A healthy natural environment is our safety net for climate change

Conservation is now about adaptation – and we must allow natural processes to function if we are to survive, writes Helen Phillips

Helen Phillips
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 18 June 2009 14.25 BST

Today is a significant one for our thinking about climate change, with the latest government projections now suggesting that average summer temperatures will increase by up to 6C, with peaks in London over 40C..
Even under the old scenarios we were looking at a life-changing alteration in our climate and we have already had a taste of some of the potential impacts – the heatwave of 2003, for example, resulted in the death of over 2,000 people in the UK. By the 2040s, that could be just another normal summer. And floods such as those we saw in 2007 – and which cost an estimated £3bn – will be far more commonplace.
These changes will also have an enormous impact on our wildlife and the habitats they rely on. Some of our green and pleasant land could become a dry and dusty one within decades, and some of our native species will face a major struggle for survival.
In the face of these challenges , the imperative of conservation is no longer – if it ever was – about preservation: it's about adaptation and enabling the environment to function naturally. In the process, we may need to accept that some of our wildlife – especially species at the edge of their range – will leave us.
A few animals, like the capercaillie, mountain ringlet or mountain hare, are facing extinction if climate change takes hold in the way that is predicted. But the majority of our wildlife will adapt to the climate if we enable it to do so – by improving natural habitats or managing our landscapes so that they species can migrate in step with the climate. And at the same time we have already seen new species from overseas colonising these shores in increasing numbers – little egrets are now well established, turtles are more commonly sighted off our coastline and butterflies are moving in from Europe.
To some, a healthy natural environment may seem an unaffordable luxury when society is faced with major climatic threats to homes and livelihoods. Many will argue that we need to invest more heavily in technology, to build bigger defences and to put the environment on the backburner – and in some instances, we may have no choice if we are to defend some highly vulnerable communities. But as the default solution, that cannot be the way forward. If we do not work with nature to a much greater degree than in recent decades, we are doomed to failure in the battle against climate change.
To cope with climate change we have to allow natural processes within the environment to function and we need to resist the interference that has characterised so much of our approach over the last century. Collectively we have to ensure that the critical services that a healthy environment delivers are able to operate unimpeded.
For example, peatbogs are the most important store of carbon in the UK – storing more than all the forests of Germany and France combined. Saltmarsh protects hundreds of miles of the British coastline at no cost. The free flood control and storm buffering benefits provided by coastal habitats like saltmarsh and sand dunes have been estimated at over £1bn per year.
Together, land and the oceans absorb around half of all human-produced greenhouse gas emissions. Urban green spaces help cool surrounding built up areas by up to 4C and protecting upland rivers can increase the supply of fresh drinking water – vital given the likely decrease in rainfall. Conserving a healthy natural environment is therefore not only morally correct, it is cost-effective action preparing our nation for the impacts of global warming.
Viewed in this light we are remarkably ill-prepared for the challenges ahead. During the last half century we have, as a society, put in place some spectacularly high hurdles in the way of our ability to respond to environmental change.
Much of our coastline is "defended" by concrete structures that have no capacity to adapt to rising sea levels and in some cases make erosion worse; we have overgrazed and damaged many of our peatlands that play such a critical role in absorbing and storing greenhouse gases; we have exploited our farmland so that soils are damaged and fertility decreased. We have overfished our seas so that fish stocks may simply find the changing climate too much to bear, and crash permanently. On the land, development, pollution and intensive agriculture have forced species to retreat to isolated and fragmented habitats that leave no room for them to move when climate change starts to hit.
Protecting and working with nature makes economic sense, and can be done now. Continuing to rely on as yet undeveloped technologies as our safety net for climate change would be nothing short of a disaster.
• Helen Phillips is the chief executive of Natural England