World Health: 25-Year Environment Plan

Debate between Melanie Onn and Mary Creagh

Tuesday 9th April 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Walker, on a subject that I know is close to your heart as a friend of the fishing community and the chalk streams, and to hear such an eloquent exposition of the problems facing our country from the hon. Member for St Ives (Derek Thomas). Our paths have not crossed very much since he was elected to the House. I am sure I join other members of my Committee—my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) and the hon. Member for Falkirk (John Mc Nally)—in inviting him to join us on the Environmental Audit Committee, for which we currently have at least one vacancy for Conservative Members. His expertise and eloquence would be very welcome, and this is a subject that we are currently exploring in our inquiry on planetary health, which is based on the

“understanding that human health and human civilisation depend on flourishing natural systems and the wise stewardship”

of the natural world.

I want to signal to the hon. Gentleman that we are about to start an investigation on toxic chemicals—the various pollutants that are around us and are affecting our hormone systems and lungs—straight after the recess. We are also about to start an inquiry on invasive species—back to the mice and rats on South Georgia—so we will have some very interesting discussions to come. Perhaps we will end up going fishing for some invasive crayfish and having a crayfish boil.

I want to say a couple of things to emphasise how grave the position of our planet’s health is, highlight the link between the health of the planet and that of humans, and explain why it is so important to act now and how the 25-year plan goes some way, but still needs further work to deliver the roadmap that we need. Everything we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves. We saw that with microplastics, as we discovered that these tiny plastic particles are being pumped into our cosmetics, shower gels and shaving gels and then flushed down the drains. They now appear in every lake and river in the UK. Indeed, I believe that the River Tame in Greater Manchester is the most polluted by microbeads—again, the science is emerging in this new area of pollution.

Humanity’s footprint is now so great that we are in new ecological epoch called the Anthropocene. It has been defined by scientists as

“the mass extinctions of plant and animal species, the pollution of the oceans”,

and a radically altered atmosphere because there is so much carbon.

[Melanie Onn]

On microplastics, has my hon. Friend had any thoughts about how they got into the food chain, in particular through fish? There is a plan for fishing and its sustainability, but how can we know the health of the fish that we consume?

[Mary Creagh]

One of the shocking things that we discovered in our microbeads inquiry was that if someone eats a plate of oysters or mussels, they consume 30 microplastic particles. It is particularly into those bottom feeders—that seafood—that this material goes. There is evidence, I think, that it can pass through the fish gut, so as long as the fish is cleaned, people will be okay, but we know that it is accumulating in the guts of seabirds, and we do not want our marine life to be choked, entangled and starved to death, whether that is by large plastics or smaller plastics, so I welcome anything that is done on this. We do not know whether the plastic particles act as vectors for chemicals such that the pollution that exists in the sea, that persists in the environment, attaches to these plastics and then potentially is delivered into our bodies. These are big emerging areas of science, and I am grateful to the chief medical officer for commissioning research on the matter.

We know that insects are the canary in the coalmine. That is a slightly mixed metaphor, but there is the issue of insects and insect loss. They make up two thirds of all life on Earth, but they are almost invisible and are being lost at alarming rates. Forty per cent. of species will be at risk by the end of the decade, and there is a 2.5% decline in insect biomass each year.

As the hon. Member for Totnes (Dr Wollaston) said, this has to do with climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change special report entitled “Global Warming of 1.5°C”, published last October, warned that we have just 12 years to avoid catastrophic climate change. It warned that the rate of biodiversity loss will be twice as severe in a 2° warmed world as it will be in a 1.5° world. The difference that that makes is that in a 1.5° world, 90% of the coral reefs will be lost, so our children will be able to see the remaining 10% of coral reefs, whereas in a 2° warmed world, our children will never see a coral reef. That includes the cold-water coral reefs on the southern border of the UK as well.