My Lords, I offer Green support for all the amendments in this group, but in the interests of time I will restrict myself to commenting on just two of them. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Earl, Lord Caithness. Due to my Australian origins, I feel I am constitutionally obliged to make a contribution on wildfires, which for most of my youth I would have called bush-fires. In the British context, from 2009 to 2021 there were 362,000 wildfires, with nearly 80,000 hectares burned. The estimate is that, if we were to go to 2 degrees of global warming—something that we cannot afford—the number of very high fire risk days would double. That is because there is less rain in summer and it gets hotter and drier. As the noble Earl just said, if you have a wet winter and a spring that has a great flush of growth, that presents one set of risks—and, of course, peatlands, in which it is extremely difficult to extinguish fires, are another area of serious risk.
When people assess the risk in the UK, we think about those rural areas—those uplands and peatlands—but there is very serious risk, particularly in the south of England. I point noble Lords to the desperate and horrendous events in Hawaii. Noble Lords may have seen the photo of the now famous red-roofed house, which was one house that was not burned in the midst of blocks and blocks of houses. The two key things with that house were that it had a tin roof, rather than the asphalt roofs that most of the houses had, and they had cut back the vegetation. That is a demonstration of how preparation is so crucial in planning and guiding the thinking of people in the UK, who are really not very used to thinking about fires, to prepare for the risks ahead.
I point to a not terribly recent example but one that demonstrates the dangers, as Hawaii did, to urban areas—the peri-urban fringe but extending quite a way into urban areas. The Swinley Forest fire in Berkshire in 2011 burnt 300 hectares and 300 firefighters had to work to stop it getting into Bracknell, population 110,000. So, this is a modest but really important amendment that really is for the age of shocks, the age of the climate emergency we now live in.
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The other amendment I wish to speak to is that in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, to which I have attached my name—I know she has not introduced it yet but I think I am in the right order—calling on the Government to publish a green prosperity plan. I was thinking about how I might present this to the Government as an idea that might be attractive to them. I would say that the climate emergency is something the world needs to co-operate on in tackling and dealing with. None the less, we have a global geopolitical situation where the US, through the Inflation Reduction Act, is lined up against the EU, through the Green Deal Industrial Plan for the Net Zero Age: perhaps I will just call it the European green deal for short. Both those major international economies are putting huge resources into tackling this, setting up the technological framework we need as one part of dealing with the climate emergency. Your Lordships’ House hardly needs me to refer to how often the Government like to talk from the Benches opposite about being world leading. Well, it is very clear that the US has led in investing in a green economy and a green industrial strategy, and the EU has reacted.
I shall just quote some figures on this. They are open to interpretation, but one set I saw calculated that the EU is planning to spend over 10 years the equivalent of $440 billion in public spending. In the US, the Inflation Reduction Act accounts for $336 billion. This is a modest amendment, a “draw up a plan, look to see what we could do” amendment. I am going to put this in the framework of time. The EU and the US have already acted. We know that in a year’s time, more or less, one way or another we will have a new Government. I am not even, since I am being emollient, going to make any suggestion about what that new Government might be, but what your Lordships’ House could do, what the Government could do by backing this amendment, is set out a plan directing the Civil Service to look in a strategic way, given the current situation we are in globally, at what the UK could be doing. That could set up the new Government, whatever they look like, to be ready to act. Surely, we need to act, given that we are clearly world trailing on green industrial strategy and we desperately need to catch up.