Queen’s Speech

My Lords, I shall follow the theme introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Soley, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester, by discussing some of the environmental issues that national policy has to address. I shall set them, however, in a global context, because all the environmental issues that we are likely to address are after all shared around the world. I should declare an interest in the sense that I chair a government programme called Living with Environmental Change—it is a government programme in that it is publicly funded. It is supported by all the research councils and a number of government departments and agencies. It takes an interdisciplinary approach to looking at the contribution that research and development in this country can make to some of these overarching environmental issues. I need not repeat—because we have heard already very eloquently—some of the climate change issues with which we are anyway familiar. But looking at environmental change more widely, one has to recognise the exploitation of our natural resources. Some would say that we have reached a point where we are in danger of tipping some of our life systems. We know that depletion of aquifers and other water sources is one of the greatest threats to humanity not very far into the future. Looking at the depletion of global fish stocks, we know that very few if any fish stocks can really be described as sustainable. One of the consequences of this environmental change is that with increasing urbanisation we are reducing the amount of land available for food production at the very time when our demand for food is rightly increasing. It is not just that the population is increasing: affluence is also increasing and with affluence comes the laudable objective of trying to achieve a standard of nutrition that we take for granted in the developed world. With these concerns comes the recognition that we have been profligate in felling forests with great consequences for climate change and loss of diversity. The World Wide Fund for Nature deserves some credit for having put forward so eloquently the concept of one-planet living, which aims to achieve a global society in which we live within the regenerative capacity of the planet's ecosystems and with an equitable distribution of resources. That puts it very well. In other words, we are urged to measure our ecological footprint and then find ways to reduce our adverse impact. There will always be some adverse impact: I am not suggesting that you can live without such an impact. The challenge is to plot a way of returning to economic growth, to which we all aspire, while using less of the planet’s resources and reducing our waste and emissions into soil, air and water. Clearly, we cannot use fossil fuel as prodigiously as in the past 100 years. Therefore, we need to move from using ancient sunlight captured millions of years ago and now fossilised or turned into oil. We need to move to a sun-based economy using today's sunlight. I do not mean solar panels: I mean using plants, which after all are biorefineries themselves and using them much more efficiently. If we develop biorefineries rather than oil refineries we will go some way towards a sustainable energy source. We have debated in recent months what we mean by the second generation of biofuels, and this is when we look at innovation and hope. I remain naïvely optimistic that innovation can and will deliver some real opportunities. There is an opportunity to turn the second generation of biofuels—any biodegradable waste whether lawn mowings, crop residues and much else—into fuel sources. Indeed, pilot schemes are already in existence. That removes the conflict that currently exists between food production and energy production. That is the agenda which I have tried to sketch out. We want to maintain our standard of living and others to match it. We want to turn to new energy sources which are less polluting, but we need above all to feed, house, and provide employment for an increasing world population, and we do so as water supplies are already overstretched. I agree so much with my noble friend Lady Shephard when she points out just how critical it will be to ensure that our agricultural resources are used to try to match that particular aim. I feel very strongly that we need not only to protect and conserve but to restore all our damaged habitats. We are only beginning to realise the scale of the danger in degrading biodiversity and losing opportunities that we do not yet understand might exist in the natural world. We have already tried some of the instruments that can achieve those overarching aims in the field of climate change such as trading schemes, financial instruments and, of course, regulation. However, I come back to innovation not as the sole solution but clearly an important and more positive aspect of regulation in trying to achieve these objectives. I suspect that those countries that move into the green economy faster than others will be doing themselves a great service. They will be exporting green technologies to others and producing clean power, clean water, clean air and healthy and abundant food. They will get the economic benefits. These green technologies will be as critical as information technology was when last we had a recession in the early 1990s when some say that the web and other such developments pulled us out of the recession. I recognise that the gracious Speech was a bit thin to say the least on the environmental measures that will help to achieve these overarching aims, but the Marine and Coastal Access Bill is certainly an important contribution. It is part of a much wider national and international agenda. At this very moment, the United Nations Climate Change Conference is going on in Poland and the United Kingdom has to ask what we can realistically contribute from our own perspective towards these issues which I have addressed and which are entirely global. I return to innovation. We have a very strong research base. Perhaps it is not as strong in the field of agricultural and environmental research as it was, but it should still be recognised. Agricultural and environmental research is only one aspect. Many of the problems will be dealt with by political economy and the social sciences. It is a multidisciplinary approach—a new approach to how one makes effective development. Research and development is the key to addressing many of these issues. It will not in itself be sufficient, but we need to ensure that our own management of research is spread inevitably and perfectly correctly between government departments and government agencies and new organisations such as the Technology Strategy Board, which will have an enormous influence in promoting the new and old technologies that are appropriate for so many of these causes. We need to ensure that we have an integrated approach to rolling out all these research and development opportunities.