It is becoming increasingly common to hear conservatives express scepticism about climate change policies and support for nature protection. You hear this sentiment clearly expressed in President Trump’s desire for clean air and clean water alongside a firm rejection of climate change. Although there’s much less climate scepticism in the UK, you hear echoes of it in our debate too, for instance in opposition to renewable energy due to its impacts on the local ecology. But while it is absolutely correct that nature needs to be given far more attention, it is a mistake to sideline climate action.
The evidence is clear that both climate change and nature loss are serious threats to our security and prosperity, and need tackling. Here in the UK, the summer of 2022 saw the hottest temperature ever recorded, which was then followed by the wettest 18 months on record. Species abundance in this country has fallen by 19% since 1970, and one in six species are at risk of extinction.
These are not isolated challenges, however. Climate change is making it harder for species to survive in the landscapes where they have evolved to thrive. In the UK, for instance, the fungus which causes ash dieback spreads more easily during the warmer, wetter winters that are becoming more common as the climate changes. This one disease is expected to cost Britain £15 billion over the next few decades and cause the near complete loss of one of our most beloved native species. Our native Atlantic salmon are threatened by climate change, as they struggle to lay their eggs in warmer waters. Similarly, our puffins face the loss of up to 70% of their nesting sites and lower availability of the sandeels upon which they rely for food, due to climate change and warmer seas.
Just as climate change causes nature loss, the converse is also true. We are fuelling climate change with the destruction of biodiverse habitats like the Amazon rainforest that also act as carbon sinks. Even though the burning of fossil fuels is the majority of the problem, around 18% of global emissions are caused by how we manage land. As such, many of the solutions to climate change and biodiversity loss are complementary, such as restoring woodlands and peatlands, farming more sustainably, and prioritising the densification of towns and cities over greenfield development and urban sprawl. Ignoring climate to focus on nature is not an ecologically coherent policy.
One reason some are pushing nature over climate is that, superficially at least, nature conservation appears a better fit with conservative values than climate action. Aligned with Edmund Burke’s vision of the ‘little platoons’, recovering nature is a necessarily local undertaking, rooted in communities, and open to bottom-up approaches. Climate action, by contrast, involves massive transformation of national infrastructure, widespread technology adoption, and global coordination. Sir Roger Scruton makes a similar argument in Green Philosophy, although the reality and immediacy of climate change has become clearer since his seminal book on conservative environmentalism was published.
But if you strip away the left’s framing of climate justice, globalism, and general ‘hair-shirtism’, tackling climate change is - at its core - perfectly aligned with conservative principles. There is no more important conservative value than honouring the responsibility we owe to the dead, the living, and the yet-to-be-born, as articulated by Edmund Burke. As conservatives, how can we tolerate the idea of bequeathing to our children and grandchildren a world with greater food insecurity, more flooding, more droughts, and rising sea levels, which is what allowing climate change to run unchecked would entail? Just as we accept the need to control spending and pay taxes to avoid passing on debts to future generations, so too we should accept the investment cost of reaching net zero so that future generations can thrive and raise their families with the security of a stable change.
Of course it is not enough simply to ground the case for climate action in conservative principles. We need to implement conservative policy mechanisms to decarbonise, and too often we haven’t done so. Ed Miliband is taking climate policy even further in a statist, centrally planned direction. But there is a viable market-led approach to net zero, encompassing competitive auctions for clean power, carbon pricing, streamlined regulation and planning for net zero infrastructure, and tax incentives for clean technology R&D and adoption. The same is true of nature policy too, where we need to focus more on private markets for nature, local nature recovery, and outcome-based, rather than process-based, environmental protections.
A second driver of the nature push is environmental. There is a worry that in seeking to limit climate change we are embracing solutions that have adverse consequences for the natural world. It is wrong to deny that clean technologies have an environmental footprint. Of course they do. Pretty much any economic activity will have some negative environmental effect, however small. Environmentalists should be in the vanguard of those calling out supposed climate solutions that come with big biodiversity harms, such as the burning of unsustainable biomass for electricity generation.
But sometimes the environmental impacts of clean energy can be exaggerated. For instance, house cats kill many many more birds than windfarms; way more mining is required for fossil fuel energy generation than clean energy; and offshore wind is not killing whales.
Similarly, when climate and nature goals are in conflict, it is possible to strike a balance. For instance, we should develop new clean energy away outside of protected areas and require much more recycling and reuse of critical minerals to limit the need for harmful mining. Conversely, we should sensitively reform nature laws to ensure they don’t make unaffordably expensive the infrastructure that we need to build for reducing emissions, as exemplified recently with the infamous £100 million bat tunnel for HS2 or the fish disco at Hinkley Point C. In doing so, there is an opportunity to improve outcomes for nature by redirecting funding towards front-line delivery away from consultancy and regulatory compliance costs.
Finally, there is often a political rationale underpinning calls to emphasise nature over climate. Polling by More in Common suggests nature is far less contentious with the right-leaning public: among 2019 Conservative voters, 95% of those who switched to Reform in 2024 agreed it was important to protect nature, while only 56% agreed it was important to tackle climate change. By comparison, 90% of Conservative to Labour switchers say they think tackling climate change is important and 93% say they think protecting nature is important. Nature is certainly much less controversial and a unifying message that should be deployed more frequently to grow support for the environmental cause.
But digging deeper, the political calculus isn’t so straightforward. Although support is more polarised, net zero is still popular with the majority of the public (75%), including a majority of Conservative voters (76%). And for many voters, acceptance of the imperative of climate action is a hygiene factor. Staunch opposition to climate action, even if accompanied by bold action on nature, could turn voters off voting Conservatives.
Nor is there an easier path to restoring nature than reaching net zero. Conservatives understandably flinch at the prospect of voters having to change their heating system or car in the name of climate change. But delivery of nature goals is far from uncontroversial either and also involves potentially difficult trade-offs, especially when it comes to farming, fishing, and housebuilding. That is why, despite doing a huge amount, the last government failed to trumpet its achievements on nature during the general election campaign. Very little was said, for example, about the transformational post-Brexit incentive schemes to reward nature-friendly farming, because of a (misguided) fear of alienating rural voters.
None of this is to reject more conservative support for nature restoration. Quite the opposite: it is very welcome. Some on the centre-right will never be convinced by net zero, and it is far better to have them champion nature than excluded from the environmental debate.
More backing for nature is urgent too. While the UK has halved our greenhouse gas emissions since 1990, our wildlife is still in decline. Nature policy is much less developed than climate policy. And with research showing 83% of Fortune Global 500 companies have climate targets while only 5% have biodiversity targets, the private sector certainly needs to take nature loss more seriously.
Furthermore, with the new government failing to match their lofty rhetoric on nature with serious delivery plans so far in this parliament, biodiversity offers the greater opportunity within the environmental debate for the Conservatives to outcompete Labour. The goal of halting nature’s decline by 2030 looks much more challenging to meet, with Labour’s trailed cuts to the nature-friendly farming budget in the second half of this parliament and the exhaustion of their political capital with farmers through an unnecessary and damaging cut to agricultural property relief.
But ditching climate action for nature would not be an environmentally sound policy, and would be a political mistake for conservatives too.
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