My Lords, I welcome the fact that in this Bill the Government are committed to targets on biodiversity and the areas that the Bill covers, including waste. There are only four areas listed, which makes choosing targets a pretty challenging task. I look forward to the debate on this group of amendments, where many different options have been put forward. I recognise that this is not straightforward. Unlike climate change, where we can have a couple of metrics—for example, the proportion of grams of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, or look at emissions as a whole in metric tonnes—biodiversity is far more difficult, and I recognise that. It is not necessarily easy for anybody, let alone the Government, to choose the right targets.
However, within the Bill there is a distinct lack of recognition of the maritime area—the seas around our island nation. Not to put emphasis on the seas and oceans, our EEZ and our territorial seas, is a major weakness in the Bill. I have talked to the Minister about this, and I thank him for his conversations. He will point out that “water” is used very generally in the Bill, but it is usually in a context that does not really include oceans and the sea around us. I congratulate the Government on their blue belt initiative for our overseas territories, but I sometimes wish that the focus on our overseas territories was equal to the focus we have on our own seas in the United Kingdom.
I recognise that this is primarily an English Bill, but let me talk in terms of the UK at the moment Not only are we an island nation, but the territorial area of the United Kingdom is just under a quarter of a million square kilometres. If you look at the seas over which we have some jurisdiction, it is three to four times that level—almost a million square kilometres. That is the EEZ plus our territorial seas. Under UNCLOS we have responsibility for those seas beyond just the 12-mile limit, and I think those are important. I will come back to some of these issues later in our proceedings.
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Some might say that we have already had the Fisheries Bill—now an Act—which a number of us here spent a lot of time on. But the Government made it very clear that it was not an environmental Bill. Climate change and the environment were part of the Bill’s objectives, but it was about fisheries, not about the broader maritime ecosystem. That ecosystem is much broader than just fish. It includes marine mammals, crustaceans, cold-sea corals, which we have off Cornwall, seagrass and what is on the bottom of the sea. It is not just about biodiversity for its own sake in that maritime area, important though that is. Seagrass, for instance, is a major absorber of carbon—even more so than peatlands, amazingly, according to recent scientific evidence. Oceans absorb something like half of mankind’s excess CO2 emissions above what is reabsorbed by the natural environment through carbon sequestration in forests and other areas. So this is key.
It would be incredible if the biodiversity targets within this clause did not include a terrestrial target. I cannot imagine that the Government would just have a maritime biodiversity target and ignore the whole of terrestrial England. The amendment is quite straightforward: let us not make the choice here between two critical biospheres—ecological systems—that are different but equally important. Quite simply, let us make sure that we have a maritime biodiversity indicator as well as that terrestrial one, which I welcome and is bound to come forward as part of the Bill. I beg to move.