My Lords, I too fully support Amendment 300 proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Young. A number of the points that I wanted to make have already been made, so I shall be brief.
One key thing we keep losing sight of in the discussion about ancient woodland is the many additional services that ancient woodland provides to our landscapes and to nature. The first one, which we did hear about, is carbon sequestration. I looked up the figures for carbon sequestration, and although ancient woodlands will not sequester as much carbon as something like Sitka spruce, for example, they are able to store huge amounts of carbon, both above and below ground. In particular, the fungal communities below ground can store up to 40% more carbon as a result of having these mycorrhizal assemblages. That is really important, because 36% of all woodland carbon is currently stored in these ancient woodlands.
There is a second role I want to flag up. Something that often gets forgotten about is the role of those woodlands in providing really important pollination services. So often, when we look at ancient woodland, it is a patch of trees surrounded by a sea of agricultural land. Some 80% of our crops in this country need pollination services, and pollinators need habitats and foraging places—that is what those ancient woodland patches provide. Without them, you then have to bring in lorries with pollinators in them. We do not want to go down that route. There is very good evidence—not from the UK but from other places in Europe—that if you remove a patch of ancient woodland the yield from the crops is significantly reduced. We need to bear that in mind
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The third reason I wanted to flag up why ancient woodlands are so important is that many of them are really important stepping stones for connectivity across the English landscape. This connectivity is particularly important for small vertebrates and invertebrates, which cannot move very far. If you take away a patch of ancient woodland, effectively, the patch left with the vertebrates and invertebrates becomes an island. As I mentioned in discussing the previous amendments, that island is then very prone to the extinction of the species on it.
For many reasons, ancient woodlands provide critical ecosystem services that go way beyond just being biodiversity hotspots in situ. They reach out across our landscapes and have been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and we ought to bear that in mind. We would not dream of moving a 600 year-old house or a 1,000 year-old archaeological site for a building project. Right now our ancient woodlands do not have the same protection as these other very old features of our landscape, and it is time they did. That is why I feel very strongly about this amendment and why it has my full support.