Tuesday, 10 September 2024 • Lords

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

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Motion to Take Note

Speaker

16:15:00

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Baroness Parminter

That the Grand Committee takes note of the Report from the Environment and Climate Change Committee An extraordinary challenge: Restoring 30 per cent of our land and sea by 2030 (2nd Report, Session 2022–23, HL Paper 234).

Baroness Parminter

My Lords, it gives me great pleasure to open this debate as the past chairman of the Select Committee on Environment and Climate Change, as we debate the issue of how we in the UK meet our target to achieve 30% of our land and sea to be restored to nature by 2030. When we launched our report last year, we called it an extraordinary challenge, and that title is as apposite today as it was then. When I look at noble Lords in this Room, I can see that I do not need to tell any of them that this global target for biodiversity for 30 by 30 was agreed at the nature COP, COP 15, back in 2022. But I put on record my thanks to the past Government, who showed considerable leadership in securing that global agreement and, in particular, to the noble Lord sitting behind me, the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, who was instrumental in achieving that. I thank him and welcome that the new Labour Government have already committed to meeting their international biodiversity obligations. We put our report together over a year ago—God knows why it takes over a year in the House of Lords to report a Select Committee, but it does—and the recommendations that we made on securing the land in England are as relevant today as they were then. That has made it even better for us to debate it today, given that we face the opportunity next month of COP 16 in Colombia, which I hope is focusing the minds of our own Government, as well as Governments right around the world, on their shared biodiversity targets. Frankly, we should not need an international gathering on biodiversity to redouble our efforts to protect nature. This month alone we have seen five more UK seabirds added to the red list for extinction: Arctic terns, Leach’s storm petrels, common gulls and the great black-backed gull, and the great skua have all been added to that list. We know that protected species survive and thrive best in protected areas such as SSSIs and SACs, as well as the SPAs—the sites of special scientific interest, special areas of conservation and special protection areas. But there is a great swathe of other protected sites around our country, whether they are areas owned by environmental NGOs, managed for nature conservation, or national parks or national landscapes, which we have come to term AOBs, or wildlife reserves, national nature reserves or national forests—to name but a few. They are all important, but the question for us as a committee when we looked at our report was what counted towards that 30 by 30 target. We were very clear that we accepted the international definition that was put together by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which was agreed at COP 15, that to qualify for 30 by 30 the area should be: “a clearly defined geographical space, recognised, dedicated and managed, through legal or other effective means, to achieve the long term conservation of nature with associated ecosystem services and cultural values”. We took “long term” to mean more than 30 years. Taking that definition, we listened to the advice from the Government’s own nature advisory body, the JNCC, and the other environmental groups, as well as from other stakeholders. We concluded that, at that time, the amount of land in England that could count towards 30 by 30 was 6.5%. That means that, by 2030, there remains 23.5% of land required to meet the target, which is a massive amount of land. To give it some context, that is more than 3 million hectares of land, or an area of land more than 1.5 times the size of Wales. The noble Lord, Lord Harlech, might want to challenge me on that—I do not know. Those were the figures that we identified. In December, the Government—as was—argued that, in their delivering 30 by 30 on land and at sea, that figure was not 6.5% but 8.5%. However, they included in their definition land that is not compliant with what we take to be suitable for inclusion in 30 by 30 as compliant with the international guidance. Irrespective of arguing over those amounts, what is absolutely clear is the scale of the challenge. But we all know that it is not just size that matters; it is also about the quality and condition of the land, as is articulated in the COP 15 statement that it should be effectively conserved and managed. When we asked Natural England for an update on the quality of those SSSIs, it indicated that only 37% were in favourable condition and that there had been no improvement in the past 13 years in improving the remaining SSSIs. When it came to monitoring, it said that less than a quarter of our SSSIs had been assessed in the past six years. Although I acknowledge that Natural England has made some extremely welcome changes since December in how it assesses and monitors SSSIs, this does not get away from the fact that we are not looking at and assessing our protected sites anywhere near enough for land managers and others to make appropriate management decisions—let alone the fact that, in February 2026, we as a country will have to report internationally on how we are doing against the 30 by 30 target. We as a committee were clear that, despite the financial implications, a proper management assessment needs to be done for every piece of land that constitutes 30 by 30, and that it should be assessed every six years. That is the state of our best-protected land in England. What about at sea? When we asked the JNCC, we found the deeply worrying situation that only two out of our 76 MPAs—most protected areas—receive any form of monitoring, despite the threats that they face from overfishing, bottom trawling near the seabed and energy infrastructure. We think that this is insufficient. We argued very strongly for there to be more monitoring of our MPAs, both inshore and offshore. We also argued for better regulation of bottom trawling—that is, I think, an issue that several Members may wish to return to later. Like the EFRA Committee, we argued that there needs to be speedy resolution in designating more HPMAs—highly protected marine areas—because the pace of change has been glacial, to say the least. Let me explain what I mean by “glacial”. One of the things we asked the Government to do was produce a map of how they saw themselves bringing together all the land needed for the 30 by 30 target, along with an action plan. We said—I remember it clearly—that one thing that would be invaluable in helping the Government draw up that map would be the “forthcoming” land use framework. The noble Baroness, Lady Young, may wish to say something more about the forthcoming nature of the land use framework, which we still need to see in its entirety. It is good to see that the new Government have committed to produce one of those. However, what the Government did do in December was produce a map, along with some indications of how they saw themselves delivering the 30 by 30 target on land, but with no indication of how they saw themselves doing it at sea. In no sense could this be called an action plan because, as the Government themselves said, the map was only indicative as they had not yet agreed the criteria for what would constitute 30 by 30. There was glacial progress too by the last Government on getting any OECMs—other effective area-based conservation measures—up and running, which would have been a really important way of helping farmers, woodland managers and others voluntarily contribute towards the 30 by 30 target. I am pleased that the Government have now committed to produce a plan for nature protection and recovery, which is to be informed by this rapid review of the environmental improvement plan. That is to be welcomed. It should be a starting point for driving nature recovery right across government departments. I suspect that if I ask the Minister now, she might say that it is probably too early for her to say how the Government see themselves securing this huge extra amount of land that we are going to need if we are going to meet 30 by 30. But it is not unfair for us to ask her today whether the Government will commit to abide by the internationally agreed guidance in drawing up the criteria for determining what will be part of those areas contributing towards 30 by 30. I have one further question. Will the Government’s laudable plans for new homes for people be accompanied by new streams of funding to provide more homes for nature to thrive and survive? I am sure that other colleagues will have many more questions; I do not want to go on for too long. I just want to say a particular thanks to those Members here today with whom I shared the privilege of being on the committee—it was a real honour to serve alongside them. I also thank the ever-diligent staff, who deal with us with professionalism, kindness and decency. In conclusion, our report made it very clear that there is a long way to go if we are going to make a reality of 30 by 30. We need to do it. If our recommendations fall on stony ground, it is quite clear that 30 by 30 will be no more than a catchy slogan for international political summits, and meanwhile our precious nature will be lost.

Speaker

16:27:00

Baroness Young of Old Scone

My Lords, the worst thing in the world is to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, for two reasons. One is that she was a magnificent chair of this committee, on which I was very privileged to serve, and the other is that she has now said everything that needs to be said, and said it eloquently and with no notes—goodness, there are days I hate her. I could just say that I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, and sit down, but that would be a bit of a cop out. I would like to make a few additions, mostly focusing on the land-based elements of our report. The noble Baroness used the word “slogan”, and that is what 30 by 30 is—it is a great slogan, and there are some in this Room who helped invent it, but we now need a plan, and it needs deliverables, and timescales for those deliverables, and a way of monitoring them, or we certainly will not hit the 30 by 30 target. I will start with sites of special scientific interest. They are the jewel in the crown of nature conservation and biodiversity in this country, and they are the best protected sites that we have, but particularly the subset of those that are special areas of conservation and special protection areas. However, there have been no real increases in the number of these sites for the last 20 years. I was probably chairing English Nature at the time when the last major additions to the suite of SSSIs went through. A small number have been declared since then—I can see that some noble Lords are going to contradict me on that one—but generally speaking we need more. It is true to say that it has not been the fashion to declare SSSIs over the last few years, but there is a real gap: there are ecological networks that need to be filled and species that need to be protected where an SSSI would be the appropriate way of doing that. We have to get over the unwillingness to declare SSSIs and see them as the pinnacle of protection. There is not a huge number of them, and we need more to fill in those gaps. Perhaps more worrying is the whole condition argument. To hark back again—I am so old that I can remember the 1990s, for goodness sake—we at English Nature used to agonise that only about 60% of SSSIs were in favourable condition in those days. That was a key English Nature performance indicator; it had to report on that every year in its annual report, and it was a big issue for us. We are now at the point where we have less than 35% in favourable condition, and that is down from last year’s number of 37%. There is a pressing need for management plans to improve these SSSIs, for those management plans to be resourced and for there to be a system of monitoring conditions that is better than the one at the moment. In reality, if the two issues of the extent and condition of our SSSIs were tackled effectively, those two simple remedies would take us half way to 30 by 30. One of the two other big contributions to the 30 by 30 issue is our national parks and our protected national landscapes. The Climate Change Committee was keen on giving an additional statutory duty to protect nature to what were in those days AONBs and national parks, but that was rejected, rather fulsomely if I may say so, by the Government during the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill—I break out into hives when I utter the words “Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill”. There was a compromise amendment on protected landscape plans and the contribution to environmental improvement targets, but the regulations to make that happen in practice were delayed by the fall of the Government. We now need to revisit that. To be honest, I do not think the compromise amendment should be pursued any further; we should just go straight to an action that declares a new nature purpose for protected landscapes and national parks. There has been some progress on delineating the draft criteria for what should count towards 30 by 30. In the early days of 30 by 30 it was felt that, if we lumped in the national parks and the AONBs, we would hit it in one go, but most of the land in the national parks and AONBs is not managed for nature conservation as its primary purpose, or indeed its secondary purpose, so we have to be pretty clear about what should count and what should not. In common with the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, I think we should simply fall in line with the IUCN guidance and the international definitions, and then include other effective area-based conservation measures if they can be demonstrated to be well managed. The last chunk of land that we need to focus on—a very big chunk—is agricultural land, which makes up a huge proportion of the land under management in this country. Nature-friendly farming is going to be crucial in this. We need to ensure that more farmers are encouraged, advised and supported to move into the higher tiers of nature-friendly farming schemes, and particularly that the guidance for that is made more specific and simpler, and is clarified. It is only at those higher tiers that we will get the right sort of outcomes that will produce genuinely high-quality land that is in favourable condition for nature conservation. The current Government, of whom I greatly approve, have made some commitments already. They have said they will halt the decline of species by 2030, which is quite a big ask, and have honoured their international commitment to 30 by 30. Most importantly, there will be a new statutory plan to protect and restore our natural environment, with delivery plans for each of the targets therein, and a rapid review of the environmental improvement programme. That is crucial, and all our work on 30 by 30 needs to clearly link to that. We also need to make sure that all of this work on the 30 by 30 agenda relates to other strands of work that are under way. We have local authorities beavering away on local nature recovery strategies, so we have to ensure that we understand the relationship between those and site protection. We now need to see what the land use framework—the broader framework that the Government say they support—will actually comprise; it will put nature conservation, food production and trees and all sorts of other non-environmental issues into one framework that allows us to make the best of our land, a scarce resource in this country. The land use framework will, I hope, provide an overarching way to look at the need for land in this country. It will allow actors at national, regional and local authority level, and individual land owners, to have a basis of sound and well-analysed data, and a set of principles under which they can begin to think about how land that they have any influence on can do the best it can not only for private landowners but for the nation as a whole. It need not be something we are scared of. It is not going to be obligatory. It will, I hope, be a help. I hope that it will also be a help in some of the rather nasty local disputes we might see coming up around the use of land for development, infrastructure and housing. I want to make one last point that your Lordships will not be surprised by from a former chairman of the Woodland Trust—about ancient woodland, my favourite topic. The time has come for proper protection for ancient woodlands. Ancient woodlands would be a key part of 30 by 30, but they have absolutely no statutory protection beyond some very finely crafted words in the National Planning Policy Framework. We had to work pretty hard to get those words in, and we are working pretty hard to make sure they do not fall out in the review of the NPPF. In this country, we still have over 1,000 sites containing ancient woodland that are being threatened by development or inappropriate land use. That is unacceptable. They are irreplaceable habitats, they are hugely environmentally and biodiversity rich, and they have historic heritage, as well a very modern purpose of combating climate change and giving the public a lot of pleasure. Let us grasp the nettle and have a new designation of equivalent protection for ancient woodland as currently exists for SSSIs. We are due to report to COP 16. Unless we do some of these things, we are going to look a bit cheesy.

Speaker

16:37:00

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park

It is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Young, and the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, who was very generous in what she said. I agreed with everything she said—particularly that part. I congratulate the committee on putting together a really valuable report and will focus, at least initially, on the international role of the UK in agitation and in leading by example, where the UK has a particular role to play. It is an obvious thing to say but, logically, there is nothing more important than mending our relationship with the natural world. Absolutely everything we have, everything we need, everything we do and our entire economic system is based on nature, which is why the damage we are doing to it, all around the world—to our rivers, mangroves, corals and forests—is just so mad. If I more or less keep to my time now, by the time I have finished and sit down we will have lost the equivalent of nearly 400 football pitches-worth of forest. That almost defies belief and imagination. These are forests that are home to four-fifths of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, around 1 billion people depend on them for their survival, and, as we know, the forests regulate so much, not least our climate and rainfall. The Congo Basin alone is believed to generate more than half of the rainfall for the entire continent of Africa. This is not just an issue of biodiversity, and it is certainly not just an academic discussion we are having. The reality is that there is no technological substitute for these systems: the only solution, and the ultimate challenge, is finding a way to protect what remains and restore what we have carelessly lost, and then to do everything we can, through all of our decision-making, to reconcile ourselves, our cultures our civilisations and our economies with the natural world, on which we depend. It is an obvious thing to say—and I am certain that, for this Room, it did not need to be said —but it is an argument that needs to be made repeatedly. The reason for that is that, far too often, when we hear debates about the environment, or when the environment is discussed as a political issue, we are not actually talking about the environment; we have reduced the whole thing to a very narrow focus on carbon and climate change. It is an extraordinarily one-dimensional discussion that we are having most of the time. The reality is that we could put all the solar panels in the world on all the rooftops around the planet, and invest 10 times more in energy efficiency, but if we do not massively ramp up our efforts to protect and restore nature then it is all pointless. There is no pathway to net zero and there is no solution to climate change without forests, and I think it is really important that we keep our conversation as broad as possible. Climate change is an overwhelming threat, but it is a symptom—just one symptom—of the underlying and abusive relationship we have with the natural world. I do not want in any way to sound like I am discouraging efforts to accelerate the much-needed clean energy transition. It is crucial, I think, that we ramp up our focus on preventing nature loss. By the way, we know that we can do it; there are examples all around the world. I had the privilege of being a Minister for the international environment, and I saw with my own eyes initiatives on a tiny scale and a huge scale—and sometimes on a national scale, where countries have managed to break the link between productivity, prosperity and environmental destruction. I have just come back from Indonesia a couple of days ago. I hate flying—I have to be drunk to get on an aeroplane, so I am probably not making as much sense now as I would like to be. I can tell you that Indonesia, a country that has taken a lot of flak over many years for high rates, historically, of deforestation, has got its deforestation under control. It does not get the credit for it but it has—the data does not lie. It has broken the link between palm oil production and deforestation. There is still some deforestation, of course, but it is nothing compared to what it was. If all the great forest countries behaved in the way that Indonesia has, we would be having a very different discussion. We know that it can be done. Noble Lords will remember that, a few years ago, we had the privilege of hosting COP 26 in Glasgow, which we made an effort to turn into a nature COP. We wanted a broader focus, and we delivered the Glasgow leaders’ declaration on forests. We got 145 countries, representing 90% of the world’s forests, to commit to end deforestation this decade, and secured $20 billion to support those countries to do it. We persuaded the multilateral development agencies to align their policies and portfolios with that aim. It represented—in theory, at least—an unprecedented package of support for forests. I put on record my thanks to the extraordinarily talented people in the invisible part of government—the people who do not normally take part in these debates but who do the real work. Without any doubt, that was a consequence of an extraordinarily effective diplomatic effort. Since then, we attempted to take that same energy, approach and momentum to Montreal, which was about a year later. In order to have an impact and to be able to influence the debate, we protected those diplomatic networks that we had created. We remained co-leaders of the High Ambition Coalition and the Global Ocean Alliance—organisations designed to extract maximum ambition from countries with which we get on well. We spearheaded, with Ecuador, the Maldives and Gabon, a programme that suggested how countries might club together in order to fund what is needed for nature restoration. It was a programme that was, more or less, adopted at Montreal, in the Kunming-Montreal protocol. There is no doubt that the UK played a very important role. I am grateful for what the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, said earlier, but the truth is that I had the honour of being the front of much of this work; the real work was done by hundreds and hundreds of people in government who were up all night, four or five days in a row. I thought some of them might be knocking on the door of madness by the end of it, relying only on coffee, but they did an extraordinary job and went way beyond what I, certainly, was expecting at the time. I am very grateful to them. What was agreed at Montreal was seismic. It was an action plan that will put the world on a path to recovery. We are here to talk about the 30 by 30 target, and obviously that was the headline achievement that was secured at Montreal. But it was also agreed—and this is hugely important—that the wealthier countries will provide at least $20 billion a year by 2025 to help countries rich in nature but economically poorer to deliver their part of the bargain. A lot has undoubtedly been achieved since Montreal. We have targets, agreements and treaties. In basic terms, we have the tools that we need, if we are serious about it, to turn the tide on nature destruction, but if we do not use those tools and properly do our part then the targets are academic. They would just be targets on paper. The truth is that, globally—I include the UK in this—we are not living up to the commitments we made. We are less than one year from that $20 billion a year target. By the end of next year, the rich countries are supposed to be contributing $20 billion between them. A report produced by the ODI and commissioned by the brilliant Campaign for Nature, based entirely on OECD figures, shows that just two countries are contributing what they regard as their fair share of that finance. The UK is not one of them. I am certainly not blaming the new Government, who have only just taken their seats, but the UK is not one of them. The UK has a hugely important role to play in turning those grandiose commitments into something approaching reality. We have been at the heart of this debate for some years now. It was a colossal error of judgment on the part of the most recent iteration of the Conservative Government just to walk off the stage. We were not there at the big events; we were fiddling the figures to make it look like we were spending more money than we were, and we were letting down allies. I think we did the UK’s reputation an enormous amount of damage. This Government have the awesome responsibility of turning things around, rebuilding our reputation and showing that, when we make a promise on these issues, we stick to it and keep our word. That matters financially, for the reasons I have just explained, but it goes far beyond finance. It is also about politics. We have a history of being able to agitate in negative ways, but also in very positive ways internationally, persuading the world to do what we think it ought to be doing. When it comes to nature, our voice has counted for something. There have been many events and times in the last few years when regional groupings have gathered to talk—for example, about the Amazon. You would have all the Amazon countries there and the UK. We have had similar events in Asia, when leaders from Asian countries have gathered to talk about their biodiversity, and the UK has been the only non-regional member there. We have a voice, and it is essential that we use it. We have to get our rich-country friends to step up and pay their fair share. We have to mobilise the private finance that we need, because there is nothing like enough public finance to do the job. We have to make sure that the forums that we are part of, such as the G7, honour the commitments that they made. If your Lordships remember, at the last G7 there was a commitment that all international aid—not just climate or nature, but all international aid—would be aligned with the global biodiversity framework. That has not happened—it has not happened in the UK or elsewhere. I am running out of time, so will make one final point. The biggest challenge that people talk about when it comes to restoring our relationship with nature is finance. We are told that there is a $500 billion black hole annually; that is needed every year to turn things around. By coincidence, that is also how much the top 50 food-producing countries spend each year in subsidising often highly destructive land use. The UK is one of the few countries, possibly the only country, that has really got to grips with this challenge of reforming our subsidies, such that we are paying public money in return for public goods like the environment. I know others will be talking about this in due course, but it is really important that the new Government seize that agenda, recognise the opportunity and do not in any way yield to the vested interests that undoubtedly will be trying to pressure them to water down our commitments on land use subsidy reform. It is too important internationally and for the UK.

Baroness Jones of Whitchurch

My Lords, I gently remind your Lordships that, although it says an “advisory” Back-Bench speaking time of nine minutes, it is slightly more than advisory. We have a lot of speakers here today, so I hope that noble Lords will keep an eye on the clock and keep to the time limit, as far as possible.

Speaker