Bills should be higher to pay for ‘disastrous’ global warming

FAMILIES should pay more for food and water to reflect the costs of climate change, the head of Natural England has said.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Tony Juniper said the “downsides” of environmentally unfriendly and unhealthy diets and dirty rivers were “hidden” from consumers because of cheap food prices and water bills.

Penalties for environmentally damaging practices should be harsher, he said, suggesting that there should be higher taxes on wealthy people, who cause more waste and pollution, through “ecological taxation”.

Mr Juniper has been chair of Natural England, the Government’s nature adviser, since 2019. He was previously director of the environmental charity Friends of the Earth.

He said: “The cost of climate change is going to be catastrophic. It’s going to destroy the economy, potentially – two, three, four degrees of global warming. Is that visible anywhere in a consumer bill?

“The loss of the benefits we get from clean rivers – for angling, for tourism, for public health and well-being – where is that in the bill?

“The mass extinction of animals and plants being principally driven by our food system, where is that?

“What about the public health dimension, in terms of the people suffering from diet-related illnesses that’s costing countries absolute fortunes on their public health services?

“This is a deficiency in the way we do economics, insofar as we can’t see the downsides of things which are basically hidden from the numbers that appear in the prices.”

Water companies and the Government have been criticised in recent weeks for failing to upgrade Britain’s Victorian water system over several decades, leading to thousands of litres of untreated sewage being dumped in UK rivers and the sea each year.

Under pressure from campaigners and the public, the Government placed a duty on water companies to reduce the negative impacts from sewage dumps in the Environment Act, passed last week.

But fixing Britain’s water infrastructure is likely to cost millions, and water companies have called on regulator Ofwat to allow it to raise consumer bills to pay for upgrades.