Climate Change: Carbon Budgets

My Lords, it is a privilege to participate in this debate and I am happy to follow the right reverend Prelate in his general thesis. I am persuaded by climate change. We need to act quickly and it means that we have to change our habits as individuals and, indeed, as a society and as a Government. That will involve hard choices individually, nationally and internationally. However, I would add a caveat in saying that. When we are talking about hard choices, we must ensure that there is a sense of equity, as the right reverend Prelate said, in the international context for the undeveloped world. Just as when we think about our own citizens, we must not get into a situation where there is no equity so that the poor end up paying a disproportionate price for the inevitable costly hard choices. It is also clear that we must use science to help tackle this problem. I declare an interest as a non-executive director of Sellafield and a lifelong supporter of the nuclear industry. I follow the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, in his special plea for the electricity grid. It is something that the Government need to be moving a little faster on. I clearly believe that at least one new nuclear power station is needed in west Cumbria, but I recognise the difficulties involved in getting the electricity on to the current grid system. We need to be thinking about to develop a grid that will have to run through a national park, and work needs to proceed to see how efficiently we can transmit that electricity under the estuaries—perhaps even across Morecambe Bay to Heysham power station itself. That sort of preparatory work could be taken forward now. I also want to make that the point that it is not just window dressing when we talk about the economy of west Cumbria as the "energy coast". It has gone right through and energised the local society, and I can cite the example of the town of Cockermouth, which has suffered so much of late. Recently a group of youngsters came down from the local comprehensive school. It was one of the most inspiring events I have been to. The key fact I want to impress on noble Lords is this: more than 90 young people from that comprehensive school are studying A-level mathematics, while more than 100 are reading A-level physics. That is a measure of the hope and expectation for science that we have in that part of the world. I believe that we need to use the nuclear industry as the non-carbon power base for our baseload of electricity. The other thing is that we should not forget nature in all this. Any society in an increasingly developed world is becoming more and more removed and remote from nature. Although we see the great power of nature, as we did in Cumbria three weeks ago, sometimes we still think that we as mankind can do it better and more cleverly. In this climate change debate, we ignore nature at our peril. That may seem mere tautology, but I declare an interest as chair of the Forestry Commission. It is probably the last time I shall make that declaration because I finish my eight-year stint at midnight tomorrow. It has been a great privilege to hold that post because I started my life as a forest worker. The point made by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, that climate change is long term and most of us will not see its effect, applies equally to forestry: you plant trees and very rarely see them harvested. Incidentally, this applies also to nuclear energy, which is another long-term industry. I make that point because for the past two years I have been encouraging my director-general, Tim Rawlinson, to take a lead internationally to see what we can do in the forestry world. In many ways we are inspired to do so by the impressive work of the noble Lord, Lord Stern, on climate change. Although we may argue about the odd percentage, he made the point that about 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions come from deforestation. That is almost as much as the industrial emissions from the whole of the United States of America. It is a large contribution that we have to tackle. The level of deforestation is still proceeding, which all adds to the difficulty of the situation. However, the Forestry Commission in Britain has taken the lead by establishing an organisation called the Global Partnership on Forest Landscape Restoration. It is not good enough to stop deforestation; we must start increasing afforestation. In degraded parts of the world and in areas that used to be afforested and are now just deserts, we can grow trees again. At a conference in London a couple of weeks ago, a number of European Ministers signed up to that. It was held in conjunction with the IUCN, and Latin American and South American countries and China have joined us in that effort. Reafforestation is an important issue. However, it is not as simple as that because we do not know what the position is here in our own country. In order to find out, we asked the eminent scientist, Professor Sir David Read, a former vice-president of the Royal Society and an eminent professor of plant pathology at the University of Sheffield, to chair an inquiry by a group of scientists and he reported a couple of weeks ago. His remit was, basically, to analyse the position of forestry in Britain in relation to the mitigation of climate change. He has produced a sound report which is well worth studying. In that report he picks up a number of points which we, as a Government, can utilise for the benefit of the country. The main point he makes is that sequestration of carbon by trees is beginning to decline in this country simply because our planting has tailed off. Having said that, he and his panel believe that if we increase tree cover by a mere 4 per cent in the United Kingdom, it would sequester 10 per cent of our carbon emissions. That is a significant percentage and we ought to address this issue. The percentage varies: coniferous forests, which are hated by many people, sequester far more carbon than the more natural and more acceptable oak. For example, he estimates that coniferous trees sequester 20 tonnes of CO2 annually whereas with oak it is 15 tonnes. On top of that we can store even more carbon in the timber itself. It is therefore important that we use more wood in our construction industry because it would tie up carbon for many years, decades and occasionally centuries. We ought to do that. It is possible. Between 80 and 90 per cent of new houses in Scotland are built using the timber-framed method; in England, the figure is less than 20 per cent. The challenge for the Government is to give a lead to architects, developers and builders. It is not only a sensible way to store carbon but, given our climate, it is a cheaper way to build houses. I hope I have made the case for an increased use of timber and an increase in forest coverage. I take the point of the noble Earl, Lord Selborne, that there are certain parts of the country, especially the south-east, where there are many wooded areas—the most wooded counties in England are Kent, Sussex and Surrey—but no market for the wood. However, as it is basically hard wood, it is ideal for burning and producing energy and biomass. We work very closely with the South East England Development Agency but more effort could be put in by regional development agencies to progress that issue. People love trees and here we have something which can help us to fight carbon emissions and provide so many things for people—timber, recreation, biodiversity, conservation, health promotion; the list goes on and on. I am sure we will hear from the Minister today that the Government are keen to help the Forestry Commission to expand the tree cover in this country.