I write this with my T-shirt still sodden with rain. After the driest spring in 69 years, the water butts in my garden ran dry in May. Normally, that happens in July or August or not at all. Desperate for rain, then, I was eagerly anticipating this week’s thunderstorms.
Thunderstorms in May. Normally they happen in July, or… you get the picture. After a few false starts and distant rumbles, when the storm finally broke I rushed around checking that the water butts were filling, releasing gutter debris, and adding buckets below spots notorious (to me, at any rate) for overflows. This is climate adaptation on a domestic scale. If you want to see what running around with buckets looks like on a national scale, keep reading. (Spoiler: no one is running. And they forgot the bucket.)
The output of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) under Labour has been scattergun. Since the turn of the year, we’ve had the Land Use Consultation for England, which was broadly welcomed and described by writer George Monbiot as a “once in a lifetime opportunity”. But then came the Planning and Infrastructure Bill, which Becky Pullinger, head of land use planning at the Wildlife Trusts, said “stands to rip up the very foundations of our wildlife protection laws”.
Wild beaver releases and new homes to be fitted with solar panels: both great. The Climate Change Committee (CCC) finding that the UK’s preparations for climate change are “inadequate... piecemeal and disjointed”, and Defra scrapping the Sustainable Farming Incentive scheme: both terrible. So, what are we to make of Britain’s current environmental policy?
The Planning and Infrastructure Bill could allow house builders to build on any area of natural beauty or urban greenery, as long as they pay an offset to restore a patch of land somewhere else. Leaders of 33 horrified environmental charities signed an open letter calling for environment secretary Steve Reed to make urgent amendments. “We are very worried,” Pullinger tells me. The bill “weakens the environmental legislation that protects our most important sites and species”.
To get to the ideological heart of this, think back to Keir Starmer’s articles in the Times and the Sun promising to “cut the weeds of regulation and let growth bloom” and to never cave in to “drum-banging, finger-wagging Net Zero extremists”. The clear policy objective is “economic growth at all costs”. Beavers and solar panels begin to look like bones thrown to appease environmentalists. The idea of cutting environmental red tape is just another dog whistle to win over Reform voters (who aren’t being won over), as it was never the issue for developers anyway. The government’s own impact assessment finds “very limited data on how environmental obligations affect development”.
“The rhetoric we’ve seen, particularly from the Treasury and Number 10 on planning, has been incredibly unhelpful,” says Pullinger. As for the speed of legislation and announcements splurging out of Defra, she says that “there are lots of spinning plates in environmental policy” and “what we still don’t have is that coherent vision that cuts across all of government”.
“Growth, of course, means money in people’s pockets, but it also means nature's recovery,” she adds.
The CCC’s April report on progress in adapting to climate change, which updates every two years, similarly took the unusual step (for an apolitical, independent body) of quoting Labour’s manifesto back to it: “The current government’s manifesto promised to ‘improve resilience and preparation across central government, local authorities, local communities, and emergency services’... Our assessment finds little evidence of a change of course.” This isn’t mere “finger-wagging”, to borrow Starmer’s phrase. Under the Climate Change Act (2008) the UK government, of whatever colour or form, has an obligation to prepare the country for the effects of climate change. Yet despite producing these reports since 2010, the CCC still does not “find evidence to score a single outcome [on adaptation] as ‘good’”.
Consider that the Planning and Infrastructure Bill legislation puts urban green spaces at risk of development, even though urban green spaces are essential for climate adaptation as they cool the urban heat island effect. The CCC report finds “a key policy gap” in action on tackling urban heat—so rather than closing that gap, we could see it further widening.
A freedom of information request submitted by the BBC found there are 18 members of staff working full-time on climate adaptation at Defra; just 0.3 per cent of the department’s nearly 6,600 staff. Richard Millar, head of adaptation at the CCC, tells me that for many areas of government “this just isn’t a priority” despite the fact that any policy or department you care to name “will be at risk from climate change”.
An overarching climate policy framework could emerge from consultations on land use and the resulting framework, which promises to replace “a haphazard approach” to how we use land in Britain with one that balances food security, development, nature and climate. Key to this is splitting up land into zones—of arable land, grassland and woodland, for example—and, in short, giving over more of it to nature.
The land use consultation gauged views on options such as “small changes”, for instance introducing more nature strips on the margins of fields and rivers, which could improve 1 per cent (500 square kilometres) of land in England. Or larger changes, such as growing trees alongside food production (4 per cent, or 3,700 square kilometres).
These are the discussions we now need to have. What is our land used for; and, given growing the climate pressures of drought and flood, how can we adapt and protect ourselves? The CCC’s report for Wales puts it even more clearly: “The Welsh Government… needs to support farmers and rural communities to diversify their incomes away from livestock farming and towards woodland creation and peatland restoration.”
The CCC describes the state of the UK’s natural environment as “a proxy for its overall resilience to climate extremes”, and one that “continues to decline despite environmental improvement goals”. Seemingly every Defra report now mentions that the UK is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.
The rather literal canary in the coalmine for climate change is the 38 million birds that have vanished from our skies in the last 50 years. One in six of all plant and animal species assessed by the State of Nature report—compiled by NGOs, conservation bodies and research institutes—are at risk of being lost, too. Whether we can turn such figures around will show us if we are on track for climate adaptation, climate resilience and fulfilling the Climate Change Act (2008). Economic growth at the cost of nature would be the death of us all.
