Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-25)
DR HELEN
PHILLIPS AND
DR TOM
TEW
1 DECEMBER 2009
Q1 Chairman: Good morning and welcome.
I will keep the introductions to a minimum because we are driving
through on quite a tight timetable this morning; we have about
30 minutes or so, and we have two more sets of witnesses after
you. Thank you very much for coming in. I know that we have had
fruitful private contact as well about this and other issues but
it is very helpful to have you on the record this morning, so
thank you for that. Can I start off with a general question? The
Climate Change Act and the Adapting to Climate Change Programme
have created a new framework for managing adaptation. Do you think
that puts the natural environment at the centre of the adaptation
agenda?
Dr Phillips: I think that the
framework is evolving very rapidly and within Defra's core adaptation
programme I think the natural environment is pretty fully recognised.
The challenges are about how it is we make sure that this joins
up across Whitehall and across government because so much of the
dependence of the adaptive response relies on a healthy natural
environment. So, for instance, if decisions are being taken about
renewable energy we need to think about it in the round. We have
had a lovely example from DECC recently where the reality of coastal
erosion and the importance of designated habitats have been reflected
in their decision around Dungeness not to proceed with that as
a proposed nuclear site. However, we have other examples: for
example, in CLG where we are somewhat at the pinnacle of strategy
perfection about green infrastructure and its benefits, but yet
we have a number of blocks and barriers in the system seeing it
being implemented and delivered at a substantial scale the length
and breadth of the country. I think that this possibly links into
the issue about costs and benefits. There is a tendency that is
almost unavoidable, but must be avoided in this case, to look
at costs and benefits in a particular suite of circumstances and
we need to be thinking about the costs and benefits across government.
The example I give there is the Department of Health, where of
course green infrastructure can substantially have a positive
impact on urban cooling and health in depth related to heat. So
we need to be thinking while we are planning green infrastructure
about what the implications are for the Department of Health and
their proposed future expenditure on issues such as that. Finally
what I would say is about the importance of the natural environment
not being seen as something that can be traded off within any
framework. It is not something that is to be traded or balanced
with something that is to be another fundamental building block
on which the whole adaptive response is considered. Also, I suppose,
the responsibility on us as environmentalists to find a currency
and a language that is better understood. We had a modest attempt
at that ourselves in a recent publication called No Charge—something
of a play on words—about the importance of long-term investment
in the natural environment. It is about how it is that we can
show what the benefits are beyond intrinsic benefits from the
environment, but how it is that it props up and sustains the social
and economic benefits.
Dr Tew: I think that last point
is absolutely key. There are two very good reasons for enabling
the natural environment to adapt to climate change and one, of
course, is a moral imperative that we have to allow our plants
and animals to adapt, but the second is that a healthy natural
environment is the best mechanism to allow us to adapt to climate
change, and that is why a healthy natural environment should not
be left in the environmental ghetto or with Defra and that is
why cross-Whitehall attention on a healthy natural environment
is so important because an unhealthy natural environment has implications
for health, transport and lots of other things. So in the national
framework, where you have the four work streams of evidence, awareness,
measuring progress and policy, and you have a thematic approach
where the environment is one theme, it is important that the environment
does not stay in that ghetto. That is why Treasury, Health and
all the other departments need to understand the importance of
a natural environment, as Helen has explained.
Q2 Chairman: Accepting the importance
of the natural environment what happens if a department or, indeed,
a public body simply does not take account of the natural environment
when they are making their adaptation plans?
Dr Phillips: I think there will
be a huge cost to the taxpayer in the longer term. Nicholas Stern's
report has been extraordinarily influential in terms of mitigation
and governments across the world understand the fact that it is
much more cost-effective to invest early in what will inevitably
turn out to be more modest sums. The fact that we are locked into
a certain amount of climate change already, despite whatever our
parallel efforts might be on mitigation, that needs to be a very
concerted programme; it needs to be good adaptation rather than
bad adaptation, and we need to recognise, of course, that properly
planned adaptation can also support mitigation measures. So if
we do not we will frankly pay quite dearly.
Q3 Chairman: Can you hold up a warning
flag if you see this happening in another part of the country?
Dr Tew: That is why the design
of the reporting powers and the adaptation economic assessment
are crucial bits of work to get absolutely right because the second
will illustrate the financial foolishness of maladapted, unsustainable
adaptation; and the first will direct government departments and
local authorities to report in a transparent way on what they
are doing and how they are taking the environment into account.
Q4 Colin Challen: What opportunities
does Natural England have to influence policy on adaptation? Do
you think you have enough influence and, if not, perhaps you could
explain where there are deficiencies and how you might be able
to improve matters?
Dr Phillips: We have talked about
an evolving framework and as part of that Defra have created a
domestic adaptation programme and we sit on that programme board
that is chaired by Defra. We are also part of a very important
work stream that sits under that looking at some of the tools
and levers that there are to make that come into being, most importantly,
of course, the reporting power and how it is that public bodies
assess and report on their progress with adaptation. They are
important places to play, and of course in our wider statutory
adviser role across government we are in a position to advise
other government departments on how it is that climate change
adaptation could be built in. I suppose that we couple that to
an extent with trying to lead by example. So you are probably
aware that we spend the best part of half a billion pounds a year
in payments to farmers and land managers for good environmental
practices on their farms and land. We sourced through the review
of environmental stewardship recently to make sure that climate
change was an overarching theme and something we could be legitimately
tackling as part of those payments rather than something we try
to find opportunities to do as we went round the country. Our
current estimate is that emissions from agriculture will be 11%
higher than they are currently was it not for the measures that
have been put in place through environmental stewardship. Of course,
we also have opportunities through our pretty close interactions
with other bodies, such as National Parks and Areas of Outstanding
Natural Beauty, where there is a real opportunity to be at the
forefront of land management practices, and so much of the adaptive
response, of course, is dependent on land management practices.
Q5 Colin Challen: You have said that
the potential for green infrastructure has not yet been realised
or perhaps even fully understood by Government. Given that, I
have just had a letter from a company in my constituency that
makes permeable paving complaining that local government also
does not really recognise its responsibilities in this regard.
What do you think can be done to address that?
Dr Phillips: We really urgently
need to get away from a situation where we understand the benefits
of green infrastructure, where we have fabulous examples of how
it can be done well. On our website our best seller in terms of
downloads used to be about newts and protected species and as
soon as we put up a new best practice guide giving 36 examples
of how to do the green infrastructure well we had something like
1,000 hits within a couple of weeks and this rapidly went up the
agenda. We seem to be engaging with the community of the engaged
and we do not have simple but mainstream ways of making green
infrastructure happen and in our view there are some very simple
things that could be done. The first is that we are in the middle
of a review of planning policy guidance with a number of planning
policy statements being brought together and in those it would
be enormously powerful if targets could be set in terms of the
amount and the quality of green infrastructure. Some standards
have been set in the context of eco towns but, as we know, that
is on the margins of development rather than in the main thrust
and the main stream of development. Whilst I would be loathe to
indiscriminately foist more targets on local authorities who are
often beleaguered measuring things, I think a matching indicator
of progress against that target in planning guidance would change
the landscape. In addition to that—and this goes to the
issue of quality—we need to make sure that the green infrastructure
is seen as a deliberative response in our approach to adaptation
rather than the incidental re-badging of local amenity or local
conservation sites. Not that amenity and conservation sites are
not very important, of course they are, but, as we know, green
infrastructure can be so much more in terms of trees, urban cooling,
shading and, indeed, the matter you have come across in your constituency,
about sustainable drainage, balancing ponds, soaking up the storm
water run-off.
Q6 Colin Challen: On your website
do you also put up examples of worst practice?
Dr Phillips: No, we do not.
Q7 Colin Challen: Is it worth considering?
Dr Phillips: We are getting close
to that point. I am a great believer in encouraging good practice
and in fact we have gone a bit further with writing in and congratulating
local authorities who are doing it particularly well, and we are
encouraging that sharing of good practice. We are considering
though, in the not too distant future, perhaps letting local authorities
see how they are doing not only on green infrastructure but perhaps
around a suite of measures such as the indicator that they have
currently on biodiversity and, indeed, the responsibilities that
they have for biodiversity under the NERC[7]
Act. I think it is always a fine balance, is it not? There is
so much that can be achieved once this properly captures the imagination,
and once they understand what the benefits are to the local economy
in terms of considering a whole site for development, that they
are not considering housing units but actually considering that
entire amenity. So I think with that whole site one has real opportunity.
As, indeed, has the Government's initiative on zero carbon homes
where we are thinking about the quality of the built environment
but we are not thinking about the quality of the associated natural
environment that potentially has huge implications for the longer-term
running costs of that neighbourhood.
Q8 Colin Challen: Do you come across
much evidence of, shall we say, moral hazard where people think
that by not adapting to climate change nevertheless the Government
will act as insurer of last resort and just pay for anything that
goes disastrously wrong? I am not saying that this is true of
any part of the country that is currently afflicted by floods,
but if you believe that the Government will pay for the rebuilding
of your destroyed bridges then you may decide that is not a current
priority for capital expenditure and you will just make things
last a bit longer. Everybody is under a lot of financial pressure
at the moment.
Dr Phillips: Absolutely, and the
issue in that regard that is most frequently talked about in the
context of green infrastructure is maintenance costs. So often
it is easy, either through development contribution or, indeed,
through the local authority's own capital grants to put things
in place in the first case but then there is often real anxiety
and, indeed, a lot of evidence that they are not looked after
in the long term. There is that lovely example in Milton Keynes
where a lot of the green space has been put in public trust. It
works there; there is no reason to say it will work everywhere,
but we do need to think about what those mechanisms are in the
longer term and that the whole life cost is a consideration rather
than the more short-term consideration.
Dr Tew: The examples that you
raise get to the crux of the problem here, which is equity, inter-generational
equity and, indeed, spatial equity. Who bears the cost of coastal
erosion or flooding? This is a deep societal challenge. Part of
the argument, of course, is to say that the insurance companies
will mop up after the floods but it is the premium holders that
pay for insurance costs and it is more expensive to pay for the
damage than it is to manage the Uplands and prevent the damage.
These are deep issues of equity that is the problem.
Q9 Joan Walley: In what you have
just said you have stressed the importance of the cost cutting
agenda across Whitehall and I am really looking at the role in
the Treasury in all of that. I am interested to know how you think
the signals that the Treasury is actually sending; to what extent
they are supporting and enabling adaptation. I wondered what your
comments are about how effective the Treasury is in getting the
right messages across.
Dr Phillips: I always think that
Treasury is to government what the national curriculum is to our
collective desire to have schoolchildren taught things. There
is no getting away from the fact that they are very pivotal to
this and there is one comment I would make before Tom says some
more. That is we were really pleased to see the work that the
Treasury and Defra have done together in the supplementary guidance
on the Green Book, and that could be quite an important driver
in terms of investment.[8]
Q10 Joan Walley: I am sorry; did
you say updated guidance on the Green Book?
Dr Phillips: Updated, supplementary
guidance on the Green Book in the context of climate change.
Q11 Joan Walley: How is that effectively
sending out messages about what needs to be done?
Dr Phillips: The Green Book is
something of a bible for those who are thinking about making investment
or de-investment decisions and it talks very fully about the important
principles of sustainable development and, by implication, sustainable
adaptation. I suppose one criticism of it would be that it talks
about effectiveness and efficiency and equity; it does not explicitly
talk about the natural environment. Consequently, our concern
would be that when people come to do cost benefit analysis they
think literally about the cost and, as we all know, sometimes
the environment is a marginal cost where there is a lower cost
solution but does not give you a sustainable solution in the long-term.
So if we could see a more explicit reference to that I think it
would make a big difference. As it would if we made sure that
whatever it is we were measuring in terms of progress towards
climate change adaptation included a measure about the quality
of the natural environment because unless we have a response to
adaptation which is based on an investment in the natural environment
and that all measures are actually leaving a more resilient natural
environment we will not have the fundamentals in place for that
longer-term response.
Dr Tew: Absolutely. We think that
the Treasury are trying hard and they are moving and it is very
welcome, but one sometimes thinks that they think the environment
is someone else's job rather than it being a job for society,
and I think that was probably reflected in the National Audit
Office assessment.[9]
Q12 Joan Walley: It is a bit of a
bold comment to make, is it not?
Dr Tew: The one I have just made?
Q13 Joan Walley: Yes.
Dr Tew: I think that the environment
is everyone's responsibility and we are trying to provide costed
examples to illustrate why putting the environment at the heart
of adaptation is the most cost-effective solution for society
and that is why I think the economic assessment of adaptation
is critically important.
Q14 Joan Walley: Can you tell me
when the latest revision of the Green Book came out because the
perversely called Green Book has been a matter of concern to this
Committee for a long time because we have not really felt that
it has been doing green things, although it might be called the
Green Book? Which update are you talking about in terms of the
revision to it?
Dr Phillips: The supplementary
guidance published in June of this year.
Q15 Joan Walley: Because that does
not come along very often, so are you saying then that that supplementary
guidance is absolutely fit for purpose?
Dr Phillips: No.
Q16 Joan Walley: You are not?
Dr Tew: We are saying that the
supplementary guidance, which talks about effectiveness, efficiency
and equity, is a good place to start defining sustainable adaptation.
Q17 Joan Walley: But would it not
have been better to have actually got it right rather than just
doing something that now needs to be changed and adapted and adapted
even further?
Dr Tew: We do not think that it
has the environment at the heart of the guidance in the way that
we would like.
Q18 Joan Walley: So how are you or
how is Defra or how is this Committee going to put pressure on
the Treasury to get the environment at the heart of that Green
Book so that it can genuinely be a Green Book from the Treasury
that is underpinning investment decisions across Whitehall?
Dr Phillips: Could I give you
an anecdote from the publication of our recent report called No
Charge, which will share the difficulty we had and possibly
the difficulty that Treasury are having?
Q19 Joan Walley: Please do.
Dr Phillips: We set out with grand
plans for this publication and were very much hoping that we were
going to build the report up to a crescendo on the back page that
would show investment strategies for five, ten, 15, 20 years,
saying that if you invest this much in the natural environment
the payback or, indeed, the cost avoided will be as much, so there
is a very clear example of an investment strategy for a relatively
long period of time that says this is a no-brainer. Despite having
used our own best brains and having worked with colleagues in
academia, and indeed elsewhere, and environmental economists there
was a lot of anxiety, despite a lot of encouragement from me and
others to do just this, about the quality of the evidence and
about how robust it was. So instead we ended up publishing a report
that contains about a dozen fabulous case studies, they are all
peer reviewed, they are all assessed and there are not holes or
flaws in them and consequently we can hold our head high about
people who produce evidence-based studies, but invariably we find
ourselves looking at examples. There is a lovely example about
the importance of investing in the Uplands in terms of retaining
water, reducing flooding impact downstream, about reducing cost
to water companies of cleaning up water when it gets to the treatment
works, about the benefits to biodiversity. There is a similar
lovely example about the end-cost benefits of managed treatment;
for example, on the Humber Estuary moving the flood bank back
and creating intertidal habitat has afforded much greater degree
of protection to homes and to land at a lower cost and with much
less requirement for ongoing revenue to contain that. So until
such a time as we create a greater awareness and indeed more confidence
that these are indeed cost beneficial ways and sensible investments
for the long term, and until such a time as we can find a way
of mainstreaming that into the language of economics rather than
pointing out good examples of where it has happened, there is
a degree of nervousness of putting this as a requirement or imposition
on others.
Q20 Joan Walley: But surely that
is the role of Defra's Adapting to Climate Change Programme, to
actually influence the Treasury to do just that, because you say
until the time comes when we can do it but we do not have the
time to do it because the time to take action is now?
Dr Tew: Yes, and the Cross-Whitehall
Programme Board illustrates the desire and the willingness for
co-operation across government. The problem is that the cost is
this equity issue—who bears the cost and who pays the cost—and
that is spread across time and space and these are complicated
decisions for local planning authorities to make. We think that
by illustrating, using examples as Helen says, one or two clear
cases, over the course of 20 years it is cheaper to realign the
coast than it is to build a concrete flood wall. It is simply
cheaper over 20 years; there are less maintenance costs and there
are more positive side-effects and those side-effects include
carbon sequestration and nutrient recycling and commercial fish
species and places for people to go and enjoy and they are more
resilient than a concrete wall and they are more adaptable to
any future changes. Those illustrations are hard won. We are looking
at existing realignment schemes and it has taken ten or 15 years
to start to report on them. So I have sympathy for Treasury, it
is not easy to come up with quick and clear examples of why it
always makes economic sense.
Dr Phillips: It does underline
the case though for having planned adaptation and a wide scale
plan about the extent and scale and pace of the adaptation measures
we are going to put in place and consequently the reporting framework
we have talked about and behind that its progress towards that
rather than some indiscriminate measures of things that might
help in the future.
Q21 Dr Turner: You have embedded
adaptation throughout all of your operations in Natural England,
which seems to put you well ahead of most government departments.
How have you approached that job: top-down, bottom-up? Could you
tell us about how you evolved your strategy?
Dr Phillips: I am happy to tell
you. It is like most things, I think it has met in the middle.
There have been some top-down initiatives and a lot of innovation
from the ground up. To give you a few examples of some of the
stuff we have done. We inherited as an organisation a framework
about the character of England. The English landscape is divided
into 159 character areas, and some decades ago we beautifully
described those and, indeed, we went to the trouble of describing
the pressures of those areas of landscape. Somewhat surprisingly,
we never described what the desired response in any of those landscapes
would be; nor did we think—and perhaps not unreasonably
at that time ago—what the desired response under various
scenarios of climate change would be. So we have taken four of
those areas and done just that. I suppose not surprisingly we
see both differences depending on the type of habitat, whether
it is the Cumbria High Fells or the Norfolk Broads, but also a
degree of similarity about the things that need to be done, which
often involve making sure that the habitat that is in good condition
is kept in good condition; where there are opportunities to extend
it it is extended; or where it is in poor condition it is restored;
and, indeed, that the land management practice is such that it
is keeping that land in good condition. What we really thought
was important—and this is some work that Tom is leading
for us—was to expand that into looking at the functions
that are provided by a healthy ecosystem because there are a lot
of functions that we are dependent on land managers to produce
that only the natural environment can produce; that we need to
be very careful to guard the public funds that are used currently
to incentivise various practices to reduce those things that only
those folk can provide for public good rather than necessarily
or exclusively personal gain. So we are doing that and that will
then form the basis of a very important contribution to our own
adaptation framework. We are also working alongside others because
you know that this is quite a big responsibility on public bodies,
so Anglian Water, for example, would obviously be very much at
the forefront of this in an area that will become increasingly
water stressed. We are working alongside them and ensuring that
what their response looks like perhaps will provide a good example
more widely across the water industry. From our own perspective
we have agreed with Defra to become a voluntary reporter under
the scheme, so hopefully we will be able to help others in that
way too.
Dr Tew: If I may make one other
point, which is that across all of our work programmes, which
we organise into communities, each and every work programme is
being asked to complete an assessment of the threats and opportunities
for their work presented by climate change, and to identify responses
and actions; and we are now writing guidance for the staff to
know how to do that. We will have an internal programme board
to review what that looks like as a whole, to review the independencies,
to agree overall risks to our work programme and then to embed
actions and resources for dealing with climate change in our corporate
plan, and that is the kind of thing, as Helen says, that we have
volunteered to report to Government as an exemplar of good practice.
Q22 Dr Turner: Fine. What do you
find to be the benefits of incorporating climate change in this
way into your risk management and what lessons can you draw from
your experience for other central Government departments seeking
to embed adaptation into their programmes?
Dr Tew: We are delighted to be
finding that it is cheaper and more effective to adapt and to
prepare for climate change than to deal with the consequences
afterwards. There is evidence for that in our management of our
own sites, in our influence over National Nature Reserves. It
is better to prepare and plan ahead, and those are the lessons
we draw. We are finding, in purely financial terms for instance,
that our own target to cut our own carbon emissions by 50% in
two years not only clearly has an input to society's mitigation
but actually is a cheaper and more cost-effective way for us to
work. It raises a whole suite of challenges for our staff, but
it saves us money and makes us more effective and contributes
to climate change.
Q23 Dr Turner: Can you point to any
practical examples which prove that this approach is working?
Dr Tew: Practical examples of
mitigation I just talked about there of cutting carbon. Our people
are travelling less; we have fewer offices open; we are encouraging
flexible working and that is saving us money.
Q24 Dr Turner: Can you point, for
example, to where extreme weather events have produced results
which are not as bad as you thought they might have been in other
circumstances?
Dr Tew: I see. That is very difficult
and that is a challenge for us who espouse the doctrine that sustainable
land management in the Uplands will reduce flooding because you
have no control and then you get a one in a thousand year event,
as we had last week, and people say to you, "That did not
work then, did it?" So that is a significant challenge. As
Helen says, we are setting up three very large pilot projects
in the Uplands and I am working very closely with the Research
Councils of this country to put in place monitoring in those projects
because we have to start attempting to address that question.
We would like to demonstrate how a new approach changes land management—in
other words, land managers are rewarded for delivering a range
of services and change their management accordingly—and
produces a change in ecosystem services, such as better flood
defence or higher quality; and we would like to demonstrate how
that also produces a higher environmental quality, but it is not
something you can do overnight.
Dr Phillips: Very briefly, if
I may, to take a link between your question back to Ms Walley's
question, which is about urgent action is required now and we
cannot wait until we have all the evidence in place, and I really
could not agree with you more. That is something that we are trying
to do in our review of our Sites of Special Scientific Interest
notification strategy, because you get detractors who say, "Why
are you protecting all these places? Under climate change scenarios
they will no longer be important for the species or habitats they
are designated for; why are we continuing to make this big investment?"
To which there is a fairly simple answer, which is that they are
the areas that have been most heavily invested in, the highest
quality natural environment and despite what the natural succession
might be in them they will still be more resilient as we experience
higher temperatures and more variable patterns. The other evidence
that is coming to the fore, albeit that it is less well based
than we would like, is about the importance of connectivity and
connecting different areas of habitat. So we are now trying to
make sure that our notification strategy in the future and, indeed,
for instance some of our work on initiatives such as the coastal
path are actually thinking about where there is a real opportunity
to join places up so that when species do inevitably have to move
inland, uphill or north that there are more opportunities for
them to do so. Also, and in fact I am sure that this will come
up in the Secretary of State's announced review of ecological
designations, how it is that landscape designations and ecological
designations might come together because we are often talking
about having to work on a much wider area, on a landscape scale
rather than a site scale, so could those landscape designations
that have been very successfully looking after areas of great
beauty or areas where there is real opportunity for amenity and
recreation legitimately bear a wider set of criteria that would
also take into account some of the things that we need to do in
response to climate change, where we could get large tracts of
land for that purpose, not in a way that excluded other uses but
in a way that could be integrated alongside places where people
live and work.
Q25 Mr Caton: In your memorandum
you made the point that future monitoring and reporting arrangements
should include measures to show whether adaptation is leading
to a healthier and more resilient natural environment. How should
this be done, by whom and do we already have the measures and
the data sources to be used?
Dr Tew: I think you are hinting
at the answer there, which is that what we cannot do is throw
all our environmental monitoring schemes away and start again.
We already in this country invest significantly in environmental
monitoring and, indeed, Natural England supports or runs many
of those programmes. There is a wide range of environmental monitoring
that we already do and that now needs to be bent to answering
the question of whether we are adapting successfully to climate
change; and it needs to do so in an integrated way. We think that
the future of monitoring is integrated monitoring and we are working
closely with everyone else who is involved in this field via the
Environmental Research Funders Forum to look at synergy between
monitoring, to look at cost-effective and streamlined monitoring
and to look at novel techniques in monitoring, for instance satellite
monitoring and so on. All of our existing monitoring schemes must
now bear in mind that we need to start answering the question
of how we are adapting to climate change and whether that adaptation
is being effective, and that will range from everything from understanding
whether butterflies are migrating north via the data collection
of thousands of volunteers, all the way to a satellite-based analysis
of sea level rise and coastal geomorphological changes. A significant
gap in the evidence base and in monitoring are these indicators
of adaptive process and then indicators of effects, and the Committee
will know that Defra are working on this at the moment and we
are working closely with Defra. One of the things that we mentioned
earlier, for instance, is green infrastructure. There may be some
very good proxies for measuring societal response to climate change
adaptation, so we think that all of those need investigating.
Chairman: Thank you very much. We very
much appreciate your coming in.
7 Natural Environment and Rural Communities Back
8
HM Treasury, The Green Book: Appraisal and Evaluation in Central
Government (and Supplementary Guidance) Back
9
National Audit Office, Adapting to Climate Change: A review
for the Environmental Audit Committee, July 2009 Back
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