Healthy soil key role in emissions battle
Climate challenge ‘is not just fossil fuels’
ENVIRONMENT: Responsible land management can be at least as big a part of the solution to avoiding climate breakdown as reducing fossil fuel use, says the chairman of Natural England.
The challenge facing policy makers, Tony Juniper said, was to ensure the restoration of damaged soil to maximise its carbon-capturing capabilities.
RESPONSIBLE LAND management can be at least as big a part of the solution to avoiding climate breakdown as reducing the use of fossil fuels, according to the chairman of Natural England.
The stark challenge facing policy makers at this crucial juncture, Tony Juniper said, was to ensure the restoration of damaged soil to maximise its carboncapturing capabilities.
With a sympathetic policy framework that leads to soil health being better nurtured, Mr Juniper said he believed that farming’s ambitious 2040 net zero greenhouse gas emissions target could be met earlier.
Speaking alongside Emma Howard Boyd, who chairs the Environment Agency, on a visit to South Acre Farm near York, Mr Juniper said: “At the moment, climate change has been seen as something which is about coal
burning, about electricity; it’s about cars, aeroplanes, all that is very true but the big bit of the challenge and actually a huge bit of the solution is linked with how we manage land.
“One of the really big opportunities we have... is to be capturing carbon in the ground in recovering soils. That is about rebuilding soil and organic matter and if we do that successfully, that’s not only going to be removing C02 from the atmosphere, it is also going to be protecting long-term food security.”
Healthier soils are also better at absorbing water and helping to prevent flooding, he said.
Better soil health is listed among the priorities of the Government’s recent 25-year Environment Plan to enhance the natural world, as well as things like improved animal health and water quality, less air pollution, greater carbon capture and biodiversity recovery.
Mr Juniper said: “Unless we can unite these things into an integrated agenda, we won’t get as far as we can as fast as we can and with as many co-benefits as we can.
“For me that is the key thing now, how are we going to be knitting together all of these pieces? We’ve got ELMS (the Government’s proposed public money for public goods farm payment scheme post-Brexit), we’ve got ‘net zero’, we’ve got the Nature Recovery Network (which is intended to deliver 500,000 hectares of new wildlife habitats), and wonderful tools in development. If we can now start putting that together... we can have a transformation, possibly even before 2040.”
The Environment Agency has
just set its own target to go net zero by 2030, and Ms Howard Boyd said: “When it comes to the net zero debate everyone is focusing, predominantly, on carbon. As chair of the Environment Agency it is absolutely key that we are also focusing on adaptation and resilience and the water aspects (flood prevention) as well.”
She said some industries will make speedy emissions gains
than others, adding: “We all need to go at the fastest pace we can possibly achieve, urge each other on and recognise that if some go early, that’s because some sectors will take longer.”
Reaching net zero, boosting nature and flood prevention are, together, “absolutely fundamental to economic prosperity” and should be given “maximum effort”, Ms Howard Boyd said.