Green stock exchange would help protect countryside, says CLA

Trading schemes could set minimum quotas for the environmental benefits landowners must deliver

Press Association
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 May 2009 13.46 BST

Farmers and landowners should be able to earn "credits" for environmental measures that could be traded under schemes to boost funding to protect the countryside, it was urged today.
The Country Land and Business Association (CLA) outlined proposals for a "green stock exchange" to ensure natural services, such as unpolluted water and wildlife, are maintained.
The association said such schemes had worked in other countries, including floor-and-trade schemes that set minimum quotas for the environmental benefits landowners had to deliver. If landowners surpassed the quotas they could sell on their excess credits to others who had failed to meet the standards.
In other schemes offsetting is used, so that businesses contributing to the loss or degradation of habitat, such as wetlands, through development would have to pay for improvements to similar land elsewhere.
On a large scale, there is the possibility of bio-banking, in which a landowner manages a large parcel of land to preserve and enhance its natural value and can then sell offsets to developers who have to meet legal obligations on protecting habitats. James Lovelock, the environmentalist who developed the Gaia theory – the planet as a "living organism" – has previously condemned putting a price on ecosystems and land, likening such an approach to slavery.
The CLA's president, Henry Aubrey-Fletcher, said it was not possible to go on increasing food production and, in parallel, damaging the environment. While indirect markets for environmental services, such as certification schemes, management of moorland for hunting or eco-tourism already exist, he said the CLA was proposing a "revolutionary" way of using private markets to protect the natural world.
"At the moment the British public are perfectly prepared to pay for food and transport and most things delivered through markets, but they don't wish to pay through any market for the environment and management of the landscape, which they see as a by-product of farming and land management," he said.
He added the only way to support the environment was currently through taxes, directly through government schemes or through the EU's Common Agricultural Policy, which pays farmers to manage the land.
But the current economic climate and with a reform of CAP looming in 2012, those sources of funding could be in doubt, he warned.
Dr Derrick Wilkinson, author of a report laying out the proposals for how environmental protection could be paid for by the private sector, said it could work in the UK. "In Australia, bio-banking has been shown to work to address the loss of biodiversity, and in the US there are no fewer than 122 mitigation banks and a market worth a billion dollars," he said.
"Creating these environmental markets would be a triple victory – a win for the environment, a win for rural business and also a win for environmental regulators who would find themselves working with fewer, but more professional environmental producers."
The CLA has held a seminar to put forward the proposals, and wants to see further debate on which mechanisms could work in the UK.