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When it comes to the natural environment – the critical infrastructure on which all else depends – this sort of ambition is largely absent. There are two possible reasons. First, it might be widely assumed that there is not much economic gain from an ambitious transformation. Second, the ambition itself might be thought to be beyond our capabilities. People have lowered their sights: they simply expect it all to get worse, and at best not to get much worse.
Both of these are wrong. The economic gains from enhancing the natural infrastructure are considerable, and may be greater than some of those projected for physical infrastructures. A major enhancement is well within our grasp, and the costs are not that great in getting there, especially when compared with the costs of some of the physical infrastructure ambitions described above. If, for example, HS2 costs £50 billion and Crossrail 2, say, £25 billion, think what £75 billion of environmental enhancements might look like in comparison. Add in some all-too-predictable cost overruns and these two projects will cost over £100 billion. It is unlikely that the gains from the environmental enhancements would be less than those claimed for HS2 and Crossrail. It is not just a failure of imagination that holds us back, but also a basic failure to do the economics properly.
Part three of this book tackles the economics head-on, showing why the benefits exceed the costs, and in many cases way beyond the narrow margin for HS2. The trick turns out to be all about how to measure economic prosperity properly. Once the costs are seen to be less than the benefits, the funding and financial frameworks can and should fall into place.
But before we get into the economics, let’s raise our eyes to the prize itself: what our natural environment could look like in 2050. As with the measures necessary to halt the declines, more of the detail is provided in subsequent chapters; here we take a high-level look at the opportunities.
There are two ways of going about this exercise. The first is to focus on the outputs. This looks at what we can expect to get out of the natural environment in the future. The second is to look at the underlying state of the assets, and the opportunities these assets provide for future generations. The first is very much about utility and hence is utilitarian; the second is about the capabilities 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 interests cannot claim is that current agricultural policy is remotely economic, or even that it focuses on the core food products or provides for food security. The fact is that it isn’t economic. It is chronically inefficient, greatly distorting production. It is hard to think how the economic costs of the current agricultural systems could be more adverse. The vested interests would probably not want to admit that the net economic value of agriculture as it is – the agriculture that has produced the monochrome landscapes, destroyed insect life and led to great declines of farmland birds – is in fact approximately zero.
In chapter 4 the startling arithmetic will be set out, and it is this that needs to be compared with the prize of the colourful, beautiful, vibrant and noisy landscape we could have instead, with all the economic benefits it would bring.
The prize would have pay-offs beyond the landscape and biodiversity. The river catchments cannot live up to their potential, and hence their part of the prize, without dealing with the agricultural pollution and silt. The coasts cannot escape the plumes of algae from river mouths. That is why it all keeps coming back to agriculture: it is the key to an enhanced environment. Without a radical change the ambitions will be disappointed. The fact that it makes economic sense to do this brings the prize within our grasp.
Of all the natural capital that agriculture relies upon, soil plays a central role. Even holding the line here is a big ask. The Fenlands will carry on losing soil for a long time to come.
The prize is a healthy soil. Soil, like many marine habitats, may be largely out of sight, but it contains a mass of biodiversity, and it is the foundation of the food chains of almost everything else. The bacteria and fungi make plant growth possible. It harbours invertebrates and insect larvae. The prize of healthy soil is an economic necessity if farming is to continue, and if the broader biodiversity is to thrive. Even in the narrow context of carbon emissions the soil is critical. Improving the carbon content, which farmers have been depleting, increases the soil’s ability to support crops and helps in the battle against climate change. Economically it is yet another no-brainer.
Many of our uplands are a shadow of what they once were. To the untutored eye the rolling hills signify ‘wildness’ and ‘raw nature’ – they are anything but. These are managed landscapes, and they have been managed with specific interests in mind. These are mainly extensive agriculture and game in a mix of small marginal farms and large private estates. Our uplands are overgrazed by sheep and manicured for the shooting fraternity. Imagine if the heather moors were managed not just for grouse and deer, but also for the wider public benefit. Imagine if the hen harriers were not persecuted, so people could watch the male bird pass its prey in mid-air to the female, and watch as the birds hunt low over the land. Imagine if the wild flowers were given a chance by much reducing the uneconomic sheep densities. Imagine if deciduous trees thrived alongside the Scots pines and the larches, and dark and dense timber forests were diversified.
The costs of transforming our uplands are even lower than for the lowlands. Reducing grazing densities saves money. For the deer-stalking, the grouse and pheasant shoots, the problems are rather different. They are about incorporating the costs these activities give rise to, reducing the deer numbers and the destruction they cause, regulating the deposits of lead shot and the poor management of feed for the game birds, and enforcing the law. As so often happens when businesses do not pay for the pollution and environmental damage they cause, they get over-extended. Making the polluters pay would improve the management of the uplands. Making those who break the law face the consequences and pay the proper costs for crimes would be a big win for the economy and the overall economic prosperity of the uplands.
When it comes to the coasts, we are already on the way to opening up a path around the whole of England. Imagine what will have been achieved when this is finally in place. Imagine the economic gains it will bring to those whose health and well-being benefit, and to the tourist industry (which is much more economically significant than agriculture and without large subsidies). Imagine if the beaches were cleared of all their plastic rubbish; if the fish and the seabirds had enough to feed on; if fishing were managed for the long term; and if the cold-water corals and the underwater wonders were allowed to return to where they were before fish farms polluted them and trawling and dredging scoured them away. Imagine if there were no longer any need for Surfers Against Sewage, and it was no longer possible to see the algae plume from the Thames right out into the North Sea (joining the plume from the Rhine).
It might even be possible to make an economic merit out of cleaning up the beaches. It could be a form of national service, or a task taken on by local communities and local schools. They could take ownership of keeping their patch of the coastline clean, and in the process gain from the community involvement and mental health benefits – as well as the exercise it would involve. Many economic activities are outside the formal measured GDP, but they matter for prosperity.
Finally, imagine what our towns and cities could be like if we invested in their green infrastructure. Imagine how much healthier and more vibrant they might be. Imagine if every child had access to a green space within a few hundred metres of their home. Imagine if today’s developers actually built houses with proper back gardens. Imagine allotments for many more people, green roofs and green walls, and new and enlarged parks. Imagine if the parks were vibrant healthy environments, with lots of biodiversity, instead of the mown monochrome lawns. Imagine if plants were encouraged alongside railway lines, road verges and urban canals, and trees planted in every street. Imagine if nature’s much more messy beauty replaced the ugliness and sterility that straight lines and tidiness bring.
Britain’s gardens comprise an area the size of the Norfolk Broads, plus Exmoor, plus Dartmoor, plus the Lake District. Acres of Britain are gardens and they have an enormous potential as wildlife havens.
Indeed, they already are: gardens can be much more biodiverse than intensive agricultural land. Imagine if every garden had a small pond and a patch of wild flowers, besides the conventional palette of garden plants, fruits and vegetables. Imagine if all of these were chemical-free. This would be a great refuge for bumblebees and honey bees, lacewings and spotted flycatchers, swallows, frogs, newts and toads, and hedgehogs too. It would also bring many who have nature-deprived lives, and especially children, face to face with the beauty of nature. They might even dig up their concrete driveways and allow water to be absorbed by the ground, reducing flooding and creating sustainable drainage.
Putting all this together would create much greater genuine prosperity. It would be the right thing to do, because it would be both the economic thing to do and, in the process, would deliver the environment that many environmentalists who reject economic approaches would want too. It would also be ethically right, fulfilling our duty as stewards of the natural environment on behalf of future generations. There would be hen harriers and golden plovers and curlews and flycatchers, and there would be all sorts of plants, insects and other fauna.
It would not be a wild world, and it certainly would not be a ‘re-wilded’ world. It would be every bit as managed as it is today. Even those areas left aside would be deliberately chosen for intentional neglect. Deer would be culled, hedges would be reinstated and managed, rivers would be built around natural capital deliberately put in place, and city streets would be planted with trees. The prize is not an abandonment of the land to the ‘forces of nature’, but the replacement of a badly managed natural environment with a much better managed one. We have witnessed the disastrous consequences for people of taking the nature out of their lives, and we can redress this, but we cannot take the people out of nature.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this was what we could pass on to the next generation?
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Imagine waking up in May 2050. You might remember the May mornings before 2020. This was a time of bright yellow oilseed rape fields. There were still some swallows, a few swifts and the occasional cuckoo. In the right place you might have heard a curlew. If you were really lucky you might have seen a spotted flycatcher. In 2050 it will be very different if we go on as we are. By then, all these birds will be rarities. There will be even fewer insects, agriculture will be more intensive and the fields barren of anything but the chosen crop.
There will be 5 million more houses, and little left of the Green Belt, except perhaps in name. Lots more roads, railway lines, solar panels and wind turbines will have industrialised the countryside. There will be very few wild salmon left, but lots of fish farms and more Trump-style golf courses. Nature will be ever-more confined to reserved areas – like zoos in an increasingly urban and industrial landscape.
There will be compensations. You will have communications technologies that cannot even be imagined today, just as I have an iPhone now, which was unimaginable a couple of decades ago. Everything will be digital, with robots, 3D printing and artificial intelligence (AI) fulfilling many of your needs. You will know your genome, and have medical treatments available to you that again are hard to imagine now.
Some economists continue to think that the natural capital you will have lost is a price worth paying for all these new benefits. But much of this can’t be simply substituted, because natural capital is not like that, open to a marginal loss here and a marginal loss there. Nature isn’t marginal, and it does not come in discrete bits to trade off against discrete bits of man-made and human capital. Worse still, it might bite back: you may know your genome, but you might not have any antibiotics that work.
This is the silent, grey and impoverished natural world we could leave to the next generation. It is what it might look like if we don’t act now, and confront the stark reality that we face if current trends continue. We cannot and should not shy away from thinking through what will happen if we carry on damaging nature and allowing our stock of natural capital to continue to decline. It is not just about the loss of nature, and all the spiritual and emotional underpinnings to what makes us fully human, but about our economic prosperity, which depends on nature and natural capital. The land would be a dull, brown and unprosperous land – and a lot less appealing to share pictures of on whatever replaces Instagram by then. We really would need a virtual and screen-based reality to console ourselves with.
Being brown, not green, means a lower level of sustainable economic growth, and perhaps even no growth at all. It is against this background that the case for nature is to be seen as a great opportunity to make us all better off: better off in a narrow economic sense, as well as a wider sense. May 2050 could be noisier and more vibrant and exciting than May 2020, and more prosperous too. But not unless we make this happen.
A damaged inheritance
The decline of nature in Britain has been extensively documented by some of the world’s best naturalists. There are books about the decline of particular species, and studies and reports on the more general declines of life on farmland, uplands and in the soils. Even where things appear to have got better, as with water and urban air quality, some of this is not what it seems.
Much of this evidence is specific to particular species and habitats, and it is supplemented by anecdotes and personal memories, and in novels and films. It is a spiritual and aesthetic loss, as well as a scientific one. Laurie Lee’s world of Cider with Rosie in the Slad Valley in Gloucester, Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford, and the novels of Thomas Hardy describe a landscape full of colour and variety, with wild flowers, songbirds and elements that could almost be called wild, even though they are all man-made.
The early landscape painters and the Romantics eulogised nature and developed concepts of the ideal landscape and the picturesque, and Wordsworth underscores the special powers of the natural world to heal our minds – a point made repeatedly down the ages.
This art and literature, often dismissed as ‘romantic’, has a hard scientific foundation. Over the twentieth century the colour and vitality of the British landscape has been replaced by monotones of green, yellow and brown. There are dark and dense conifer forests, vivid green fertilised fields of grass, and the yellow and brown of cereal landscapes. The people have gone too: farmland, which makes up 70 per cent of the country, is now managed largely by fertilisers, agrichemicals and machines, and in time it might be autonomously farmed by robots. To the silent spring of the birds has been added the silence of people.
It has not all been downhill. The pea soup fogs have gone from the cities and the gross pollution of the mid-twentieth century has been gradually unwound. There are few rivers now that could be called biologically dead, as the Mersey and even parts of the Thames have been until relatively recently. Sewage is no longer dumped at sea, and DDT has been banned.
Some species have recovered, and these are often trumpeted as ‘successes’. The peregrine falcon is becoming quite common again (albeit as much in cities as in the uplands where illegal persecution remains); the buzzard has broken out of its southwestern enclaves; and the odd salmon has even made it up the Thames. The red kite is back in the Chilterns and mid-Wales, and is spreading fast. The cirl bunting has been pulled back from the brink of extinction in the southwest of England. Even the pine martens are showing tentative signs of recovery, and the fortunes of the otter have been transformed.
The optimists get terribly excited about these very visible improvements. Such success stories can be tracked, filmed and shown on screens, unlike the bulk of the biodiversity that lies beneath our feet in the soils. But welcome though they are, they don’t tell us much about the underlying adverse trends; nor do they indicate some quick and miraculous improvement. Like the climate sceptics who point to the odd colder year, or even just a cold snap, they mistake exceptions for the trend. It simply is not true to suggest that as people get richer, they reverse the declines and get back to anything like what has been lost. Ecosystems are complex; they require firm foundations, and many of the building blocks have been knocked away, diminishing resilience to what is coming. There is not much chance of simply going in reverse gear back to the status quo ante. We can’t just have a couple of hundred years of industrialisation, take a big environmental hit, and then, Humpty-Dumpty-like, try to put it all back together again. Nature doesn’t work like that: much has gone for good – because of us, and the inefficient short-term economy we have built.
The fundamental building blocks of natural capital – the soils, groundwater, the river catchments and the air – are not getting much better. Soils are still deteriorating from a terrible baseline; groundwater will continue to deteriorate for at least another 60 years even if we limit current pollution;
the carbon in the atmosphere has exceeded 400 parts per million and does not appear to have peaked;
and the mayflies in many rivers are now scarce. Statistically, adding more and more aliens as the globalisation of species plays out may increase the narrow measure of species biodiversity, but this is not the same thing as improving ecosystems. Counting species does not tell us much about the health of our environment. Zoos have lots of species, but not lots of nature.
While it is true that the chemicals applied to the land are sometimes used to a lesser extent than they once were, and in a narrow sense water quality has improved, in a dynamic ecosystem stopping pollution inputs does not halt the decline in the underlying assets. A tanker can stop its engines, but it will plough on for a long way before coming to a halt.
What is missing, and what matters, is the aggregate measure of the overall state of our natural capital, as well as the constituent parts, and the overall state of the natural environment that has been lost since the Industrial Revolution, and especially since the coming of industrial agriculture. A full picture will have to wait until proper national natural capital balance sheets have been developed and populated with good data. In time and with the explosion of new digital technologies to do the measuring, this will be possible and the numbers for the past can be added, in the way in which numbers for populations and economic performance in past centuries have been added to the national statistics by painstaking research.
In the absence of an aggregate, the best that can be done is to piece together the evidence for the main categories of our natural capital. This is something that naturalists and conservationists and ecologists have been doing for a long time. There are bird atlases, plant atlases, insect and butterfly atlases, and reptile and amphibian atlases, and there are New Naturalist studies on specific species and habitats. The non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have brought much of this together in the ‘State of Nature’ reports, led by the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds).
Steps to develop more comprehensive databases, using the full panoply of digital mapping techniques, will shortly give us a real-time and extremely detailed understanding of exactly what is going on.
This is not the place to try to provide a comprehensive summary. It is both beyond the scope of this book, and well beyond the abilities of an economist to construct. The direction of travel is, however, pretty clear, and it is this that we need to bear in mind in being realistic about the baselines, the scale of the challenges, and the disastrous consequences that will follow if we do nothing to hold the line.
More declines
The easy bit is the non-renewables which, as the name implies, can be used once.
Nature has endowed us with them – they are natural – but they do not renew themselves except over geological time. They include the coal, iron ore, tin, oil and gas upon which our economy has been built and remains utterly dependent. Unsurprisingly, we know a lot about them. There are detailed measurements of the volumes mined and extracted, and there is also price data. This least interesting dimension of natural capital is the easiest to measure. It is also the dimension of which, by 2050, much will have been exhausted or, in the case of coal, oil and gas, hopefully left in the ground. In chapter 10, we will see that we should compensate future generations for what we have consumed, and for the legacy of carbon and other mineral pollution we have left behind from our largely selfish use of these non-renewables.
When it comes to the really important stuff, the renewables – the natural capital that nature can keep on giving us for ever – there are two obvious starting points. The first is the bits we are familiar with: the birds, plants, mammals, fish and invertebrates. The second, the one we concentrate on throughout, is the habitats and ecosystems, including the river catchments, the farmed lands, the uplands, the coasts and the urban areas.
How bad could the river catchments get in a business-as-usual scenario? Think of the stresses they already face. If you drink tap water in London it is often said that it may have already been through up to seven people.
That water will have been abstracted from rivers and cleaned of all the chemicals that have leached into it, and will be again after your sewage has been collected, processed and discharged back into the river. It might also include raw sewage from storm overflows. The sewage, before it is treated, will be contaminated with pharmaceutical products. Take a look in the cupboard under your sink. See the cleaning fluids you put down the sink and the toilet. Take a look in your bathroom at all the products you use. Many of these end up down the plughole, and we all just expect the environment – in this case the rivers – to absorb them. You turn on the tap and you expect clean water to flow. You water your garden and wash the car with this costly, treated water, and you don’t want to pay much for it.
Yet that is just the beginning. We go on tipping more and more fertilisers, pesticides and herbicides into our watercourses, and allow the silt to run off the land from intensive farming practices. Industry adds its pollution too. Add all the plastic and other rubbish that gets thrown in and you can see the results alongside any major river.
Now add another quarter-century of all this. Add more and more chemicals, and more demand for more water for everything from land irrigation to servicing the expanding population. The National Infrastructure Commission
recommends a new water grid to connect major rivers just to meet demand (and without much regard for the environmental consequences of the mixing of waters).
Now add climate change on top. You may be confused by the various claims about the impacts of climate change. Droughts, floods and plagues make the headlines, and dire warnings may induce scepticism or, worse, fatalism, but behind the hysteria lie some very inconvenient predictions. Heat in summer means more demand for water.
Floods in winter mean more silt and more pollution. The river life is adapted to what we have, not the climate we might get. For the river catchments, business-as-usual for another quarter of a century looks bad.
Agriculture plays a big part in both water demand and pollution and much else. A common theme in all these sad tales of decline is the impacts of modern farming not just on specific species, but on farmland birds generally and on the state of our rivers and on inshore marine environments and on the emissions and air-quality consequences and on the loss of invertebrates and mammals and the serious decline in the soils. It is beyond doubt that it is the intensification of farming, and in particular the application of chemicals, that is a primary driver of this major environmental damage.
By 2050, targeted chemicals should be able to get rid of almost anything that competes with or damages crops. Indeed, many can now. Almost all arable weeds (and in some robotic applications every individual weed) can be killed off with the non-selective herbicide glyphosate. That is why one well-known brand is called ‘Roundup’. As glyphosate comes under increasing regulatory scrutiny, replacements are on their way. Without a change of direction in agriculture, by 2050 herbicides will be completely and selectively engineered for specific crops, and pesticides will finish off specific insects. Ultimately nothing will be left for wildlife to eat. By 2050 it will largely be over.
The uplands will not escape these pressures in the business-as-usual scenario. Being home to a lot of biodiversity now does not mean they will continue to be so. The economics of marginal upland farming is already precarious. If and when the main elements of the CAP wither away, and in the absence of proactive efforts to protect and enhance the uplands, things could go downhill very quickly. This farmed landscape could revert to ranch-style extensive farming, to intensive game-shooting and to development. Worse still, it might simply be abandoned. The rewilders might like this idea. Let the scrub grow back and then the woodlands re-clothe the hills. Except it will not be like this. The uplands are farmed landscapes. It is farmers who have shaped the landscapes that so many people, and so much of nature, enjoy. Farmers created the hedgerows, and the ditches and the lanes and the meadows. Grazing stock is the essence of the uplands. Woodland birds and woodland mammals might benefit, but this will not conserve the nature and landscapes we so admire today. By 2050 the uplands may be playgrounds still, but not the playgrounds we know now. Few think that zero subsidies will produce a helpful answer, except those who simply want us humans to abandon the land.
The impacts of farm pollution are exacerbated by other developments. Fish farms bring direct pollution to our coasts, and perhaps even more pernicious is the harvesting of sand eels and other small marine life to feed the farmed salmon. Direct pollution from shipping, from oil slicks and the washing of tanks at sea (including now palm oil), to the illegal dumping of waste and chemicals, all contribute to the declines. Plastics have become ubiquitous in our seas and along our coasts. Their sources are all largely out of sight, diffuse, and able to escape the law.
These are largely out of control. By 2050, with lots more trade and shipping, with lots more fish farms, and with global warming impacting on already stressed ecosystems, there may be no puffins, few gulls, and below the surface a more lifeless habitat. By 2050, eels and wild salmon might be an occasional rarity, as their populations decline below the thresholds for renewing themselves naturally.
The threats to our urban environment out to 2050 are about both its size and its content. There can be little doubt there is going to be a lot more ‘urban’ in 25 years’ time. More greenfield and brownfield sites
will be built on, new villages and towns will be built, and the built land area will absorb more and more of the Green Belt. There will be quite a lot of semi-urban sprawl for the ‘executive homes’ so beloved and profitable to the building companies. It is not inevitable that all of these developments will have less biodiversity than the land they concrete over. But concrete they will, and without strong net environmental gain compensations, the aggregate impacts are probably going to be worse. For every showcase green development project, there are many that are anything but.
In terms of the content of urban areas, the temptation to concrete over the green spaces in our towns and cities will become increasingly intense. The parks and gardens are going backwards for a variety of reasons, and over the next quarter of a century, if we carry on as we are, these will gradually disappear. What remain may be turned into amusement parks, and nature will get squeezed out. Brownfield sites, even where they have surprisingly high levels of biodiversity, will go under concrete.
What is coming next
The above stock-taking is a picture of general declines, with some noticeable exceptions. Almost all of the causes are known and persistent, and all can and should be dealt with. Yet what dramatically raises the stakes are the new challenges the natural environment is facing. Without positive action, all the trends described above will continue. It will be a picture of gradual declines, punctuated by sudden population collapses and occasional trumpeted successes. As resilience is tested, one day you will look up and there won’t be any swallows and swifts in May. The scary thing is that you might not even notice. For the next generation, it may be a case of not missing what they have never seen, except in pictures and films.
These extrapolated trends could get a whole lot worse without immediate action. Over the next few decades through to mid-century, Britain faces a rising population, and rising consumption. These together mean more houses, more developments and more hard infrastructures. On a business-as-usual basis, the results will in aggregate be negative for the natural environment. It is not only the present baseline that needs to be addressed, but also the ‘known unknowns’, and resilience against the ‘unknown unknowns’ of the future.
More people
Britain is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, even though large areas are sparsely inhabited. There are the great conurbations, and then there are the Scottish mountains, the Pennines and mid-Wales. Although London and the surrounding area is being overtaken in scale by the mega cities of Southeast Asia, the southeast is as densely populated as parts of the Netherlands and Hong Kong. The corridor that runs north to Birmingham and Manchester is dense too, and HS2 will make it more so. The new Oxford–Cambridge corridor, with more than 1 million new houses planned, is going to add another dense conurbation. The clamour to build on the Green Belt is getting ever louder.
In the 1970s and especially the 1980s, the assumption was that Britain’s population would peak and then perhaps gradually decline, and in the process it would age. The assumption was that Britain would go the way of Japan and Germany – with an ageing, static or even declining population. British women have already gone through the so-called ‘demographic transition’, and the silver lining to the silver age should be less pressure on resources. The depopulation of the rural areas that followed the great urbanisation of Britain in the nineteenth century, indeed since the enclosures, would continue relieving environmental pressures. We could, it was thought, become an older, less populated and greener country.
This has been turned on its head by immigration. For much of its recent history, and especially in the nineteenth century, Britain exported people (and Ireland more so). The displaced rural populations colonised the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and countries throughout the British Empire. It was the safety valve as mortality rates fell.
Britain started the twentieth century with a population of around 25 million, and ended it with around 60 million. Nature was bound to suffer as a result, especially as the 60 million were many times wealthier than the 25 million. Immigration picked up as the Empire slowly wound down, with notable flows from the Caribbean and then Uganda and East Africa, and from India and Pakistan.
The initial numbers were quite small, but the game changed in the twenty-first century. European immigration was added to the non-Europeans, notably after 2004 when the Eastern European countries joined the EU, and freedom of movement applied to them. Britain made few objections at the time, and assumed that immigration from Eastern Europe would be marginal – perhaps 50,000 per annum – and would enhance economic growth.
The immigration figures started to edge up from the mid-2000s, reaching a gross 600,000 per annum in 2014/15, with net migration peaking at over 300,000. Such levels are unprecedented in British history. Net migration is still around 250,000 per annum (the average since 2004), with non-Europeans taking up the slack as European net migration falls.
Few societies find it easy to cope with what now could be described as mass immigration, and for Britain it was a crucial factor leading to the Brexit vote. The political ambition is clearly now to limit the number of European immigrants. Whether this objective is met, those who are here in the main expect to stay, and there will still be positive net immigration for years, and perhaps decades, from non-European countries.
There are two effects on the natural environment. The first is the aggregate resources, including housing and infrastructure, that will be required to address the needs of a growing population. The second is the impact on composition. By 2020 the population is expected to reach 67 million, rising to 77 million by 2050.
Although this population will continue to age, it will have more young people than anticipated a couple of decades ago. The European immigrants have turned out to be young and well educated. For the European and non-European immigrants, birth rates are typically higher than for the rest of the population. We have built population growth into the long term.
Without mitigating action now, the environmental consequences of some 10 million extra people will be a repeat of what happened throughout the twentieth century. They will place 10 million more demands on the environment for consumption – for water, energy, housing and food. They will have a higher standard of living than those in the twentieth century, and therefore they will consume more per head. This is the equivalent to adding one more London, and one that is wealthier at that. None of this suggests that immigration is a bad thing: these extra people would have an environmental impact wherever they live, just as we do. The important point is that if we want a green and prosperous land, we have to factor in the inevitable consequences of a growing population.
More houses
With the growth of population has come an assumption that Britain needs more houses, and all the main political parties have committed to building more. The Conservative and Labour parties are competing to come up with ever-higher targets. These extra houses could pose a great challenge to the natural environment, and the impacts depend on where and how they are built and what supporting infrastructure is provided. On a business-as-usual basis, it could mean more ribbon development, more incursions into the Green Belt, more loss of greenfield land and more traffic and associated infrastructures. Every city, town and rural village is getting houses added and, with housing a political imperative, there is so far scant evidence that the environment is going to do anything other than suffer, as it did in the 1930s with the creation of ribbon development and suburbs, and in the 1960s too. There is little beauty in this business-as-usual world.
The increase in population does mandate more houses, but the demand for houses is more complicated. Britain has a high level of owner occupation (even if it is falling), and owning a house is the main way in which citizens acquire wealth by what is in effect forced savings. British people want to own houses, in addition to needing housing. It is still a core part of the ‘British dream’ for young families, in a way that young Germans would not appreciate, even as fewer can afford it.
The emphasis on ownership reinforces a further trend, which is household break-up. More people are choosing to live alone and still own houses, and this is reflected in a fall in occupancy rates. Whether there are enough houses to go around depends on how many people live in each of them.
The point about occupancy rates drives a wedge between the simple equation of population and the number of houses needed. It gets worse: as people get richer they want bigger houses; they want more privacy and seclusion, and they may even want more than one house. The constraint on housing demand is income. House builders know this. It is one of the reasons why they prefer to build large ‘executive homes’ and not affordable small ones.
Changes in housing size and occupancy in turn have implications for the environmental footprint. A row of small tenements or blocks of apartments and flats in inner cities have radically lower environmental impacts than those of larger houses and housing estates on the periphery of towns and cities. Dense urban housing creates fewer carbon emissions and less traffic, and brings economies of scale and density. Imagine a world where most people lived in cities, and most of these in the city centres. It would be a world of public transport, not private cars, and of radically greater energy efficiency. It would leave most of the rest of the land open and green, and indeed it would create more scope to green the suburbs with lots of natural capital for these urban populations to enjoy.
