Green and Prosperous Land

What is coming next

The above stock-taking is a picture of general declines, with some noticeable exceptions. Almost all of the causes are known and persistent, and all can and should be dealt with. Yet what dramatically raises the stakes are the new challenges the natural environment is facing. Without positive action, all the trends described above will continue. It will be a picture of gradual declines, punctuated by sudden population collapses and occasional trumpeted successes. As resilience is tested, one day you will look up and there won’t be any swallows and swifts in May. The scary thing is that you might not even notice. For the next generation, it may be a case of not missing what they have never seen, except in pictures and films.

These extrapolated trends could get a whole lot worse without immediate action. Over the next few decades through to mid-century, Britain faces a rising population, and rising consumption. These together mean more houses, more developments and more hard infrastructures. On a business-as-usual basis, the results will in aggregate be negative for the natural environment. It is not only the present baseline that needs to be addressed, but also the ‘known unknowns’, and resilience against the ‘unknown unknowns’ of the future.

More people

Britain is one of the most densely populated countries in the world, even though large areas are sparsely inhabited. There are the great conurbations, and then there are the Scottish mountains, the Pennines and mid-Wales. Although London and the surrounding area is being overtaken in scale by the mega cities of Southeast Asia, the southeast is as densely populated as parts of the Netherlands and Hong Kong. The corridor that runs north to Birmingham and Manchester is dense too, and HS2 would make it more so. The new Oxford–Cambridge corridor, with more than 1 million new houses planned, could add another dense conurbation. The clamour to build on the Green Belt is getting ever louder.

In the 1970s and especially the 1980s, the assumption was that Britain’s population would peak and then perhaps gradually decline, and in the process it would age. The assumption was that Britain would go the way of Japan and Germany – with an ageing, static or even declining population. British women have already gone through the so-called ‘demographic transition’, and the silver lining to the silver age should be less pressure on resources. The depopulation of the rural areas that followed the great urbanisation of Britain in the nineteenth century, indeed since the enclosures, would continue relieving environmental pressures. We could, it was thought, become an older, less populated and greener country.

This has been turned on its head by immigration. For much of its recent history, and especially in the nineteenth century, Britain exported people (and Ireland more so). The displaced rural populations colonised the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and countries throughout the British Empire. It was the safety valve as mortality rates fell.

Britain started the twentieth century with a population of around 25 million, and ended it with around 60 million. Nature was bound to suffer as a result, especially as the 60 million were many times wealthier than the 25 million. Immigration picked up as the Empire slowly wound down, with notable flows from the Caribbean and then Uganda and East Africa, and from India and Pakistan.

The initial numbers were quite small, but the game changed in the twenty-first century. European immigration was added to the non-Europeans, notably after 2004 when the Eastern European countries joined the EU, and freedom of movement applied to them. Britain made few objections at the time, and assumed that immigration from Eastern Europe would be marginal – perhaps 50,000 per annum – and would enhance economic growth.

The immigration figures started to edge up from the mid-2000s, reaching a gross 600,000 per annum in 2014/15, with net migration peaking at over 300,000. Such levels are unprecedented in British history. Net migration is still around 250,000 per annum (the average since 2004), with non-Europeans taking up the slack as European net migration falls.[13]

Few societies find it easy to cope with what now could be described as mass immigration, and for Britain it was a crucial factor leading to the Brexit vote. The political ambition is clearly now to limit the number of European immigrants. Whether this objective is met, those who are here in the main expect to stay, and there will still be positive net immigration for years, and perhaps decades, from non-European countries.

There are two effects on the natural environment. The first is the aggregate resources, including housing and infrastructure, that will be required to address the needs of a growing population. The second is the impact on composition. By 2020 the population is expected to reach 67 million, rising to 77 million by 2050.[14] Although this population will continue to age, it will have more young people than anticipated a couple of decades ago. The European immigrants have turned out to be young and well educated. For the European and non-European immigrants, birth rates are typically higher than for the rest of the population. We have built population growth into the long term.

Without mitigating action now, the environmental consequences of some 10 million extra people will be a repeat of what happened throughout the twentieth century. They will place 10 million more demands on the environment for consumption – for water, energy, housing and food. They will have a higher standard of living than those in the twentieth century, and therefore they will consume more per head. This is the equivalent to adding one more London, and one that is wealthier at that. None of this suggests that immigration is a bad thing: these extra people would have an environmental impact wherever they live, just as we do. The important point is that if we want a green and prosperous land, we have to factor in the inevitable consequences of a growing population.

More houses

With the growth of population has come an assumption that Britain needs more houses, and all the main political parties have committed to building more. The Conservative and Labour parties are competing to come up with ever-higher targets. These extra houses could pose a great challenge to the natural environment, and the impacts depend on where and how they are built and what supporting infrastructure is provided. On a business-as-usual basis, it could mean more ribbon development, more incursions into the Green Belt, more loss of greenfield land and more traffic and associated infrastructures. Every city, town and rural village is getting houses added and, with housing a political imperative, there is so far scant evidence that the environment is going to do anything other than suffer, as it did in the 1930s with the creation of ribbon development and suburbs, and in the 1960s too. There is little beauty in this business-as-usual world.

The increase in population does mandate more houses, but the demand for houses is more complicated. Britain has a high level of owner occupation (even if it is falling), and owning a house is the main way in which citizens acquire wealth by what is in effect forced savings. British people want to own houses, in addition to needing housing. It is still a core part of the ‘British dream’ for young families, in a way that young Germans would not appreciate, even as fewer can afford it.[15]

The emphasis on ownership reinforces a further trend, which is household break-up. More people are choosing to live alone and still own houses, and this is reflected in a fall in occupancy rates. Whether there are enough houses to go around depends on how many people live in each of them.[16]

The point about occupancy rates drives a wedge between the simple equation of population and the number of houses needed. It gets worse: as people get richer they want bigger houses; they want more privacy and seclusion, and they may even want more than one house. The constraint on housing demand is income. House builders know this. It is one of the reasons why they prefer to build large ‘executive homes’ and not affordable small ones.

Changes in housing size and occupancy in turn have implications for the environmental footprint. A row of small tenements or blocks of apartments and flats in inner cities have radically lower environmental impacts than those of larger houses and housing estates on the periphery of towns and cities. Dense urban housing creates fewer carbon emissions and less traffic, and brings economies of scale and density. Imagine a world where most people lived in cities, and most of these in the city centres. It would be a world of public transport, not private cars, and of radically greater energy efficiency. It would leave most of the rest of the land open and green, and indeed it would create more scope to green the suburbs with lots of natural capital for these urban populations to enjoy.

What these considerations illustrate is that housing left to market forces will be an environmental disaster and will replicate some of those disasters now being witnessed in a number of rapidly developing countries. Market forces drive up demand for houses in line with income. If the next decades witness 2 to 3 per cent GDP growth per annum, it is not hard to see that much of the Green Belt, and lots more green fields, will be concreted over by 2050. If each development does not have to pay for the environmental and social costs it imposes on the rest of the population, it will impose them. Imagine how quickly the Green Belt would fill up if the landowners could sell to the highest bidders without worrying about planning permission and paying for the environmental detriments caused. Paying for top lawyers and using consultants, lobbyists and PR companies to influence legislation and planners’ decisions has worked for them in the past, and it could go on doing so. Indeed, it is.

This is why planning is essential to housing and housing development. Britain needs to decide how many houses should be built, what sort of houses should be built, and where they should be built. That was the step taken in the 1947 Planning Act, and with the creation of the National Parks (which were largely planning bodies – more on this later). It has now fallen away.

It is perfectly possible to house the growing population without a net detriment to the natural environment. Indeed, the environment can be enhanced as part of the process. Nor is it necessarily the case that house prices have to rise, provided that the impacts of developments on the rest of the natural environment and us are properly priced, compensation is paid and prudently spent on new and enhanced natural capital, and, overall, houses are not protected from taxation to make them particularly attractive ways of accumulating wealth. But to do this requires much more efficient policies, to which we will return later.

More infrastructure

There are probably not many people who think that Britain’s physical infrastructure is in good shape. Sitting in a traffic jam on the M25, experiencing the delays on the Great Western main line, trying to make a mobile phone call on Exmoor, let alone trying to get a decent broadband connection, are daily reminders that all is not well with Britain’s infrastructure.

Along with these basic service failures there are additional pressures. Water supplies are taken for granted, but the pressure on abstractions and the growth in demand with new housing have considerable implications for the natural environment. The attempts to reduce carbon emissions are leading to the need for new electricity transmission lines, new wind and solar farms, and new nuclear power stations.

It is not hard to argue that Britain’s infrastructures are generally not fit for purpose, even before we add the extra 10 million people and all the houses that are planned. If we do add these, and work out how much transport, energy, water and sewerage, and communications demand they will add on top, the scale of the new infrastructure development requirements that emerge is very large – with potentially massive implications for the natural environment.

Infrastructure comes in lots of shapes and sizes. There are massive projects like HS2, Crossrail, Hinkley nuclear power station, the Thames Tideway and new airport runways. Then there are significant increments to the existing systems: to roads, electricity and gas networks, and to the water and sewerage systems.

On top of all this, there are the connections to all the new houses. Travel around many smaller towns and villages, and you will see 500 houses being added here and there on the outskirts. Semi-rural Oxfordshire is littered with them – from the housing developments at Didcot linking up to the A34, to the housing estates added to villages without many amenities – in effect dormitories. One or two cars per new house on the existing roads is going to have obvious consequences, and yet the developers have only limited liabilities to address these.

Many conservationists take a hostile stance towards new infrastructure and new housing developments. Across Britain there are community initiatives to try to halt the bulldozers. Dismissed by the housing industry and their lobbyists as driven by ‘nimbys’ (‘not in my back yard’), these campaigns are typically about much more than the impacts on their individual properties. To many these look like a repeat of tagging housing on to existing communities in the 1960s, or, worse, the ribbon developments of the 1930s that helped to precipitate the planning legislation of the 1940s. They have much to fear and much to protest about if they want to protect their local communities.

The problem for these objectors is that they will mostly lose. Central government has pushed through a series of planning acts to tip the balance away from local communities, encouraged by the massive lobbying of developers. There are now national plans and national strategies, and local authorities are in effect told to get on with it.[17]

While there are good reasons for particular campaigns and objections, something more is needed if the impacts are not to be seriously damaging to the natural environment. This requires not only a return to planning, but also the urgent application of the ‘net environmental gain’ principle to infrastructure and housing developments, properly and comprehensively measured.

It also requires an intelligent approach to technologies. Electricity transmission lines no longer need to be a blot on the landscape. They can go underground. Roads and railways can be fully digital. The need to travel to work can be tempered by video links and ever more efficient communications. The comprehensive roll-out of broadband and fibre could reduce the demands for other physical infrastructure. Better measurement and management of energy supplies and water can reduce demand too. It is possible (and in the above examples it is necessary) to improve infrastructure and at the same time protect and enhance the natural environment, but only with an integrated and planned approach. The unconstrained application of market forces will not deliver this.

More consumption

The pressures of population growth, housing and infrastructure are multiplied through the rising levels of consumption. As GDP goes up, so does consumption. Indeed, most of the increases in economic growth in Britain are driven by spending ever more. Britain has a very high propensity to spend all of its income – and indeed more than its income – by increasing debt levels. In 2018, this was reflected in the average household spending £900 more than their income.[18]

Some numbers help to bring a perspective to this challenge. If GDP grows at 3 per cent per annum, it will double in less than 25 years. It is just the power of compound interest. Britain probably won’t quite make 3 per cent, but, as a rough guide, by 2050 a doubling is a plausible assumption to make.

Imagine what this would look like in 2050. Although the extra income would be spread over more people, think what you would spend twice your current income on. The better-off might buy bigger homes or even more second homes. The bulk of the population will buy more holidays, more clothes and more services. Most of this stuff has the potential to further damage the natural environment and create even more waste.

It is this that leads more radical greens to question whether we should be allowed to keep on spending so much or whether a more frugal lifestyle is required to ‘save the planet’. It is not hard to empathise with this sentiment. Looking beyond Britain, growth rates in China, India and increasingly in Africa are more like 5 to 7 per cent per annum. China has spent nearly 30 years growing at around 10 per cent per annum, which is a doubling of the size of its economy every seven years, and this is reflected in the new affluence of the emerging Chinese middle classes who now turn up in Britain in significant numbers as tourists. Whatever the benefits of all that extra consumption to the Chinese people, from a global environmental perspective, the spectacular GDP growth of China since 1980 has been a disaster for climate change, water resources, the state of the seas and for biodiversity. And it is one that continues to gather pace.

There are two dimensions to this extra consumption that impact on the natural environment: how much is spent; and what it is spent on. How much is spent should not be based on the 2 to 3 per cent GDP growth number, and there is a lot to be put right before economic growth can be accommodated, including the impacts of all the fiscal deficits, trade deficits and quantitative easing that pumped consumption up artificially high since the financial crisis of 2007/08. Current growth and spending levels are not sustainable: we are living beyond our means. It is not that these numbers cannot rise without damage to the environment. They can. Rather, it is that the numbers need first to be adjusted so that they are in fact sustainable.[19]

The amount of consumption growth after these corrections depends on technical progress, and there is lots more of this to come. Rebased, what will the resultant incomes be spent on? This depends on prices and planning. Current spending does not properly take account of all the external negative impacts on the environment – the externalities – and it should. What this requires is that these externality costs are reflected in the prices we pay online and in the shops. Food is artificially cheap because farmers do not pay for the pollution they cause. New houses are artificially cheap to build because the builders do not pay for all their wider impacts and the infrastructures they require. Packaged goods are artificially cheap because we don’t pay for all the cardboard and plastic. Once all these externalities are included – if the polluter-pays principle is properly applied – what we spend our money on may turn out to be rather different than business-as-usual suggests.

An even quieter spring?

Business-as-usual is not a stable equilibrium, a world where we just live with the damage done in the twentieth century and allow it to worsen in this century. The damage is dynamic and, if allowed to run on, it will not bode well for the natural environment. More people, more houses, more physical infrastructure and more consumption is a world in which the chances that nature will hold its own are slim without action now. There will be some successes, but this is a world of instant gratification in almost all human activities.

The housing lobbyists argue that there is lots of land, and that building on more of it leaves lots left. Similarly they argue that the Green Belt is large, and a few more houses make little difference. Tracks up hillsides for wind farms, trucks to fish farms and cutting down a few ancient woodlands for HS2 are collateral damage for a claimed greater economic good.

This marginal argument, a marginal difference for each project and each marginal development, when set against a much larger whole plays out in business-as-usual. At each point along the way, one more housing estate is too small to make much difference to the whole. But it is a deadly argument. The trouble with this marginal argument is easy to see, but almost entirely ignored. Each time the marginal card is played there is a bit less left of the ecosystem and habitat of which it is a part. And so it goes on, until there is nothing left. In the words of the song by Joni Mitchell, ‘you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone’.[20] You will hear developers say that the Green Belt is not really very green anymore anyway because it has been intensively farmed. But why has it been intensively farmed? Because each new marginal addition to the chemical arsenal has been added on a case-by-case basis.

The tyranny of the marginal is the route to an increasingly silent spring. It is what business-as-usual means. Lots and lots of marginal losses end up with a catastrophe for insect life and for farmland birds. To seriously head off the damage that business-as-usual will bring – through more people, more houses and more hard infrastructures – the starting point needs to be the public goods, and not the marginal changes. It is these public goods that are being eroded in a death by a thousand cuts. Make no mistake, business-as-usual is likely to tip many ecosystems over the edge. By 2050 there could be very little left, and in a world with perhaps 500 or more parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere. The intensification of farming, industry, towns and cities could result in a silence of nature – of the birds, of the remaining insects and most of our mammals, reptiles, fish and invertebrates. It doesn’t have to be like this, but it will unless we act, and act now.