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Climate Change Bill [HL]

Perhaps I may speak briefly in support of the biodiversity amendment, but first I declare an interest through past and present associations with bodies such as the WWF, the Natural History Museum, the Joint Nature Conservation Committee and various others I have probably forgotten about. I want to make two points. There is a reason we should think about this more for our own sakes. The recent UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment considered 24 categories of ecosystem services that we depend on and found that two-thirds are deteriorating, and that most of the rest are not assessable. There is also a necessarily rough assessment that suggests that the actual economic value of ecosystem services is roughly comparable to that of conventional global GDP. So there is a selfish reason. The second reason for thinking about biodiversity is that this Bill is all about us, about humans. We might find room in one paragraph to refer to the rest of the living world.