Clause 3
Climate Change Bill [Lords]
1:00 pm
David Maclean (Penrith and The Border, Conservative)
I want to make a few comments, and ask the Minister a couple of questions. I will not attempt surreptitiously to move the clever amendment in my name, which you wisely did not select for debate today, Mr. Atkinson. However, I would like the Minister, in responding to the clause stand part debate, to give me firm reassurances about subsection (2).
If the Secretary of State is going to consider scientific knowledge about climate change, biodiversity loss will be among the many things that he will consider. According to Dr. Rodolfo Dirzo, who is a world expert on biodiversity at Stanford university, the most critical global environmental change is biological extinction. For one thing, biological extinction is the only irreversible global environmental change. Climate change, given enough time and if we do the right things over a period of time, can be reversed, but if we lose certain species, it will be impossible to recover them. Environmental damage and biodiversity loss in forest ecosystems cost between $2.1 trillion to $4.8 trillion per year—I think that was the figure given at the conference in Bonn, which the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs attended last week or last month.