Environment Bill

Report (1st Day)

Amendment 1

1: Before Clause 1, insert the following new Clause— “Purpose and declaration of biodiversity and climate emergency (1) The purpose of this Act is to address the biodiversity and climate emergency domestically and globally. (2) As soon as reasonably practicable and no later than one month beginning with the day on which this Act is passed, the Prime Minister must declare that there is a biodiversity and climate emergency domestically and globally.(3) The Government must have regard to this purpose and declaration when implementing the provisions of this Act.”Member’s explanatory statement This amendment would have the effect of the UK Government declaring a climate and biodiversity emergency.

My Lords, it has been two months since we debated the Bill in Committee over a period of three weeks, but the planet has not stood still over that time. First, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the IPCC—released its sixth report prior to COP 26, on which the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr António Guterres, commented:

“This is code red for humanity.”

This is an absolutely accurate declaration to my mind.

However, this is not just theoretical: let us look at other things that have happened during the end of July and beginning of August. First, we could look at fires: we have had forest fires in the northern hemisphere, almost unknown before, in California, Canada and Siberian Russia, where some 4 million hectares of forest have burned down and are still burning in parts of Siberia even today.

In terms of flooding, we have seen flash floods just now in New York. It was almost unexpected there, let alone down in the southern states of the United States. We have now had some 300 deaths in the north-east of the United States from those flash floods. Earlier, in July or August, some 300 people died in Henan province in China, many of them in underground metro systems, again in flash floods—something that had never happened in that way before. Of course, nearer home, in Europe—in Germany and close-by states—we had some 200 deaths because of flooding, which was unprecedented and unpredicted in terms of conventional weather forecasting.

In terms of temperature, in Lytton in British Columbia we had the highest temperature ever recorded in Canada at 49.5 degrees centigrade. More staggering was the fact that that was 5 degrees—I repeat, 5 degrees—more than the previous record. All those incidents and that report have happened since we last debated this legislation in this House.

We have also had, in July, the Government’s response to the Dasgupta report on biodiversity. They accepted, quite rightly, that we have to reverse biodiversity loss by the end of this decade; it is something that has been going backwards for decades and we have to amend that within a period of nine years.

I am also sometimes asked, “Is this just politics?” It is not, because we all know that these crises are real, and we all know that we want our means of combating them to be effective. Here I would like to quote President Biden; he was asked a similar question and was talking about Hurricane Ida and its effect on the north-east of the United States. He said categorically, “This is not politics”. The climate crisis is here; it is now, it is here, it is happening. This is not about politics.

I was also very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, for adding her name to this amendment, even though it was after the date when it could be published on the Marshalled List.

This is exactly the right time for the Government to make such a declaration. We have this potentially landmark legislation going through the House, which will be completed—we hope—before COP 26. It is time to bring us together and confirm our leadership, and it is also the opportunity to recognise something that is real and happening now. At COP 26 we have the opportunity not just to have the presidency but to take global leadership. I believe passing this amendment would be part of that, and I beg to move.

My Lords, I am very happy to support this amendment. As the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, I joined up a little too late.

Biodiversity is all too often seen as the poor relation of climate change and somehow less important. It is not. It is just as important and life threatening as any weather patterns, droughts or floods—and they are indeed all connected. So what is it? In essence, it is the variety of life on earth and all its interconnectedness. But it is also the product of millions of years of learning—of trial and error—by all the creatures, flora and fauna on earth to arrive at a system where this planet flourishes and where we can exist on it. Everything is in its place and everything is doing its bit—sometimes large, sometimes microscopic—and it keeps our planet in the healthy state that we want to preserve.

I have heard what we are doing now described as “burning the library of earth”. To take something really complex that we have made, let us think of an aeroplane going to New York, carrying 600 people. Out falls one rivet—not too bad. Out come two—maybe not a big deal. But suppose 10, 20 or 30 come out; at some point that aeroplane is going to come crashing down to earth—and that is what we are doing now with the complex world of our biodiversity. We do not know quite when we will pass the tipping point, but we are clearly very nearly there.

I have a few examples relating to the insect world, which is endlessly dismissed, but—as Einstein, apparently, famously said—the planet would survive without us, but it would not survive without insects. They are essentially the unseen rivers that keep the planet functioning, yet we have not managed to identify them all—and yet we are cutting down their environments. As I said, no one knows how close to the edge we are, but in China they are pollinating apples and pears by hand. In Bengal they are doing the same for squash plants. In Brazil it is passionfruit, and it is blueberries in Canada. Even the French beans in Kenya are now having to be mechanically pollinated because we have trashed the insects.

My Lords, I support both these amendments: Amendment 1, so ably introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and backed by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, to which I am pleased to have attached my name; and Amendment 21 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and signed by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott.

In introducing his amendment, the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, looked at what happened in the timeframe from when we last debated the Bill to today. I will take a different timeframe and go back to when the Bill was first introduced on 15 October 2019. A lot has happened since then. Obviously, we have had, and still have, a global pandemic, which is related to our biodiversity and climate crises, but in reaction to it we have seen enormous, massive and rapid change. We have seen the invention from scratch of highly effective new vaccines from a range of technologies. We have seen billions of doses of those vaccines already delivered. We have seen transformation on an almost daily scale of our entire way of life. The previously obscure word “lockdown” has become daily currency. International travel has almost stopped. “Zoom” has become a verb.

What has happened to the climate in those two years? Emissions fell in 2020, chiefly because of the pandemic, but a lot less than people expected. They then started to rise again. We have seen Extinction Rebellion out on our streets regularly and the climate strikers have become part of the national life of countries all around the world. But we have yet to see the scale of reaction that is needed to these emergencies, which are on the same scale as the pandemic. Just look at the contrast between those two scales of reaction and the fact that the Bill was written two years ago. In the age of shocks, with time moving so fast, that is an age. Amendment 1 would update the Bill to be fit for today, as it must be, and create the frame for it to be fit for the future.

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 1, to which I added my name. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for his helpful amendment. We agree that assessing long-term environmental risk should be an essential part of setting environmental targets and improvement plans.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, very much for setting out why recognising our climate and biodiversity emergency is so important. He and other noble Lords set out the case with clarity, passion and commitment. As he said, this is indeed code red for humanity.

We had a number of excellent contributions in Committee which all strengthened the importance of having Amendment 1 underpin the Bill. It has of course become commonplace for government and civic society to acknowledge that we have a climate change emergency. The recent global evidence that the noble Baronesses, Lady Boycott and Lady Bennett, referred to reinforces this view. Quite frankly, it has made a mockery of the dwindling band of climate sceptics.

However, we still have some way to go to put the biodiversity crisis on an equal footing with the climate crisis, with comparable attention and resources. As the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, said, biodiversity is seen as the poor relation, yet, as we have heard, the evidence of a biodiversity emergency is all around us. At a UK level, the RSPB’s State of Nature report showed that 41% of our species are declining and one in 10 threatened with extinction. We are one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. At a global level, the WWF has documented the international failure to meet the UN biodiversity targets, with an average 68% of species decline across the world. We see the impact of this decline in our gardens, countryside and waterways. For many of us, it is personally heartbreaking to see nature suffering and declining in this way.

My Lords, I have listened carefully to the very powerful arguments that have been made. I believe that what is happening with biodiversity is more of an emergency than the climate. I am not certain that I like subsections (2) and (3) of the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, and I do not like Amendment 21, which is grouped with Amendment 1 but is not consequential on it. That would make it harder for the Government to pursue their environmental improvement plans and 25-year plan. There would be unnecessary duplication with the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Bird. I am very happy with subsection (1) of the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. The purpose of this Act is to address the biodiversity and climate emergency domestically and globally. Once that is in print, it will be acknowledged by the Government as an emergency. Surely that meets the noble Lord’s point, and if my noble friend the Minister accepts subsection (1), I will be perfectly happy.

My Lords, it is a curious experience to be standing up without being called.

The noble Earl, Lord Caithness, has made the classic Conservative error of separating biodiversity from climate. It is all interconnected: you cannot talk about either without accepting that each has an impact on the other. Every noble Lord must understand that we have a climate emergency, and therefore this government Bill is not good enough. We all know that–it is why there are so many amendments at Report. It is our job to improve the Bill and it is the Government’s job to listen and, I hope, accept our improvements.

I hope that your Lordships will remember the words of the Pope in Laudato Si’, when he said that climate change was the symptom of what we had done to the world. That brings together bio- diversity, imposed poverty, the lack of fertility in our soil, modern slavery and a whole range of other things. Climate change is the planet crying out for the elimination of its disease.

I was not present for his speech but I read carefully what my noble friend said about his commitment to both these things. I hope that, when he comes to answer this debate, he realises that it is extremely difficult for us in the Climate Change Committee to explain to people why biodiversity is part of the answer—putting that right is just as important as a range of other things, and we cannot divorce them from each other. It is difficult, because we have already started doing that, making climate change one sort of thing and these other things different from it. I hope that the Government will understand why this amendment has been put down and why it is important to connect these things. If I have a difficulty, it is that a lot of other things ought to be connected as well, but these two are particularly important this year, given the nature of international negotiations in this area.

I hope also that my noble friend will think to himself a very simple thing: if the Government will not accept the amendment or rewrite the Bill—my noble friend Lord Caithness may be right; I am not arguing in detail about the particular amendment—it is perfectly possible for them to come forward and make a statement in the Bill which makes it clear that the biodiversity and climate emergencies are intimately and intricately connected. I hope my noble friend will realise that, if he cannot say it, he will be showing that the Government are not prepared to say it. That would be really worrying. The reason the Government have to say it is that there is a fundament problem with government: it has a series of silos, and if we are not careful these big issues get caught up in some ministries and not others. Unless we make it clear that this should be a driving force in, say, the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport as much as in the Department for Education, Defra or BEIS, we will not win this battle.

My Lords, in supporting the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, I draw attention to a particular feature that has been mentioned but perhaps could be made more explicit. It is a feature of both the climate emergency and the biodiversity emergency: the discontinuities that will arise as a result of incremental change. My noble friend Lady Boycott alluded to this in talking about the rivets in an aeroplane: it does not matter, perhaps, if one, two or three rivets fall out, but when more than a critical number fall off there is a discontinuity and the plane falls out of the sky. This is true, as we know from the IPCC and others, of the climate emergency. We hear over and over of the notion of dangerous climate change, whereby if we exceed a certain boundary then we will tip into a new world in which life becomes intolerable and many regions of the planet are uninhabitable for the human species. That is equally true of the biodiversity emergency.

I am an academic ecologist, and so I will refer back to the scientific literature. Back in 1969, an American ecologist, Robert T Paine of the University of Washington, drew attention to the notion of keystone species. He was studying a species of starfish that lives in the intertidal zone of the north-western United States—Washington state. If this species of starfish disappears then the whole ecosystem flips to a new state, because the starfish is the keystone species that maintains the equilibrium of the intertidal ecosystem. The same will be true in many other situations.

It is not just the number of rivets that fall out of the plane that is important; it is particular, key rivets. The sad thing is that, if we lose some of these keystone species, we will be among the ones that suffer, because we will suddenly find that the systems we rely on to produce food, purify our water and provide other ecosystem services will simply not exist any more. A genuine emergency is created by crossing these thresholds: once we have crossed them, it will be too late.

My Lords, in the Book of Common Prayer, the Lord’s Prayer says:

“Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name,

your kingdom come,

your will be done,

in earth as in heaven.”

I repeat, “in earth”. It was not the work of some liberal conspiracy in the Church or the Liturgical Commission but, somewhere in the last 300 or 400 years in the popular saying of the Lord’s Prayer, it somehow changed from “in earth” to “on earth”. This tiny change encompasses for me all that is wrong in our relationship with the earth of which we are a part. We used to understand that we live in it, we are part of it, we depend on it and that, as good stewards of the earth, the earth depends on us. Then, somehow, we decided that we did not live in it any more but on it; it was ours and we could do with it as we wanted.

Therein lies the whole challenge to the human race. What I want to hear from the Government on this crucial amendment is a clear signal that we have recognised—as a human race, as a nation and as the Government of this land—that there is an emergency, and that what is happening to our climate and to biodiversity is completely connected. At the same time there must be recognition of the terrible responsibility that we bear for having imagined that we lived on the earth rather than in it. By giving that signal, everything else could follow.