Agriculture Bill

My Lords, Amendment 73 stands in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Worthington. This is a simple amendment. About 25% of greenhouse gases come from agriculture. That percentage will increase as more green energy production comes online. What we can grow, and what we will be able to eat, will be determined by climate change.

We are watching the rapidly changing climate in the Arctic with some horror. That is of huge importance to us, as four of the six main systems that determine this country’s weather are driven by conditions in the Arctic. One example, and a pretty sobering one, is that the “beast from the east” that we experienced in March 2018 cost the UK about half the annual budget paid to farmers.

The Paris Agreement states that countries should be

“holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C … and pursuing efforts to limit temperature increase to 1.5°C”.

We are likely to break that threshold of 1.5 degrees before the next general election.

All of the pathways in the IPCC’s special report say that there has to be the use of negative emissions; that is, the removal of CO₂ from the atmosphere. This is not an alternative to reducing emissions but an essential extra if the planet as we know it today is to survive. Our land is not absorbing as much CO₂ as it could, and the priority should therefore be to restore nature to allow it to sequester increased amounts of CO₂. That is what my amendment seeks to do.

I commend the NFU on the progress that it has made on this and on its template aim of net zero by 2040. We must give every encouragement to farmers to help them meet the reductions that will be necessary, and I believe that the Bill could do more on that. I had thought that my amendment would sit well at the end of Clause 1(1)(j) relating to soil, but I prefer it where it is, so that any financial payment would be conditional on meeting the reduction in sequestration condition. That is no more than what the Climate Change Committee asked for in its 2019 report, when it recommended:

“Financial payments in the UK Agriculture Bill should be linked to actions to reduce and sequester emissions, to take effect from 2022.”

I beg to move.