Green and Prosperous Land

There are various ways of going about this. We could start at the species end or we could start at the habitat and ecosystem end. In practice it will be both. This book looks in detail at each of the main habitats – the river catchments, the landscapes and agriculture, the uplands, the coasts and the urban countryside. But first let’s just take a preliminary look at each to get a handle on the overall prize.

Stopping the environmental damage in river catchments starts with the chemical inputs into rivers and the silting from soil erosion. As urban centres developed and the Industrial Revolution got going, rivers were treated as sewers. The Great Stink of London in July and August 1858 is but one example of what was going on in all the great rivers that had the misfortune to flow through towns and cities. The Taff in Wales and the Mersey in northwest England died because of mining and industrial effluent.

Both of these forms of gross pollution have been tackled at source, but sewage still ends up in rivers and industrial pollution remains in some pockets. The river sediments contain lots of heavy metals, and many estuaries – like the Thames – have serious residuals. Dredging to develop the new Thames Gateway container port revealed its scale. Halting the decline means not only stopping further pollution, but also dealing with the continued and long-lasting damage it has caused. We have to deal with not only our mess, but that of previous generations too.

When it comes to sewerage, existing systems continue to overflow in heavy rain through the storm overflows. Stopping the declines means increasing the capacity to contain sewage and prevent overflows. The Thames Tideway aims to do just that, carrying it all to the east of London to the Beckton Sewage Treatment Works. What happens there continues to be a problem, and the estuary remains the final repository. For many sewerage works, it means going down the natural capital route with reed beds and other natural options, and dealing with the sewage at source too. This is both cost-reducing, so our water bills don’t go up, and it creates great habitats for birds, insects, amphibians and aquatic life. The phosphates the water-treatment works pump out into the rivers need to be reduced, partly by stopping them at source from getting into the river in the first place, and partly by better treatment.

The decline of heavy industry and the development of sewerage systems have put a stop to some of the grossest pollution, but river pollution is a moving target. Since the middle of the twentieth century, intensive and agrichemical agriculture has done immense damage. Stopping the further declines here means the creation of significant buffers between the rivers and the arable fields, limiting fertilisers near rivers, putting an end to maize and cereal crops close to rivers to stop the silting, and seriously controlling the application of pesticides and herbicides. It means stopping the treatment of sheep with chemicals near rivers upstream, and it means strict controls of slurry storage to prevent it ending up in the rivers. All are economically good things to do anyway, and this prize will make all our rivers assets rather than liabilities.

Agricultural impacts on the land continue the degradation of the environment more generally, perversely incentivised by the subsidy regime. The decline in insect life is one of the major impacts, and this has contributed to the falling populations of farmland birds. The soils are often in a poor state and are in many areas deteriorating, and this is bad for farming productivity. Hedgerows and field boundaries do not look after themselves. Doing nothing allows the degradation to go on. Stopping the further damage in agriculture requires quite radical surgery. Fortunately, in such heavily subsidised industries the costs of changing practices are low, and especially so when compared with the benefits. Arguably, these improvements can be made and less public money can be spent – much more for less. The prize is a healthier and more vibrant farmed landscape at lower cost, and hence we will be doubly better off as a result.

Because they are harder to plough up, because the weather is less benign to farming, and because the soils are poorer and thinner, the uplands often remain the last bastions of once-widespread wildlife. Once-common lowland birds, like red kites and even house sparrows, have been pushed back to the uplands, back behind the natural constraints that limit intensive farming. Unfortunately, even though upland agriculture is barely, if at all, economic, it has been environmentally damaging. This can and has to stop. Intensive sheep grazing has seriously damaged much of the remaining habitats, stripping the vegetation and exposing peat to the elements. Stopping further damage means reducing sheep intensity, as well as preventing slurry, sheep-dip and other pollutants from entering the rivers. Because the sheep are of very little economic value, the costs of this surgery are negligible. Sheep sale value minus all the various subsidies equals zero, or even less than zero. There is economic gain to be made here.

Stopping the declines along our coasts again comes back in part to agriculture. Most environmental things do. It requires dealing with the run-off of fertilisers, phosphates, pesticides and herbicides, and also dealing with the declines caused by overfishing, by fishing that damages the seabed, and by a wide range of pollution. As with farming, subsidies and especially regulation are an important part of the current system, and the economic value of Britain’s fishing catch, net of supports, is very low. In many areas the obvious answer is simply to ban fishing in exclusion zones. This will mean more fish and a larger sustainable catch than that provided in a business-as-usual scenario. In other areas it needs sustainable fishing plans, which are properly enforced, so that stocks can recover.

In the emerging aquaculture industries, the initial ‘wild west’ of the salmon farms has had serious environmental costs that the producers first denied, and still neither fully pay for nor take sufficient mitigating action against. Indeed, in the west of Scotland this economically inefficient damage is accelerating. Stopping the further damage means sustainable regulations and making the polluters pay. This is all the more important as aquaculture in general is growing and can make a greater contribution to food production over the coming decades, provided the environmental impacts are taken fully into account.

In the urban areas, halting the declines means stopping the further erosion and loss of green spaces, and the chipping-away and degradation of public parks and gardens. It means preventing further loss of urban trees, most notoriously exemplified by Sheffield City Council cutting down thousands of mature trees in the name of utility works. The lack of a full statutory duty to preserve urban green spaces is a serious threat, as councils struggle to pay for social care and other increasing demands on their budgets. Green streets and green parks have very large economic benefits.

What all these measures, which will be elaborated on in subsequent chapters, have in common is that they are all ways of increasing prosperity immediately. They are all sensible economic policies, as well as making a better and greener world. Improving rivers improves our drinking water, and stopping further pollution reduces our water bills since less treatment is needed. Indeed, so great are the economic benefits that some water companies are already paying farmers not to pollute, and to keep the ground covered with crops and grass over winter. Sewage in the river from overflows directly affects people’s welfare. It is not only a health hazard, it deters people from the riverbanks, from exercise and therefore from the health and well-being benefits.

Measures to clean up agricultural pollution would result in seriously large economic gains. Much of the pollution is encouraged and paid for by us as taxpayers. It is heavily subsidised and, as we shall see in chapter 4, reforming agricultural policies to ensure that subsidies are only for the provision of public goods is sound economics. When it comes to the uplands, the subsidy element becomes overwhelming. We pay taxes to subsidise the overgrazing of sheep that are simply not economic. We even subsidise sheep that get live-exported to Europe, with all the animal welfare consequences that such transportation brings. Stopping the damage by reducing grazing intensity would increase the economic value of the uplands, and if the subsidies went towards public goods instead, the economic prosperity of the hill farmers would improve. They are trapped in a system that keeps many of them both poor and marginal.

Stopping overfishing, particularly of shellfish, around our coasts improves the value of the fisheries, and helps to solve the classic free-rider problem that the ‘tragedy of the commons’ reflects.[2] It will increase fish stocks generally inside and outside the protected areas. Unregulated fishing is a disaster for the industry and the public and, as with the upland farmers, inshore-water fishers do not come off well. They are at the economic margins. The economic prosperity of coastal communities is much more about services, tourism and amenities, and these in turn improve the health of the population. But even where it is about catching fish, protected areas excluding fishing is in their interests.

Stopping the environmental decline in cities is an economic no-brainer. The health benefits of access to green space are well documented. It bears directly on mental health, on the quality of the air and hence on limiting respiratory diseases, and it increases physical activity and therefore helps to fight obesity. The costs of these diseases and the bad health outcomes are considerable; the costs of holding on to green spaces is trivial in comparison.

No more declines means more economic value – now. In narrow terms, it is worth achieving. Prosperity goes up if we halt the damage. Yet it is not going to happen on its own. The reason why we can go on depleting the natural environment is that there is little pressure to pay for its capital maintenance. Where physical infrastructure is concerned, it is obvious that failure to carry out the necessary maintenance is economically costly. The potholes in the roads not only cause damage to cars and bikes, they undermine the roads themselves. Eventually they have to be fixed, and because the early damage is often left unchecked, the eventual repair costs escalate. Similar issues arise with the maintenance of water pipes, sewage-treatment works, railway lines and signalling, and electricity distribution cables.

Exactly the same economic logic applies to the natural environment. Failure to maintain natural capital stores up problems for the future, and stores up extra costs too. We can pretend, like the company that allows its buildings and machines to deteriorate and reports inflated profits as a result, that we can spend the gross surpluses, when economics tells us we should do our accounting properly, and set aside the costs of the maintenance. It is simple: not to do proper capital maintenance is to live beyond our means, and store up trouble, leading to lower living standards for the future. This is precisely what we have been doing: living off nature’s bounty without recognising the thresholds and safe limits.

It works for a while. Sometimes it works for a long time. But eventually it catches up with us. The farmers who fail to take care of their soils will run into trouble eventually. The Fens will one day cease to deliver,[3] just as swathes of the badlands in the USA did in the 1930s, and China’s expanding deserts are today.The loss of pollinators will cost farmers dear, and the loss of the urban parks is already having a detrimental impact on health. Just because we do not account for these costs properly does not mean they are going to go away.

The first part of the prize – no more declines – is best seen as basic housekeeping. It will save us from a lot of costs later and provide natural capital to future generations that is at least as good as we inherited ourselves. This book sets out the sorts of measures necessary to achieve this – all practical and economic.

Enhancements

The gains from stopping the declines pale almost into insignificance when compared with the gains from enhancing the natural environment – not just holding the line, but improving our ecosystems across the board. This is the real prize for the next generation.

If you ask what the main physical infrastructure networks of Britain will look like in 2050, in every case the answer is both different and much enhanced compared with now. Take the electricity system. By 2050 it will be digitalised and decentralised, and linked into the transport system and electric cars. It will be transformed from the passive, centrally controlled electricity grid of today. Take communications. By 2050 it will all be fibre; we can expect to have massively enhanced 5G mobile and fibre networks. Train networks will be more integrated at the international level, and there may be High Speed 2 (HS2), Crossrail 2 and full electrification, whether overhead or with batteries. Roads will be intelligent digital highways. We have a National Infrastructure Commission to look into all this and come up with a 30-year plan to present to each parliament.[4]

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 were to cost in excess of £56 billion and Crossrail 2, say, £25 billion, think what more than £80 billion of environmental enhancements might look like in comparison. Add in some all-too-predictable cost overruns and these two projects will cost well 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.[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.