Introduction
The health of the natural environment is critical to the long-term future of the planet and to the quality of life of people today.
The condition of the local environment has been shown to have a direct effect both on the ability of people to enjoy the places where they live, work and spend their leisure time and on their mental and physical health. For example, the National Institute for Clinical Excellence has recently called for the physical environment in urban areas to be improved to encourage people to take more exercise, after finding evidence that increasing physical activity levels can help to prevent or manage more than 20 conditions and diseases.
The health of the planet depends on balanced ecosystems that enable the sustainable production of energy, food, timber and other resources and that process pollution and waste to provide clean water and air and fertile soils. Humanity must live within the environmental capacity of the planet or face long-term disaster.
It is therefore of considerable concern that, on almost any measure, the trends both locally and globally are bleak. In the UK, the local environment is being damaged by:
- A degradation of the landscape
- The reduction in urban open spaces
- Diminishing tranquillity through light and noise pollution
- A loss of wildlife and their habitats
The environmental services delivered through the natural environment are being overloaded: we are exceeding the Earth’s regenerative capacity by a third; if everyone in the world adopted an average UK lifestyle, we would exceed that capacity threefold. In particular:
- Some key resources are being consumed so fast that, at current rates, they will be exhausted in the foreseeable future
- The rate of loss of biodiversity is increasing so fast that scientists are forecasting a massive wave of extinctions that threatens human well-being as well as destroying habitats and species that are of value in themselves and whose significance may not yet be understood
- Clean water is an increasingly scarce resource throughout the world - including parts of the UK - and water pollution of both inland and marine environments continues
Climate change is aggravating almost all of these problems; however, as the Party has already looked extensively at issues surrounding Climate Change in Policy Paper 82 Zero Carbon Britain, this paper will not be dealing with these issues.
Concern for the natural environment is one of the founding principles of the Liberal Democrat Party: the Preamble to the Party’s Constitution states that ‘We believe that each generation is responsible for the fate of our planet and, by safeguarding the balance of nature and the environment, for the long term continuity of life in all its forms’.
This is no token belief: Liberal Democrats have been at the forefront of the fight to protect our environment locally, nationally and globally. In the last few years, we have adopted policies that include ensuring that the World Trade Organisation respects environmental principles; providing fiscal and other incentives to encourage the efficient use of resources; calling for an Environmental Responsibility Act; setting a target of zero waste by 2020 for all municipal waste; adopting policies to better protect species, habitats and green spaces, and so on.
But we recognise that the scale and changing nature of the challenge requires fresh thinking and new and extended policy initiatives. We also recognise that the natural environment is extremely complex and that actions can have unexpected consequences (as demonstrated recently by policies to encourage the production of biofuels). We spell out below some key areas that we believe need attention but highlight here two options that could provide an overriding framework for our policies:
- Should the UK adopt a long-term target for protecting the natural environment through the introduction of a Parliamentary Bill setting legally binding targets paralleling those in the Climate Change Act, with an independent expert committee setting and monitoring the targets? If so, should this, from the start, set targets to achieve ‘One Planet Living’ or should it initially be a Resource Reduction Bill (on the basis that resource targets could be relatively easily measured and that this would lead on to full One Planet Living targets)?
- How can a meaningful economic value be put on environmental resources to facilitate sensible policy decisions?
