My Lords, I rise with a very long list of amendments to speak to, and I shall begin by very briefly addressing the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, and the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, in response to my noble friend’s Amendment 32. I begin by thanking the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, for offering his support for my Amendment 11 on soils. I agree with him that it is rather odd that it is not initially in the Bill.
On Amendment 32, I first point out that this amendment does not seek to impose a diet on anyone; it sets a target to head the national diet in a certain direction. On what the noble Lord, Lord Curry of Kirkharle, said about methane, yes, its impact on the climate is shorter lasting, but it is also more than a score higher than that of carbon dioxide. When we consider the facts that we have an emergency and have to ensure that we stay below 1.5 degrees above industrial warming right now, the next 10 years are absolutely crucial and methane emissions now particularly crucial.
My noble friend will not forgive me if I do not stress that we very much understand that animal agriculture has an important place in the British landscape, but we have to start by tackling factory farming—for many reasons, from antimicrobial resistance through to the point that it is food waste to feed perfectly good food that people could eat to animals to produce much less food as a result.
I shall now get to the list that I started with. I shall briefly speak to Amendment 10 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Randall of Uxbridge, on light pollution. We in the Green group would have attached our signature to this amendment, had there been space to do so. Clearly, this is a huge issue. The noble Lord, Lord Randall, referred to what has been called “insectageddon”, the huge loss of insect numbers and species, and light pollution is certainly part of that. I also point out that this is very much a case for joined-up government. So much of the light that we emit and pollute our skies with is utterly unnecessary. For example, the French Government have brought in a law that says that neon shop signs have to be switched off between midnight and dawn, which undoubtedly has benefits for the natural world. I am sure it also has huge benefits for people who live in flats above shops, who live in the environment. We are talking about making the environment benefit people and nature.
I also briefly offer support for the general intentions of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, in focusing on trees, while taking on
board the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, that we need the right tree in the right place, to use the buzz-phrase. We talk a great deal about tree planting, but it is important that we think about the natural regeneration of trees, because that is one way in which nature will help to ensure that we get the right tree in the right place. We also need to talk a great deal more about agri-forestry and the possibility of forage crops and crops producing human food—nut and fruit trees and so on—mixed in to our existing agricultural systems.
Now I get to the three amendments that I really want to talk about here. I apologise that this will be rather a long speech, but these are short but very important amendments. I come first to Amendment 7, which appears in my name and changes one of the proposed targets set down by the Government. The target as expressed by the Government is for resource efficiency and waste reduction, but I am calling for the words “resource efficiency” to be replaced by “reduction in resource use”. The current wording essentially says, “We’ll continue to treat the planet as a mine and dumping ground, but we will do it less wastefully”. What I suggest is that the law should acknowledge that we cannot have infinite growth on a finite planet and that a circular economy is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a sustainable world. In the terms of the neat video, “The Story of Stuff”, which has been around since 2007, we must have less stuff in our lives.
I refer to an important report from the Green Alliance, which I encourage noble Lords to read, which points out that resource use drives half the world’s climate emissions and 90% of nature destruction around the world. The UK’s use of resources, renewable and finite, is twice the level considered sustainable. Of natural resources alone, the UK uses three times as much as the planet can sustainably provide. That report, by what is not by any means a radical green group, calls for resource use to be halved. The UK’s material footprint was estimated at 971 million tonnes in 2018, equivalent to 14.6 tonnes per person. In 1997, 40% of that came from domestic extraction, which fell to 27% in 2018. We are taking a huge quantity of resources from the world—far more than the world can bear.
I stress that cutting resource use does not have to mean a lesser quality of life. When we think about the damage that stuff is doing, whether the ocean is turned into a plastic soup, the planet heated dangerously or soils destroyed in producing food then wastefully fed to animals, which then produces health-damaging junk food, we can see that reducing resource use can considerably improve our quality of life—not just using it better but using less of it. Really, there is no alternative. In a debate on the Finance Bill earlier this month, the noble Lord, Lord Agnew of Oulton, for the Treasury, responded to my remarks along these lines, by pointing to the book More from Less by Andrew McAfee, which claims that technology is enabling the dematerialisation of growth. As many critics have pointed out, however, that book ignores the fact that very often material use and exploitation are being exported, not replaced, and the acceleration of planned obsolescence means that more efficient use of resources has very often not meant less use of resources.
The noble Lord, Lord Agnew, pointed us to the United States Geological Survey figures for 72 resources, saying that only six had passed their peak, but that is a reflection of what the known reserves are. What about the damage done to people and nature by extracting them? Mining is by its very nature inevitably destructive. In a world suffering a pandemic of environmental ill health and the biodiversity emergency, more destruction tips us over multiple planetary boundaries, a concept that the response from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, suggests that the Treasury has yet to grasp.
I am well aware that the Minister will find his work cut out in tackling the Treasury on these issues, but I point out that, if this Government want to be—as they so often tell us—world-leading, the European Parliament has demanded that the EU reduce resource use by 2030 and bring it within planetary boundaries, which means cutting it by two-thirds by 2050. That is the target set by the European Parliament. If we are going to be world-leading, that is where the Bill should be going. I am well aware that running the country for the economy instead of running the economy for the well-being of the country is deeply engrained, but that is a challenge for the Minister to take on.
I come to the two other amendments that appear in my name. Before I do, I want to refer back to a comment made in the first group by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, who said that we are inadequately exploring the relationship between the Agriculture Act, the Trade Act and the Environment Bill. I had a meeting last week with farmers and farming advisers who expressed to me exasperation and frustration because they were struggling to understand the Government’s intentions in that process. These two amendments that I am about to speak to attempt to deal with some of those issues.
I come to Amendment 11, on soils—and I hope that I get it through. I express my great thanks to the noble Lord, Lord Whitty, for attaching his name to this amendment and want to thank the noble Earl, Lord Caithness, and the noble Lords, Lord Curry and Lord Randall of Uxbridge, for expressing their support for it. As the noble Lord, Lord Randall, said, it is astonishing that it is not in the Bill to start with.
I want to quote Thomas Jefferson:
“While the farmer holds the title to the land, actually, it belongs to all the people because civilization itself rests upon the soil.”
I will also refer to a few points in the report The State of the Environment: Soil from the Environment Agency in June 2019. It is really telling that it says:
“There is insufficient data on the health of our soils and investment is needed in soil monitoring”.
It is very clear that we do not know enough, and if we set a target, that will create a framework where we need to do the measuring. In some ways perhaps it is a bit “chicken and egg”—but let us get this started, because it clearly needs to happen.
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Now I am aware that some may look at many of the issues affecting soils and say, “Well, testing for water and air will address some of those issues”. But there are many issues with soil that measures that might
address water and air quality will not address. One of the very obvious ones is soil compaction. To go back to the Environment Agency report:
“Almost 4 million hectares of soil are at risk of compaction in England and Wales”.
That has impacts on fertility, as well as on water and flooding. The report also says:
“Over 2 million hectares of soil are at risk of erosion in England and Wales.”
We have of course carbon stores in soil that are absolutely crucial, but we also have a situation where intensive agriculture has caused arable soils to lose 40% to 60% of their organic carbon. We have, through the spreading of supposedly organic material, had 300,000 hectares of soil contaminated in the UK. Recently in Cumbria we had horrific cases where farmers have suffered huge damage from the spreading of what they thought was organic fertiliser on their soil, which has caused huge contamination with everything from pharmaceuticals to heavy metals and a range of other contaminants. So it is very clear that the Government need to have a target for air, soil and water. There is a very clear, obvious logic to having targets in all those areas.
I come finally—sorry, I am aware that I have spoken for some time—to Amendment 14, which in some ways is related to this but raises a whole new area of science that I believe the Government and the world need to be paying more attention to: the management of nitrogen. Again, noble Lords might say, “Well, that seems to fit within soils”, and in some ways it does, but I point out that this is a fast-growing international area.
In fact, the international nitrogen management system project was set up by the UN a decade ago with the aim of doing what the IPPC did for carbon emissions and setting global targets for nitrogen. To put this in context for noble Lords who want to know more about this, I point to an article in New Scientist called The Nitrogen Emergency: How to Fix our Forgotten Environmental Crisis, from last month. This points out that we should, to fit within the world’s planetary limits, only be fixing 62 million tonnes of nitrogen a year on land. We are currently fixing at least 300 million tonnes of nitrogen each year—five times as much. The international nitrogen management system had a very large international meeting in 2018. It thought it should set a target around the figure I have just cited, but decided it was politically impossible, so instead set a global target of halving nitrogen waste by 2030.
It is worth saying—this fits in very much with the needs of farmers—that applying and fixing nitrogen of course has huge costs. Nitrogen efficiency use by farmers around the world has now fallen from 50% in 1961 to 42% today. We think about progress, but we are largely going backwards in terms of our efficiency in the use of nitrogen. There is a UN target, the Colombo Declaration, but only 14 countries have signed up to it. So nitrogen is a separate issue, but it is something that I would urge the Government to consider taking much more action on, even if it is not included in this Bill. Because, in brief, nitrogen means huge ocean dead zones and huge amounts of air pollution—something that my noble friend will address in other
aspects of the Bill. It means soil acidification and ozone depletion and problems with alkaline air, which causes massive damage by eating away at the ozone layer.
So we need to make the Bill a lot better, and indeed we talked about that in our debate on the first group of amendments. This group of amendments is where we start to concretely see how we can make the Bill larger and stronger. Amendments in this group have some serious force and detail behind them. I do not necessarily expect the Minister to respond in detail to everything I have said today but, in terms of nitrogen, I hope that the Government will see the arguments coming from all sides of the House, in particular from the noble Lord’s own side, that soil quality has to be there. We need to greatly improve the Bill and this group gives us some really important ways to do it.