Green and Prosperous Land. Dieter Helm
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and choices people will have about how they choose to live their lives. It is therefore a distinction between direct and narrow benefits and the broader opportunities natural capital offers to future generations.
The two are of course related. You need the natural assets to get the utility; the ecosystem services and the natural assets that are going to be given priority are those that have the greatest direct benefit to people. The differences come in the practicalities as much as the philosophy. Natural assets come in systems, not discrete lumps, and hence mapping the outputs onto the assets is far from straightforward.
Let’s take a look at the two approaches and see how the prize might be defined. Taking the outputs approach, there are some obvious direct-benefit prizes. In 2050 we can have much cleaner air. Children can grow up in cities without clogging up their lungs with particulates. By 2050 the air should be ‘clean’. Drinking water could be of better quality, drawn from cleaner rivers and aquifers. There should be increasingly diverse plant and animal populations. Wildlife should be thriving. People should get more out of nature, and benefit from landscapes that are more beautiful. These are all ambitions included in the 25 Year Environment Plan.[5]
The great advantage of starting with the high-level outputs is that they are measurable. The content of air in different locations can be directly measured. The health outcomes can be measured too. The quality of drinking water is measured all the time already, and we can measure whether it is getting better. The number and diversity of plants and animals can be measured too. How many people spend how much time doing what in nature is measurable. We can also measure mental health and obesity and relate all these to the time spent with and experience of nature (or the lack of it).
These outputs are every bit as measurable as the time saved by HS2 or Crossrail; by the speed of internet access, and the use time people get out of the internet; by the impacts on carbon emissions of renewable energy technologies; by the convenience and use of electric car charging and other outputs from physical infrastructures. Natural capital infrastructure is on an empirical par with physical infrastructure.
The fact that these things can be measured gives the 25 Year Environment Plan traction. Governments can be held to account for identified failures. There may be many environmentalists who claim that we cannot measure the beauty and wonder of nature, or the spiritual values and so on. They are right. But the trouble is that this does not get us very far. The Treasury can easily wriggle its way out of the capital maintenance and investment in the enhancements. Whether the benefits of the prize can all be measured or not, the fact remains that the costs can, so there is no avoiding the question of how much should be spent on the various competing outcomes and ends. There is a good reason why the Treasury thinks in numbers.
In narrow utility terms the value of these prizes can be assessed and compared with the value from investing in other infrastructures in the economy. Just as the value of HS2 depends on the other infrastructures that connect with it and support it, so too on the environmental side. HS2 will not work unless other bits of the road, railway and airport transport networks interconnect with it, and unless it has fast broadband fibre to facilitate its operations. Similarly, clean water depends on what happens in river catchments and in agriculture. The specific projects get their economic rationale from the coexistence and interaction of the rest of the networks. Ultimately, none of them works unless there is a natural environment to support them.
This creates a big problem for the application of crude cost–benefit analysis. Take HS2. It makes little sense to calculate the costs and benefits of the link between Birmingham and London without including the rest of the high-speed rail network to the north. Similarly, whether or not HS2 is connected to HS1, and hence the main European cities, makes a big difference to the potential benefits in the cost–benefit calculation.[6]
Carried across to the natural environment, these problems arise because the environment comes in ecosystems. Everything is connected to everything else. Hence the outputs depend on the overall environmental context. This means that achieving these headline outputs in 2050 will require attention to be paid directly to the underlying environmental infrastructures – to the state of the catchments, the farmed land, the uplands, the coasts and the urban countrysides. Even taking these separately is a questionable heuristic, since the catchments depend on the uplands and the farmed land, and the costs depend on what happens in the rivers and the estuary and coastal towns and cities.
We have to start somewhere, and the pragmatic approach is to divide things up into our five categories, while always accepting that it is going to be at best a roughly right answer.
The attention to the systems leads into the second perspective, starting with the natural capital assets, and setting the prize as having these in much better shape by 2050, rather than trying to calculate the utilities of each bit. Natural capital is about making sure that the next generation has these assets, so they can choose how they want to live. They can do their own utility calculations: it is not for us to prejudge these.
Taking each of our five categories in turn, again as a preview of what follows in the book, the catchments natural capital in 2050 could be much enhanced by looking to natural capital solutions to both river quality and flood prevention. Many rivers are a sad shadow of what they were before they were tamed. Since the Middle Ages and sometimes even earlier, they have been straightened out and controlled for energy through weirs and hard physical flood barriers.[7] The results are not only far from pretty, they are often inefficient. Imagine a river catchment where the upstream is allowed to meander, creating oxbow lakes and slowing down its flows. Imagine trees taking up more of the shock of heavy rain. Imagine reinstating flood meadows to hold the water in winter.
These natural capital measures would restore and rebuild what has been lost, improve flood defences and avoid the costs of more hard concrete. This is something that can start now. The Cumbria catchment has been designated as a pioneer for the natural capital approach, and has already identified lots of opportunities. The new concrete canal being built around Oxford might not be needed, or could be constructed at a reduced scale, were money instead spent upstream on trees, meadows and better land management.[8]
Natural capital approaches would greatly contribute to biodiversity outcomes, and these in turn would open up additional health and recreational benefits to people. Imagine the wonders that restored water meadows might bring in snake’s head fritillaries, cowslips, barn owns, curlews, redshanks and lapwings. All of this is possible not only in the Upper Thames, but throughout our river catchments, and it is much more cost-effective even in the narrow flood defence context. The Severn lends itself to a similar approach, as does the Ouse above Pickering.[9] The more pertinent question is whether there are any major river catchments where it would not be a sensible approach to prefer major enhancements to the natural environment at lower cost and with less emphasis on the alternative hard solutions.
Consider the cost–benefit comparison between all that concrete and natural capital approaches. The reintroduction of beavers could help slow down flows. Imagine if all of the main river catchments had thriving beaver populations in their upper river stretches. Imagine rivers as green corridors through towns and cities.
Turning to the broader landscape and agriculture, imagine if the monochrome fields were replaced with an enhanced patchwork quilt of many colours. Imagine if the harsh vivid green of ‘improved grassland’ were replaced by the complexity of shades of green that unimproved land still hangs on to. Imagine if rye grass were not the only species, but rather that sweet vernal grass, Yorkshire fog, crested dogstail and other grasses were once again peppered across our landscape. Imagine if the countryside were colourful again, and the simple delights this world has were set against the stresses of everyday life. Imagine if the hedgerows were put back, and the dry-stone walls repaired. Imagine if beauty was brought back into the landscape – and most of the landscape, not just the protected areas.
To do this requires a wholesale reconfiguration of agricultural policy. The vested interests would no doubt protest that all of the above is just a romantic ideal, and a dangerous one at that. They would point to the need to produce food, and even argue that food security is of overriding importance. They would want to claim that this ideal is not remotely realistic. But they would be wrong. For what the vested