Transcriber: raghad afaneh Reviewer: Mujtaba Abdelwhab
We’re living in a climate and ecological emergency.
That’s a phrase that we’ve all heard many times over the last few years,
and principally thanks to the amazing efforts of young people
in pushing up the global political agenda.
So given this is an event organized by young people,
I want to start by saying thank you.
Your generation gives me hope and goodness.
We need hope right now.
Scientistsare really clear that it’s the decisions we make collectively in
the next decade or so that will make
the difference between whether we can just about manage climate change in
the future or whether we take the Earth system into runaway climate change,
where it becomes increasingly difficult to do anything about it.
And we're potentially actually we trigger changes in
the Earth system that could make
the world inhospitable to human civilization and many, many species.
We know what we need to do. We need to halve carbon emissions in the next decade.
But are we going to do it? as if that’s not enough
we’ve also overrun the Earth.
We've destroyed vast areas of wildlife habitat.
We fragmented those bits to the left.
And we've got rid of the abundance of so many wildlife species
and destroy those natural processes.
Around half the world's tropical forests are gone.
And those that are left are increasingly fragmented.
And astonishingly, now, half of all,
fertile soil worldwide is farmed
and where it is farmed more often than not,
it's also been doused with artificial fertilizers and pesticides,
meaning that we're eradicating so many of our birds, our bees, our fungi,
our worms. Perhaps you can spot the problem with that
even more astonishing. All of us together, you and me,
and seven point nine billion people around the world,
along with our domestic animals and livestock that's grown to feed us,
represent now 96 percent of mammalian biomass.
All the world's wild species,
from the smallest mouse to elephants to
the mightiest blue whales put together represent just four percent
of mammalian biomass.
Now, this is tragic,
but it's also really stupid
because the evidence is clear in plundering the world in that way.
We're plundering our very life support systems.
We’re plundering the ability of nature to keep us alive,
to provide us with clean water, to regulate our climate,
to provide us with food, with fiber, with fuel.
And actually, yes, to regulate disease. You know, it was 20 years ago.
I first read the first scientific article that warned that if we kept fragmenting
wildlife habitats around the world,
it would lead to the emergence of ever more diseases as, say,
spillover from wildlife populations.
We saw this with HIV aids in the 1980s, and in the last two decades.
We’ve seen it with Ebola, with SARS, with Nipah virus, and of course, most recently,
COVID. And if we keep destroying the natural world and fragmenting it,
we will see more pandemics and the impacts they have on us.
So we've really got to turn this around.
Now one of the things that's driving me mad through my career, he said.
All too often, sometimes even people in the environmental movement,
treat the climate problem and the nature problem as if they’re separate issues.
I've even had people argue to me before now that one is more important than
the other. This is a complete nonsense, of course. They are inextricably linked.
There is no way we’re going to solve the climate crisis
unless we can put nature into recovery.
And there's no way we're going to solve the nature crisis unless we can stop
the runaway climate change. And if you need further proof of this.
Think about this. There's we don't think enough about.
We all know that the cause of climate change is burning fossil fuels.
But what are fossil fuels that dead biodiversity millions of years,
hundreds of millions of years ago?
Nature was in abundance and as such,
carbon out of the atmosphere and put it into the biosphere.
And when those creatures died and sunk into deep sea sediments or into swamps
and a compressed down over time,
it traps that carbon into what we now call fossil fuels.
Now, because that took place over millions of years,
that's what we've got to stop burning them.
It will take a long time to pull that back.
But we've yes, we've got to stop burning fossil fuels
and we've got to do something about nature as well.
Now what is it we've got to do about nature?
You know, for over 100 years,
the conservation movement has always talked about
the need to protect nature more to conserve nature more.
You know, back in the mid 1990s, when I was here at UCL,
I was studying my M.S. in conservation and I was based in the Darwin building,
just opposite on the other side of Gower Street.
Sometimes I'd look out the window and
I would look at this building that we're in now.
I guess what it was kind of wasn't used at the time.
It was sort of abandoned and the windows were boarded up.
And I found myself thinking,
I wonder what they’re going to do without there one day on
a discover tonight that you obviously use it for 10x tools and
I assume not much else. But when I wasn't looking out the window,
I was learning that practice of conservation,
even that word conservation implies conserving what we've already got.
Protection implies protecting what we've already got.
But given the world is so degraded,
given the world is so depleted of nature already. And guess what?
The UK is one of the most nature depleted countries anywhere in the world.
Conservation protection is not enough.
Of course, we've got to protect the best bits that are left.
Of course, we've got to do that, but we've got to do more.
We've got to put nature into recovery
fast and at scale. How do we do that?
Broadly, there's three things we've got to do.
We've got to make more space for nature,
a lot more space for nature rather than push me into the boundaries.
The last little bits left that humans don't use.
We've got to restore the abundance of nature
in this country in the UK.
41 percent of our wildlife species have declined in abundance since
the early 1970s. In my lifetime,
and it’s all very well as warrying about different species and we should do.
But you know, when bees are actually not abundant,
they don't do a very good job of pollinating.
All species need to be in abundance in their natural abundance if they're going
to do the job that we need them to do.
And that points to the first thing we've got to get nature working again.
We've got to do novel things that make sure our wetlands are wet.
What an astonishing thought,
because many of them aren't at least in this country anymore.
We've got to make sure that we can reintroduce species that are missing.
We've got to get our natural systems working and flourishing again.
We've got to make more space for nature.
We've got to restore the abundance of nature
and we've got to get nature working again.
Now, fortunately, people are just starting to get this very slowly,
as the world does. World leaders have in the last year agrees that
the we've got says place that we've got to get over 30 percent of space
for nature by 2030 is called 30 by 30 pledge.
Over 50 world leaders have now agreed to that,
and it's just possible that later this year at
a convention of biological diversity meeting
the whole world will hopefully agree that we've got to get 30 percent of our
land and sea in recovery for nature by 2030.
But you know, we've heard targets before,
both on climate and nature from world leaders, and they get missed.
This job is too important to leave to world leaders.
Everyone needs to get involved.
And this time around with this target,
we've got to do it from the grassroots up.
So tonight I want to introduce to you a new concept,
the concept of wild belt,
wild belt is any space for nature,
big or small to be set aside
and deliberately say that's there to put nature in recovery because we need
a common way of thinking about this,
a common way and thinking about how we can put nature recovery at pace
and at scale. And we need a way for everyone to get involved.
While some waiting down, waiting for leaders to act first.
So I want you to invite you to think tonight about what you can do to create
some wild belt. Let’s start really small.
If you're living in a flat or even in a hall of residence room,
you might just have access to a window box
and you might want to grow all kinds of things in it.
But could you perhaps leave 30 per cent of your window box
for nature to grow wild? If you're lucky enough to have access to a garden
and there's 23 million gardens in the UK,
perhaps we could leave 30 per cent of our gardens to grow wild for nature.
If you are a school, maybe we should be looking at how we can take 30 per cent
of our school grounds, perhaps including green roofs, to go wild for nature.
It could be all kinds of bits,
the bits of the side of the playing fields,
a little bit at the side of the car park, green roofs, whatever,
but can add up across the school grounds to 30 per cent with your window box,
with your garden, with your school.
Perhaps we can lead the way university campuses as well.
Would it be nice if that square outside the front of UCL with a big portico?
What about that square had 30 per cent of land set aside for nature's recovery?
Wouldn't that be a wonderful thing just to give you an idea if you want to?
And this can happen in our parks as well in our towns and cities, our local parks?
Wouldn't it be amazing if a 30 per cent of every urban park was set aside
for nature's recovery as well?
And if we call them all wild belt,
then people will understand that's what we're doing.
Because the psychology of this is really important.
Research has shown that in urban parks, if you leave a bit to grow wild,
if you don't explain what you're doing,
people will think it's been abandoned and don't like the idea of this.
But if you put a sign there saying left to go wild for nature,
people starting love the idea.
Amazingly, if you allow the grass to grow long and you even mow
a little path through the middle of it,
people can then say it's not by accident or
because someone hasn't turned up to mow it.
They can say it's deliberate and then people suddenly love the idea.
So if we consistently start calling this wild belt,
we say we've left this 30 per cent of the window box of your school,
of your university or your local park to go wild and delivered it for
a wild belt as part of a local to global effort that people might just be able
to get on board and be inspired to do the same with their window box,
their school, their university, their park, their garden,
and it could catch on. This is incredibly important,
and this is what we need both to put nature in recovery
and to deliver climate solutions.
Because the amazing thing is that the role nature can play in cities
and helping deliver climate solutions is extraordinary.
Yes, it can suck carbon out of the air,
but actually almost just as importantly in cities.
Perhaps more importantly, you can help us adapt to climate change when we can
put nature recovery across our urban environment.
It provides the best buffer to extreme weather events.
It holds water back in the landscape.
Trees provide urban cooling and extreme weather events.
They can also even clean the air and nature can clean
the water in our towns and cities as well. Crucially important.
Now they’re all examples of this tantalizing examples of where this is
being done. I live in Cambridge,
just an hour north of here on the on the outskirts of Cambridge.
There's a nature reserve called Trumpington Meadows that was actually
created 15 years ago in a partnership between a housing developer,
the local authority and a local wildlife charity.
And they created Trumpy tomatoes out of what was low grade agricultural land,
but then said this was a new reserve to make new space
for nature alongside new housing in the process.
And guess what is now one of the most visited green spaces in
and around Cambridge, and it's only 15 years old.
It's now somewhere where people love to go to and celebrate
and get close to nature, and it's only 15 years old now,
I can imagine what some of you might says
ah creature said it was old agricultural land and isn’t this the problem?
If we do this at scale, how are we going to feed people?
That’s what people often say about this, but I invite you to think this.
There is no such thing as food security if nature continues to be in decline.
The only security we've got for food production in
the future is if we can turn things around and put nature in recovery,
which is why we need wild, well, yes, in and around our towns and cities,
but also stretching from our towns and cities out into the wider countryside
as well, so that we get 30 per cent of our countryside being set aside
for nature's recovery as well.
And if you don't think that as possible, think about this.
Earlier this year, the government,
the UK government published a report called the National Food Strategy,
which had a stand out astounding statistic in it.
It said that if you take 20 per cent of the most marginal land in Britain,
module farmed land in Britain and took it out of production,
it would only affect the production of one percent of
the calories in this country.
Astonishing, which is obviously way less than how much we waste to food waste,
so we could take 20 per cent of our land out at least of our farmland, let alone.
The land is not in farmed areas as well,
and put 30 per cent aside to put nature in recovery.
You might also say, but what about the economy?
The economy is not going to allow this.
Surely, how can we how can this work in a way that will help the economy
and economic concerns will come first?
But of course, we often forget the economy is
a wholly owned subsidiary of nature, not the other way around.
Nature would do brilliantly if the economy didn't exist,
but the economy would do pretty badly if nature didn't exist.
So even the best thing for
the economy is to make sure we get at least 30 per cent of our land
and sea in recovery by 2030.
And it's also the right time to do it, because over the last two years,
my goodness, we've learnt just how much we need nature for our physical
and mental wellbeing. Millions of people worldwide through this appalling pandemic
have realised we need our daily dose of nature to make sure that we still feel
human because humans are part of nature.
And so this is perhaps one of the best moments in history for us,
not just to put nature's recovery,
but to put the relationship between people and nature in recovery too.
Now we can do this, we have to do this.
We have to do it from the grassroots up for the window box to the school to
the university, to the local authority, the urban park out into the countryside,
across the nation and around the world,
creating wild belt around the world
so that we can put nature in recovery in time to solve both the climate and
the nature crisis. We can do it.
Everyone can get involved young or old, even middle aged men. We can do this.
We have to do it. I would not be a fitting way to pay tribute to
the enormous efforts that we've done,
so the enormous pain we've gone through over the last two years of this pandemic.
If we we sent our relationship between people and nature. Thank you.