Mass extinctions of plants and animals unavoidable without halting climate crisis, warns head of Natural England

Nature-based solutions are part and parcel of tackling the twin threats of climate and biodiversity collapse, Tony Juniper tells Harry Cockburn

‘There’s a huge sense of awareness to the danger at hand,’ says Natural England’s Tony Juniper (Defra)

The key focus at the Cop26 climate summit will be on slashing the fossil fuel dependency poisoning our atmosphere and heating up the planet, but it is not just cutting emissions that will get us to net zero by 2050, it is also the restoration of the natural world.

Forests, soils and ocean ecosystems are far more adept at absorbing and sequestering carbon than any carbon capture and storage technology yet in existence, so conservationists are hoping that these “nature-based solutions” to the climate crisis will be a key area of focus at the summit.

One person who is highly invested in the recognition and utility of the role of the natural world in balancing out humanity’s excesses is Tony Juniper – the current chair of Natural England, which advises the government on nature restoration. He was previously executive director of Friends of the Earth in the UK, worked for the WWF, once stood for election for the Green Party and is a fellow at the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Sustainability Leadership.

Speaking to The Independent on the eve of the critical summit, and following the UN’s stark warning that even with the latest round of emissions cuts pledges the world is still “on track for catastrophe”, Juniper is disarmingly upbeat – not just about what the conference might achieve, but beyond Cop26 entirely.

Although he readily acknowledges the scale of the challenge at Glasgow, noting that the emissions cuts announced by governments since the Paris Agreement in 2015 “don’t add up to a sufficient level of action to avoid warming going well beyond 2C, nevermind 1.5C”, the overriding impression he gives is one of cool confidence that our planet may not be quite as doomed as some have suggested.

After having spent decades in the environmental movement working tirelessly to bring the plight of the planet to global attention, he suggests the deteriorating conditions around the world are now holding people’s attention and forcing change.

“There’s this huge sense of awareness, even since 2015, with many more people now alert to the danger at hand,” he says.

“This is not only through the quality of the science and the communications going on around the issue. It’s down to the fact that people are seeing it with their own eyes – the extreme conditions that have been occurring in recent times, including the terrible flood impact in Germany and the Netherlands and Belgium and the extreme heat in Canada, pushing up towards 50C.”

He said the coronavirus pandemic has also provided a new lens for assessing the possibility for making momentous changes to how we live in a short scale of time.

“The destruction which has come in the wake of that has maybe recalibrated the extent to which people are prepared to see risk as real when it comes to climate change,” he says.

He suggests the worsening climate crisis “has been, for some time, expressed as a future risk, with some people perhaps regarding it as an abstract risk, but with Covid we saw these things are real, and if we don’t attend to them in advance then we suffer some pretty serious consequences.”

In his role as chair of Natural England, the most important discussion Juniper wants to see at Cop26 is around the interconnectedness of the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis, and how beginning to solve one of these crises not only helps solve the other, but is a basic requirement of doing so.

He says: “Since Paris, a theme which has deepened and widened since then is this realisation of the fundamental connections between nature and reversing the decline of nature, and the challenge of climate change and reducing emissions and the impacts of climate change. These two things are fundamentally connected and that has become very apparent.

“We can’t achieve a 1.5C pathway unless we halt and reverse the destruction of nature, and we can’t avoid a mass extinction of animals and plants until we slow down and limit climate change.”

Has the discussion around the climate become too focused on flashy new technology? Juniper doesn’t deny it, but understands why Boris Johnson’s government often talks up electric cars, hydrogen and carbon capture and storage technology. Possibly, he suggests, “it’s the filter of the media sometimes which goes to the electric cars and wind turbines, because they are in some ways easier to explain”.

Perhaps, as a result of this, his mission at Natural England is entirely unambiguous: under the banner of the “nature recovery network”, the organisation – a non-departmental body overseen by Defra – is restoring large areas of habitat, in a way which, Juniper says, benefits not only ecosystems and the wider environment, but also people.

These benefits may be in the form of adaptation to the changing climate: greater levels of vegetation across landscapes can reduce surface-water runoff and prevent flooding, while boosting biodiversity – particularly among certain species of animals – can rapidly bring economic benefits to areas through increased levels of tourism.

“One of the famous ecotourism stories from this part of the world was the benefits following the white-tailed eagle being reintroduced to the island of Mull in Scotland some years ago,” he says.

“This has driven extra revenue to the island. We now have a similar project underway on the Isle of Wight where white-tailed eagles are regularly seen, and it is hoped they will begin breeding, so one can only expect that there will be a beneficial effect of that, with people taking their families there to see white-tailed eagles rearing their young.”

He is also passionate about the role of peat, and how it encapsulates the connection between the climate crisis and the restoration of the natural environment.

Speaking about adaptation to the crisis, he says: “Peatland recovery projects are a good example of that as they are natural sponges which catch rainwater, and as we expect more rainfall into the future, the targeted recovery of these ecosystems achieves several things at once – carbon capture, wildlife recovery, flood risk reduction, and reflecting the fundamental nature of how climate and nature are connected.”

Ahead of the summit in Glasgow, it appears there is recognition for the natural world’s role in bringing down the threat level.

Earlier this week, the government’s chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, said supporting natural regeneration was an ‘integral’ part of hitting net zero emissions.

“The biodiversity angle of this does need to be taken very seriously and it’s something that needs to be looked at across the globe,” Sir Patrick told The Independent at a press briefing.

Success for Juniper at Cop26 will be seeing leaders agree to policies that commit to keeping global temperatures under 1.5C – which at the moment looks far from certain.

But Juniper adds: “Implicit in that 1.5 outcome will be a commitment to the recovery of nature.

“You can’t exclude it. It’s central to the whole thing.”