and planting wild flowers in every garden.
In between the local and the national, the environmental organisations all have a checklist of preferred measures, from restoring particular habitats, to making road verges and railway lines havens for nature, to bringing back beavers. The general bodies have lots of great ideas for plants, birds and bugs. The national bodies, like the Wildlife Trusts, have plans for key habitats, from the Brecklands and managing the grazing now that the rabbit populations have collapsed,4 to restoring wetlands in the Upper Thames like Otmoor by keeping the River Ray wetter,5 creating and enhancing green spaces in cities, and managing and enhancing woodlands.
All of this makes very good economic sense. It can all be done. This is not only a prize worth fighting for because nature matters in its own right, but represents good mainstream economic policy. We can stop doing stupid things like wasting £2 billion per year on paying farmers to own land;6 wasting money on cleaning up water for drinking, which should not have been polluted in the first place; wasting money on creating hard flood defences when natural flood management can be much cheaper; and wasting money on cutting down urban trees, as in Sheffield. All of this money can be much better spent on actually enhancing nature. This is why we should do it – because we should care about nature, and because we will collectively be better off as a result.
Part one of this book sets out these great opportunities – the prize. The prize is what nature could look like by the middle of this century. It is all about what we could have, what a greener Britain could look, smell and sound like. It identifies the value of halting the declines and moving towards a richer natural environment, and explains how we can all be more prosperous as a result.
Set against this great green prize is the brown alternative: what happens if we don’t seize the opportunities, and what happens if we allow the destruction of nature to continue. The prize of sustainable economic growth is not the same thing as the fool’s gold of GDP. It is all about harnessing technology and human ingenuity to make us all better off, by maintaining the natural environment and seizing the opportunities to get much more out of nature. The brown alternative of business-as-usual is literally a waste of money. It is also ugly and often nasty, as beauty is translated into lifeless monoculture fields and bleak housing estates. The sounds and sights of nature are diminished, replaced by ever-more noise and vistas of the man-made. The scale of the destruction of nature coming down the track if we do nothing should terrify everyone.
Part two is the practical part. It is all about how to secure the prize, what can be achieved, and why it is sensible economics to do so. Pragmatically, it involves five key areas of the natural environment: the river catchments (chapter 3); the agricultural land (chapter 4); the uplands (chapter 5); the coasts (chapter 6); and towns and cities (chapter 7). For each you are asked to imagine what an enhanced nature might look, sound and feel like. For each a practical framework to achieve the greener outcomes is provided, and why we will be more prosperous as a result is explained. To whet your appetite, and to move from the wonders of the imagination to reality, in every one of these areas a few practical examples of initiatives and projects already under way, and potential new ones, are identified.
It is all about river catchment system operators and ensuring the polluter and not the polluted pays; about a new agricultural policy based on public money for public goods, not perverse subsidies for owning land; protecting and enhancing the uplands for their beauty, health and leisure, and the biodiversity, and again not damaging them through perverse subsidies; opening up the coasts and coastal fringes for their full public potential, and stopping destructive fishing practices, most importantly in Marine Protected Areas; and greening towns and cities with trees, parks and Green Belts to improve air quality, childhood experiences, and health and leisure. What is not to like about this, not just from a conservationist’s perspective, but also for the economic prosperity of Britain?
Part three turns to the money – how to pay for it all. Chapter 8 considers public goods, why they matter, why the market won’t deliver them, and how they should be paid for. Chapter 9 looks at the polluter-pays principle, compensation and net environmental gain, and perverse subsidies. The place to start is with the sheer inefficiencies of current policies. An efficient economy is one that internalises all the costs and benefits of economic activities into prices and decision-making. In an efficient economy pollution is charged: it is inefficient not to charge for pollution, resulting in a lower level of economic prosperity. This is both 101 economics, and rarely followed. Not even carbon has a proper price yet. Making polluters pay is the single most radical and effective policy that could be adopted, for economic prosperity and for the environment. The British countryside would be radically different, and radically less polluted, were this simple economic principle adopted. It would not cost anything to the economy in aggregate, and at the same time it would yield lots of revenue, some of which could go to repairing past damage and enhancing our natural environment.
Instead of demanding more public expenditure, conservationists would be better advised to home in on this fundamental economic principle. Why should it be any more acceptable to pollute than to steal? Both take something from others that they do not pay for. Polluters steal people’s health and they force the polluted to pay for what has been done to them. Expecting more public expenditure is something that might motivate protests and campaigns, but most conservationists know that if they wait for the Treasury to open its coffers they will be disappointed. While money is needed, getting to a more efficient baseline is an urgent necessity, making us all better off.
The converse of making polluters pay is to get rid of perverse subsidies. More than £3 billion is spent annually on subsidising Britain’s farmers, £2 billion of which goes on paying them to own land. This absurd policy has been perverse not only for the natural environment but for the farmers themselves, inflating land prices. It came about as a result of trying to get away from the even more absurd consequences of subsidising the prices of agricultural products, resulting in the infamous European wine lakes and butter mountains, and the intensive sheep grazing that has done so much damage to the uplands. Getting rid of perverse subsidies would save a lot of money. It could be better spent. But even if it were just withdrawn, Britain would be greener.
Next comes the fraught subject of compensation for damage to the environment. While there are conservationists who believe that there should be no damage at all, the reality is that there will be. Faced with a population increasing by around 10 million by mid-century, and with more than 200,000 new houses per year for over a decade, more land will be concreted over. Add in the new roads, railways, and energy generation and networks to service all these extra people and the wider growing economy, and damage is inevitable.
Can this damage be squared with enhancing the natural environment? Only if there is compensation over and above the damage to the natural environment elsewhere. This is the net environmental gain principle: any damage must result in not just offsetting it, but by a positive margin. The positive margin is the precautionary principle in action.
Money is currently spent in silos, notably the agricultural subsidies. Winning the prize, and making sure we hang on to it, requires cementing the money into a comprehensive and integrated framework. Chapter 10 sets out how to do this within a Nature Fund. This acts a bit like sovereign wealth funds do for oil- and gas-producing countries. It should include the economic rents from these non-renewable activities like North Sea oil and gas production, mirroring other sovereign wealth funds, but it can also bring together the monies from pollution taxes and charges, from subsidies directed towards public goods and the net gain payments. Crucially it would be for nature, not general public spending.
The net gain principle set alongside the polluter-pays principle together ensure that there is enough money to pay for an enhanced natural environment. Add the money previously spent on perverse subsidies, instead going to environmental public goods, and the numbers stack up. We can have a greener and more prosperous Britain, without extra public expenditure.
A Nature Fund would need to be protected from the host of vested interests and from political opportunism. These interests are not just those opposed to the conservation of nature. They include nature organisations, which are notoriously fragmented and quarrelsome. With a pot of money, the Nature Fund will become a target for each and every interest to look after its