollution are equally, if not even more important to biodiversity degradation. Last year, ahead of COP 26, the Natural History Museum published its new biodiversity trends explorer. This uses satellite imagery to collect abundance data on plants, fungi, insects and animals all around the world. It shows for the first time how local terrestrial biodiversity is responding to human pressures causing land use change and intensification. We can now measure with increasing precision and detail what is happening to our environment essentially everywhere.

Our research continues, but it is already showing that the earth has only 76% of its pristine natural biodiversity still intact—well below the safe limit of around 90%, which is the broad consensus among natural scientists. Here in the UK, only just over half our natural biodiversity is still intact, placing us last in the G7 and in the bottom 10% worldwide, because so much of our land has been given over to sometimes marginal agriculture or monoculture conifer plantations.

At this point we might be tempted to throw up our hands and give up, but the crucial point is that this is a fixable problem. We have the science and the solutions, and we know that—given the chance before it is too late—environmental diversity responds and recovers quite well.