We must make peace not war with nature

This blog is part of our COP16 miniseries, a collection of blogs spotlighting this year’s UN Biodiversity Conference.

The theme of this year’s UN global biodiversity summit COP16 is Peace with Nature. At the start of the last Conference, COP15 in Montreal in 2022, UN Environmental Programme Executive Director, Inger Andersen, made the memorable statement, “we are at war with nature” and must “make peace.” Two years on, it seems little has changed and despite its centrality to life on earth, our war with nature is ongoing.

Despite our mistreatment, nature continues to nurture our souls and provide us with the essential ingredients of life: the food we eat, the air we breathe and the water we drink. Yet this relationship is not sustainable and puts both us and our natural world on a precarious footing.

Our nature movement is rooted in peace 2024 is also a significant year for our domestic nature movement. It marks the 75th anniversary of the seminal legislation that created our first National Parks, enshrined access rights, protected nature reserves and established their statutory guardians. The 1949 National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act was visionary legislation, even more so because it was conceived, promoted and drafted in a time of national adversity – World War II.

The Act was the culmination of a long and popular campaign. As part of this, CPRE, the Countryside Charity, commissioned a six-minute film to be shown in cinemas, ‘Rural England: The Case for the Defence’. The film’s language of fighting for freedom became hugely poignant with the outbreak of war during 1939, describing the “…grand, open country with the fresh clean air coming across the hills and dales and the rivers and lakes with their quiet still waters offering their havens of peace to all.”

Later that year, one young soldier wrote to CPRE, begging them to continue their campaign for National Parks: “Whatever damage might be done by enemy action, I do not wish to return and find destruction of our own creation.”

In 1942, as part of the planning for post-war Britain, a town planner and campaigner called John Dower was asked to prepare a report on National Parks in England and Wales. His vision was that National Parks should be “…for all who come to refresh their minds and spirit, and exercise their bodies in a peaceful setting of natural beauty.”

This sentiment was carried forward by the post-war Atlee government with minister Lewis Silkin recognising that “… the increasing nervous strain of life it makes it all the more necessary that we should be able to enjoy the peace and spiritual refreshment which only contact with nature can give.”

Fast forward 75 years and the government’s statutory nature adviser Natural England has picked up the mantle, with its Chair Tony Juniper recently calling for a rebalancing of our relationship with nature: “Nature is a dynamic, vigorous, multi-layered force that can provide so many of our essential needs today and into the future, if we take this opportunity to understand it better and treat it with respect.”

We must end our war with nature This lack of respect has led to the UK’s position as one of the most nature depleted places on earth. We wince at images of global deforestation and plundering of precious habitats but need only look within our own borders to see the harm that we wreak on nature.

There is no simple answer to why we are at war with nature, not least because of some inherent contradictions in our society. How, for example, can a determined nation of animal lovers allow wildlife crime to continue unabated? Official statistics show how much we love peaceful encounters with nature, yet we are often silent when nature is pummelled by pollution and development.

The new government has vowed to change the state of nature. It is reviewing a major plan for environmental improvement to make it fit for purpose, with the environment secretary aspiring to be the most nature-positive government the UK has seen and pledging to work with the deputy prime minister to find ‘win win’ solutions for nature and house building.

Public outrage on the dire state of our lakes and rivers has catapulted the environment into mainstream politics with pro-river campaigners faring well in several constituencies in the general election, showing that not only do we want a more peaceful coexistence with nature, we are also prepared to vote for it.

Devastating conflicts across the world are causing unconscionable harm and destruction to many people and communities. The environmental cost of war is often overlooked in the face of such human suffering. This preliminary assessment by the UN Environment Programme of the environmental impact of the conflict in Gaza makes for stark reading, although little mention is made of nature. This report charts the high environmental toll of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the negative impact on the country’s biodiversity.

Out of conflict must rise hope At COP15, a new global biodiversity framework was agreed. This includes the flagship commitment to protect and conserve a minimum of 30 per cent of land and sea for nature by 2030, known as 30 by 30. Two years on, the UK is yet to grip this fully, following wrangling about what level of protection or environmental quality is needed for land to qualify.

In 2023, an expert parliamentary committee called for urgent action, finding that ​“with only seven years remaining [to 2030], the extent of land in England which already meets the criteria for 30 by 30 sits at a maximum of just 6.5%”.

In 2024, the Office for Environmental Protection found that the government was “largely off track” to meet its environmental ambitions, and must speed up and scale up its efforts to achieve them.

Now, as negotiations continue in Cali at COP16, we hope that this slow domestic progress will focus the minds of our UK government representatives both to continue to push for enhanced global ambition, but also to return home with a renewed purpose to deliver domestically. This must include publishing an ambitious National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan, the official document that ideally should have been the UK’s calling card at the negotiating table in Cali.

The government’s review of the environmental improvement plan provides an immediate opportunity to embed 30 by 30 and other global goals in our domestic framework. The government professes to be mission-led, congregating action around five goals, the first of which is renewed economic growth. The explicit absence of nature in the missions is a concern, but as eminent academics, the government’s statutory advisers and economic think tanks have evidenced, nature is foundational to economic wellbeing. The health of nature and the health of the economy are umbilically joined.

We wish the UK team of ministers, officials, advisers and NGOs currently in Cali every success in this global effort for a brighter future for nature.