Green and Prosperous Land. Dieter Helm
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economic principle. Why should it be any more acceptable to pollute than to steal? Both take something from others that they do not pay for. Polluters steal people’s health and they force the polluted to pay for what has been done to them. Expecting more public expenditure is something that might motivate protests and campaigns, but most conservationists know that if they wait for the Treasury to open its coffers they will be disappointed. While money is needed, getting to a more efficient baseline is an urgent necessity, making us all better off.
The converse of making polluters pay is to get rid of perverse subsidies. More than £3 billion is spent annually on subsidising Britain’s farmers, £2 billion of which goes on paying them to own land. This absurd policy has been perverse not only for the natural environment but for the farmers themselves, inflating land prices. It came about as a result of trying to get away from the even more absurd consequences of subsidising the prices of agricultural products, resulting in the infamous European wine lakes and butter mountains, and the intensive sheep grazing that has done so much damage to the uplands. Getting rid of perverse subsidies would save a lot of money. It could be better spent. But even if it were just withdrawn, Britain would be greener.
Next comes the fraught subject of compensation for damage to the environment. While there are conservationists who believe that there should be no damage at all, the reality is that there will be. Faced with a population increasing by around 10 million by mid-century, and with more than 200,000 new houses per year for over a decade, more land will be concreted over. Add in the new roads, railways, and energy generation and networks to service all these extra people and the wider growing economy, and damage is inevitable.
Can this damage be squared with enhancing the natural environment? Only if there is compensation over and above the damage to the natural environment elsewhere. This is the net environmental gain principle: any damage must result in not just offsetting it, but by a positive margin. The positive margin is the precautionary principle in action.
Nowhere is it more important to apply these three principles than to climate change and net zero. But to meet the climate imperatives, and at the same time be mindful of the natural capital dimensions, requires us to integrate all of these into the wider environmental context. Net zero might be an environmental disaster if it means planting the wrong sorts of trees in the wrong places. Chapter 10 shows how the smart use of natural carbon sequestration and the creation of natural capital markets can bring the net zero agenda into this broader creation of a green and prosperous land. Markets help to ensure that polluters do in fact pay, public goods are efficiently provided, and that compensation is paid. Money is currently spent in silos, notably the agricultural subsidies. Winning the prize, and making sure we hang on to it, requires cementing the money into a comprehensive and integrated framework. Chapter 11 sets out how to do this within a Nature Fund. This acts a bit like sovereign wealth funds do for oil- and gas-producing countries. It should include the economic rents from these non-renewable activities like North Sea oil and gas production, mirroring other sovereign wealth funds, but it can also bring together the monies from pollution taxes and charges, from subsidies directed towards public goods and the net gain payments. Crucially it would be for nature, not general public spending.
The net gain principle set alongside the polluter-pays principle together ensure that there is enough money to pay for an enhanced natural environment. Add the money previously spent on perverse subsidies, instead going to environmental public goods, and the numbers stack up. We can have a greener and more prosperous Britain, without extra public expenditure.
A Nature Fund would need to be protected from the host of vested interests and from political opportunism. These interests are not just those opposed to the conservation of nature. They include nature organisations, which are notoriously fragmented and quarrelsome. With a pot of money, the Nature Fund will become a target for each and every interest to look after its own, whether specific species or specific habitats and locations. Its constitution matters, as do the rules of engagement. A Nature Fund should encourage cooperation and coordination for the prize as a whole.
The way to do this is to bring the opportunities together into an agreed practical plan to make it happen – a plan of how to integrate the myriad opportunities into coherent actions, and the necessary institutions to deliver this wonderful opportunity. It is about the full delivery, in spirit and letter, of the 25 Year Environment Plan published in 2018.[7] Some will say that this is too radical, but the real radicalism is in doing nothing, in allowing the business-as-usual to continue. This radically worsens the opportunities of the next generation, who will not only be deprived of swallows and flycatchers but, in the process of the continued destruction of nature, find the basic necessities of their lives increasingly compromised.
The 25 Year Environment Plan needs to integrate the principles behind it into the fabric of the economy and government. These are the two aims of the earlier 2011 White paper, ‘The Natural Choice’:[8] putting the environment at the core of the economy; and leaving the natural environment in a better state for the next generation. Although much may be achieved immediately and a number of reforms will help us along this path, to stand the test of economic crises and recessions and the sheer power of the hostile lobbyists, there needs to be an overarching legal and constitutional framework. As with climate change, politicians are good at the rhetoric, and they may well mean what they say, but permanently delivering it requires something more. The 2008 Climate Change Act changed the game. It is very hard to get out of its targets and the carbon budgets. We need something similar, a proper Nature Act that enshrines the principles in the 2011 White Paper and the 25 Year Environment Plan.
There is a choice: we can impoverish ourselves by continuing down the current path, or we can have a greener and more prosperous land, and one that is pleasanter too. The book concludes with this choice.
Imagine what our natural environment could look like in 25 years. Imagine bright colourful hay meadows full of wild flowers, birdsong and butterflies. Imagine cities with green trees along the streets, green parks and green Green Belts. Imagine the sounds of uplands, of golden plovers and curlews. Imagine beaches without plastic, and the loud noise of winter waders in the estuaries and marshes. Imagine wildlife corridors all around the coastline and across the land and along the rivers, roads, railways and canals. Imagine a marine world full once again of fish and free from the harrowing of the seabed by trawling. Imagine colour and beauty restored to the landscape. Wouldn’t it be wonderful?
This prize is not just a dream. It is perfectly practical and achievable, within our reach, and it would greatly enhance our lives and our economy. We don’t have to ‘go back to nature’, become austere and abandon capitalism. None of that is likely to happen anyway. Instead we need to embrace the most important type of capital: natural capital – the stuff nature gives us for free. We would be much more prosperous as a result. To make this possible, stand back and think big.
The prize comprises two parts: holding the line against further deterioration of existing natural capital; and creating and enhancing more of it. That is what leaving the environment in a better state for the next generation means. Not to go down this path is to court a significant loss of prosperity and make the next generation worse off. The question is just how much worse off. This chapter is about that prize; the next is about what happens if we don’t halt the destruction.
No more declines
The natural capital that really matters is the renewables – the stuff that nature keeps on giving us for free for ever, provided we don’t deplete it below a threshold so it cannot continue to deliver its free bounty. Nature at threshold risk is the stuff of red lists and endangered species, and some of it is well known. To hold the line means that