Wednesday, 30th June 2010
European Biodiversity in a Global Context
(Delivered in the European Parliament, 30 June 2010)
Established in 1994 with the support of IUCN - the International Union for Conservation of Nature - the cross- party Intergroup on Climate Change, Biodiversity & Sustainable Development now enjoys the greatest support of any parliamentary intergroup. We have more than 200 MEP members and were formally endorsed by the EPP-ED, the Socialists & Democrats, the ALDE Group and my own ECR Group. With a first class secretariat provided by EBCD (The European Bureau for Conservation & Development) we have provided a dynamic forum for MEPs to learn, debate and create policy geared towards maintaining and enhancing biodiversity, fighting climate change, while aiming always for sustainable development.
This is the Year of Biodiversity and it is a sad fact that scientists reckon we are suffering the worst biodiversity loss this year that the world has ever known. They believe that between 150 and 200 species are being lost every 24 hours. Much of those losses can be attributed to climate change. We need to teach the public that biodiversity is valuable; it has an economic, social, aesthetic and practical value from which every one of us individually benefits. Biodiversity services purify the air we breathe, act as a global air conditioning system, provide us with rainfall and oxygen and fertilise plants. We have never put a price tag on these ecosystem services because they are invaluable. But sadly, some people think that anything that is free has no value and therefore can be exploited and abused.
Now we are learning that these things do have a cost and we are paying the price! Mankind's greatest ever contribution to the planet has sadly been a negative one...global warming! Thousands of years from now, if earth survives, the only remaining trace of our current civilisation will be our carbon footprint. Over the next quarter century, global energy consumption is forecast to grow by 61%. Over 2 billion people still do not have access to any power at all.
If oil at over $80 per barrel is painful for us, it is an impossible agony for developing countries. If we continue to rely on fossil fuels as our main energy source, we will exacerbate world poverty, face catastrophic increases in global temperatures, create freak weather conditions and cause sea levels to rise by over 1 metre, wiping out tens of millions of people worldwide.
We have to change. Reducing CO2 emissions by 20% in Europe by 2020 is a start, but it is not nearly enough. We need to aim for zero CO2 emissions and the technology is already here to achieve this goal. The current oil, gas and coal technologies are in their twilight years. They are sunset technologies. You need only look at the Gulf of Mexico to see that drilling for oil in environmentally sensitive areas is completely untenable. That rules out oil exploration in the Arctic. Arnold Schwarzenegger has even ruled out further exploratory drilling off the coast of California.
Even nuclear power, which is an almost CO2 emission free energy provider, cannot provide the answer. It would require an estimated 200,000 new nuclear plants around the world to replace the base load energy currently provided by coal, oil and gas. The capital costs, security risks and unresolved question of nuclear waste storage, render such a prospect obsolete. Of course nuclear power will play a role in any CO2 emission-free future, but the role will be nominal rather than significant.
Carbon is the enemy and reducing carbon emissions is the main task confronting the world. If we don’t get it right we will face a new challenge of environmental refugees; people fleeing drought and famine brought about by global warming.
We will have to work in partnership with third countries outside the EU to encourage them to join in a sustainable, low carbon future. A low carbon economy can create new jobs and prosperity. On the other hand, the cost of doing nothing will be one order of magnitude greater than the cost of tackling climate change now. We need to invest a lot more resources into developing the hydrogen economy which, I believe, will be the next great industrial revolution.
Nevertheless in the meantime we have to take care that the policies we pursue are sustainable. The drive to produce biofuels is causing global deforestation, which as well as releasing massive quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere, could also lead directly to global famine. We are potentially creating a bigger global problem than we set out to resolve. In the US, vast quantities of maize are being converted to bio-ethanol. This in turn has led to huge tracts of the Amazonian rainforest being burned to make way for growing maize and soya as food crops to make up the shortfall.
Meanwhile the Indonesian rain forest is being torn up to make way for biofuel crops like palm oil to supply the EU market. Such policies are thus destroying the world’s air conditioning system while at the same time releasing millions of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. Another leading cause of CO2 emissions is deforestation, which is responsible for more greenhouse gas than all the world’s cars, trucks, planes and boats combined.
Greed instead of care for the environment has become the defining feature of our strategy for tackling climate change and the race to biofuels is potentially threatening the lives of millions of people as the global population soars from its present 6 billion to an estimated 9 billion by 2050. An extra 6 million people are born every month. By 2030 the world population will have expanded by such an extent that we will require a 50% increase in food production to meet anticipated demand. By 2080 global food production would need to double. But the reality is that an area the size of the Ukraine is being taken out of agricultural food production every year due to drought and as a direct consequence of climate change. Global food production is declining rather than expanding and our headlong rush to produce biofuels is taking even more land out of food production.
Linked directly to this argument on sustainability is the question of renewable energy. Allowing windfarms to be developed on peatland is a catastrophic mistake and will cause irreversible damage. Peatlands form a crucial part of the world’s air conditioning system. Peatlands and wetland ecosystems accumulate plant material under saturated conditions to form layers of peat soil up to 20 metres thick – storing on average 10 times more carbon per hectare than other ecosystems. Peatlands occur in 180 countries and cover 400 million hectares or 3% of the world’s surface. Scotland, Finland and Ireland have a unique role to play in preserving and maintaining this global resource. Over one sixth of the world’s blanket bog is located in Scotland.
Nevertheless in the headlong rush to cut carbon emissions the EU and the UK government are throwing money into renewable energy without any coherent planning strategy to determine where wind farms should and shouldn’t be built. The result is that there are dozens of outstanding planning applications to build giant wind turbines on blanket peat bog in Scotland, causing immense damage to the environment and releasing vast quantities of CO2 – in other words achieving the exact opposite of what was intended!
We need to pay more attention to the ecosystem services provided by different aspects of our EU environment such as the peat bogs of Scotland, Ireland and Finland and the great cork oak forests of Portugal, Spain and France. These bogs and forests act as carbon sumps, absorbing and storing carbon for centuries. They form an essential part of our global air-conditioning system and we cannot allow them to deteriorate or to be destroyed by development.
