A key political advisor to the UK government has stressed she is committed to fulfilling the country’s nature-related targets, including biodiversity credit action, the same day as a reshuffle of the country’s top ministers saw the environment secretary resign.
Joanna Penn, a political advisor and junior minister in the UK Treasury, said the country needs to focus on reversing its nature degradation through measures such as its work on biodiversity credits.
“I’m absolutely committed to all of our targets and work in nature and biodiversity,” Penn said in response to question from Carbon Pulse at the Natural Capital Summit in London on Monday.
“There is huge amounts going on in the UK at the moment and big opportunities … whether it’s biodiversity net gain, or the reform of our Common Agricultural Policy into the Environmental Land Management system.”
Her comments came a few hours before the country’s environment secretary Therese Coffey resigned from her role, amid a wider government reshuffle with changes to the home and foreign secretaries.
Penn acknowledged that Rishi Sunak, the UK Prime Minister, had announced changes to the country’s commitments to net zero in September. These included pushing back the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035.
The Treasury advisor said that Sunak did not alter the “very ambitious, nationally determined contribution to 2030 … but how we get there was adjusted a bit. It actually keeps us in line with most major other economies that are ambitious in this area, such as the EU”.
Regardless, the UK government was “driving forward” work on biodiversity credits, while looking to ensure financing to protect biodiversity abroad, she said.
Andrea Ledward, international biodiversity and climate director at the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, also said she was working on biodiversity credits.
“We have been working very hard with France, to support work on biodiversity credits. That is recognising that there are an awful lot of questions in the private markets about how do you best invest with integrity,” Ledward said.
“The work on the Independent Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits is seen very much as trying to support implementation of Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) by looking at how you take forward [its methodologies] into supporting market-based mechanisms, to actually stimulate finance in a more nature-positive direction.”
In the summer, France and the UK announced they were establishing an advisory committee that will present a concept of what the global biodiversity credits market might look like at COP28 next month.
The UK has also been working as ocean co-chair at the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, an intergovernmental group of 117 countries targeting policy change, Ledward said.
“That has been about how do you go through the National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans Accelerator Partnership … to really help countries access direct funding,” she said.
Nevertheless, progress on tackling global biodiversity loss was “probably not fast enough”, she said.
COP28 should be used “as a pivot point to sharpen minds” around the integration of nature and climate to “show them as two sides of the same coin”, she added.
“I’m looking to go to COP28 with a number of UK ministers in a couple of weeks and will very much be focusing on how we use that as a stepping stone into COP16.”
The UN biodiversity conference, COP16, is due to take place next year, while the climate equivalent, COP28 begins later this month in Dubai.
By Thomas Cox – t.cox@carbon-pulse.com
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