Dr Peter Brotherton, is Lead Director for Climate Change at Natural England, the government’s agency for the natural environment, and Environment Officer for Peterborough Diocese.
What has climate change got to do with the Church?
Climate change will be hugely impactful for the entire world, but the changes associated with climate change will be worse felt by the countries who have done the least to cause it. That’s a Christian issue. We are meant to be stewards of God’s creation and it is patently clear we are failing in that stewardship. We have an important role to play to support biodiversity, just as we do for climate change.
How are climate change and biodiversity linked?
Climate change is threatening species and making the ecosystems we rely on to become less able to deliver what we need from them and that in turn is making climate change worse. All of that is threatening humanity’s future in a really important way. 15 per cent of the emissions causing climate change are by land use change driven by human consumption. We are cutting down the forests that would be soaking up the carbon just as we need them to do that more than ever. In the UK, one of the most deforested nations of the world, we are degrading our peat bogs which are a vital resource to help us manage climate change. Instead of locking up more carbon for us, human activity is resulting in our peat bogs drying out so this really important carbon store becoming a carbon source. To restore them is really important.
Is our impact on biodiversity already affecting us?
For a long time we treated nature as if it was infinite and we now know that is not the case. The UK is one of the most nature depleted nations on the earth and already nature isn’t providing us with what we need. Our air isn’t as clean as it should be, or would be if we had a rich natural environment. Our towns and homes flood more that they should as we no longer have the stable wetland ecosystems that should be preventing that. Our soil is rapidly depleting and blowing away in some parts of the UK as we are not looking after this vitally important natural asset. These things are really starting to affect us.
The scale at which humans have captured the earth’s resources, is simply staggering. If we take the entire weight of all mammals combined, from mice to whales, that is one tenth of the biomass of humans alive today. The weight of all wild birds is one third of the weight of our chickens. The scale of which we have captured the world’s resources for ourselves is staggering. It is time for us to do something about that.
What can we do?
Many of the most nature rich places in our towns and cities are our churchyards. There are species in Britain known only in churchyards so we do have a special role to play and can make a difference by protecting and nurturing their biodiversity. We must speak up. If the church doesn’t speak about the environment, at a time when children are more conscious than ever that their future options are disappearing, as a result of environmental changes, we will become irrelevant.
We are big landowners. What we do on our land matters and we need to take responsibility for it. Globally we know of over 1 million species threatened with extinction. Over half of all species are declining in the UK. Things are getting bad. This is a loss of beauty and experience in people’s lives that the church needs to react to.
This is an enormous challenge. What can individuals do?
Lots of little bits of action will matter. What we do as congregations matters a lot and what we can do as individuals collectively adds up to a lot. Anything we can do to reduce how bad climate change gets has to be a good thing.
It is hard as individuals to tackle the big systemic issues about climate change. But looking after nature better and thinking about what we do in our gardens and our churchyards that is something we can all do. Thinking about action for nature as action for nature and for people is empowering. People should feel powerful.
What about the bigger picture?
The biggest thing we can do as individuals is tell our MPs that this matters to them. Paradoxically, historically we’ve waiting until we are rich enough before we invest in the environment, but we only get richer by exploiting our environment. We have got to break out of that and see that investing in nature is infrastructure that we really need to make us healthy and prosperous. If we as a society shift our mindset around nature then we will be making our little bit of the world a little bit better.
What gives you hope for the future?
I am hoping that people will be hearing a lot more about nature-based solutions to environmental problems in the year ahead. Getting a healthier school space by planting shrubs alongside a school, cooling down cities by planting more trees. There are many ideas being explored.