On a first look, the new strategy goes no further towards a balanced set of policies to address climate change; it remains one-sided, playing down the progress needed in other sectors compared to the energy sector, and pays lip service only to nature and adaptation. It screams of a rush to secure a prime global stake in technology and infrastructure markets, above and beyond genuinely achieving net zero.
A shift from ‘Build Back Greener’ to ‘Powering Up Britain’ is both a telling, and increasingly blinkered, change in emphasis.
Plenty has been said already about the reliance to achieve negative emissions on unproven, expensive, and high-risk carbon capture and storage (also referred to as negative emissions technologies). The new strategy does not heed scientific or public concern, or consider the speed at which negative emissions are needed. Nature is here and is already doing the job. The UK Government has signed itself up to protecting 30% of land and sea for nature by 2030. It is nowhere near achieving this, and in this document the climate benefits of doing so are left unmentioned. Rather than ‘letting nature help’, the new strategy looks to be shifting and storing up even more risk to our already depleted natural environment. This is not just a policy limitation, it’s dangerous.
Why have we taken this view?
This week, global leaders in climate science and economics have met at the Royal Society to discuss the latest understanding of the economic consequences of climate change. The group has discussed the collapse of global breadbaskets, the shutting down of circulation cycles in the atmosphere and oceans that sustain life, and mass die-offs. These are some of the statements that have been made:
“Biodiversity, health and climate are entirely interwoven”
“Ecosystem loss and collapse are being left out of the models”
“When welfare loss increases to a certain value, it becomes infinite”
“Adaptation is absolutely critical; but we are still not capturing the benefits”
“Assuming there is continued economic growth in the future is simply wrong”
It doesn’t sound good, does it? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last week gave a similar harrowing message off the back of its latest global assessment, which barely made the headlines. The understanding of these system effects, the importance of adaptation and protecting nature to reaching net zero continues has been almost entirely ignored by Ministers. We don’t see a great shift forward in today’s strategy.
Looking at the detail, in the previous iteration of the Net Zero Strategy, the land and nature numbers didn’t add up. The Government had assumed almost the same amount of emissions savings from agriculture and land use as the Climate Change Committee’s net zero scenarios; but included lower amounts of peatland restoration and tree planting. No one could tell where the magical extra emissions savings came from. Numbers to reduce the carbon footprint of the agriculture system were there; but the policies to achieve it were missing.
In this iteration, the strategy itself admits that the land use and agriculture numbers are still insufficient, and many remain unquantified.
There is no new real funding, and no new policy initiatives for increasing investment in nature-based solutions.
The policies highlighted – the Environmental Improvement Plan, Environmental Land Management - all spin around each other with none setting out specifically the contribution to meeting net zero. There is more effort to calculate the contribution of specific actions within those policies, though how emissions savings have been calculated to five decimal places from a generalised policy description is a bit of a mystery.
Looking at peat as an example; peat restoration targets for the near-term have not been enhanced, and the publication of the pathway to meet them has been delayed to 2024. Government then states its “intention to ban the use of peat in horticulture, with limited exemptions, in 2024”. However, just last week Defra made clear that while a sales ban on bagged peat compost will come in 2024, a total ban on peat-containing products will be delayed to 2030. The Government response to the Climate Change Committee's progress report suggests covering bare peat does little for carbon emissions but ignores the growing risk of carbon losses through erosion from bare peat from more extreme weather, let alone the biodiversity value of vegetated lowland peat.
Our NGO colleagues will be crunching all the numbers across all the land and agriculture policies over the coming weeks; but an early look does not appear to be very positive.
On the plus side, there is more recognition of the contribution from blue carbon, but the estimates of potential impact remain unquantified. Staying at sea, pressure is mounting for more energy infrastructure with increased investment in port infrastructure to support the development of floating offshore wind. This taken alongside the announced acceleration of the delivery of grid infrastructure and the expansion of other emerging technologies such as hydrogen is piling the pressure on an already busy land and sea space, ignoring the urgent need for effective strategic plans.
Early indications from the revised strategy also suggest that the long-awaited draft Energy National Policy Statements will not align with the Government’s own targets for nature recovery, which is disappointing to say the least.
Outside of the nature policies (or lack of), there is still no real push on the easiest, most sustainable and logical measure of all – reducing energy demand in the first place through energy efficiency. Given that the renewables sector is increasingly sounding an alarm bell about where it will put all of this new infrastructure and where the materials will come from, this lack of prioritisation seems utterly bizarre. The same applies to diet change. The government seems to want to avoid touching anything that includes the words ‘less of’.
Not a single one of the policy asks we set out two years ago have been included. Here is our list again:
- Set out new, public funding for nature-based solutions alongside existing mechanisms to boost private investment to help meet the £44 - £90 billion nature funding gap up to 2030.
- Publish quantified metrics and indicators for the contribution that Environmental Land Management (and associated policies in the devolved administrations) will make to climate change mitigation and adaptation.
- A wholesale ban of peat in horticulture now; not by 2030 with an open-ended promise on exceptions which the government announced this week.
- A UK wide ban on bottom trawling to protect marine blue carbon stores; all seagrass habitats to be given highly protected status; and policy to protect and expand saltmarsh.
- Urgent progress on marine spatial prioritisation
- A major policy shift to incentivise diet change.
- More emphasis on protecting and managing existing woodlands and trees alongside tree planting targets.
- Specific linkages between adaptation and net zero:
- How the resilience of carbon stores will be improved, including reducing wildfire risk
- More support for farmers on dealing with the damages from extreme heat, drought, flooding and fire.
- Include predicted losses of carbon set out in the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment into baseline future emission pathways.
The economists speaking at the Royal Society this week are increasingly vocal that an economic system obsessed with big infrastructure and a skewed idea of growth is failing. Climate change will cause it to fail further. Waiting until a nature disaster unfolds to change course is not the work of a wise government. All in all, this strategy still gives us a picture of a government unable to crawl out of the pockets of technological fixes and business interest, and pay due attention to the bigger picture.