On the eve of Rio+20 the environment secretary talks of natural capital, saving bees and defending George Osborne's record
Next week leaders from around the world will be attending Rio+20, a successor to the landmark 1992 "saving-the-planet" Earth Summit. It has been billed as one of the most important summits in the history of the United Nations, but with the eurozone in crisis, and some leaders, including President Obama staying away, expectations for the event have not exactly been sky-high. That has not stopped Caroline Spelman, the environment secretary, who has been leading Britain's preparations, looking on the bright side. We did a long interview earlier this week, covering Rio+20 and much else, and here are the main points.
• Spelman claimed that the international economic crisis actually increased the chances of a deal being struck at Rio+20. "What we are dealing with in this financial crisis is a period of unsustainable development," she said. "These are the consequences of having grown and developed unsustainably. I think it focuses the mind on what it is we need to do differently."
• She said that David Cameron was not attending the summit partly because of the crisis in the eurozone.
• She said it was "just so wrong" to claim that there was a conflict between growth and sustainability. "It has not been helpful to see some commentators make an artificial distinction between green and growing," she said. "The straight answer is you can be both green and growing."
• She said that water meters were "not a panacea" to water shortage problems.
• She said she had not made up her mind yet whether to support David Cameron's plan for gay marriage. "It's a free vote," she said. "When the vote comes round up I'll make my mind up about that one. I've been so busy."
• She rejected claims that the Conservative party needed a chairman in the House of Commons.
• She said ministers should be able to use projectors in the House of Commons chamber so that they can present visual data when making parliamentary statements. This would be particularly helpful to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) because its announcements often involve maps, she said. "The chamber is a lovely, lovely building but it isn't geared up for modern, visual media."
A new book about the coalition, The Politics of Coalition by Robert Hazell and Ben Young, quotes a senior Defra official as saying Spelman is "the most collegiate cabinet minister I have ever worked with" and that she is "devoted to working constructively with her colleagues". This came out when we spoke on Tuesday. She refused point-blank to accept the idea that George Osborne might not be fully signed up to the green agenda and trying to get her to agree that there could be any conflict between policies that promote growth and policies that promote sustainability was impossible. But, thankfully, other lines of inquiry were more productive. Sheis no hardcore environmentalist – "I'm not a saint," she said, when I asked her about her personal green credentials – but she is certainly an enthusiast for the green economy agenda. Here's how it went.
Rio+20 Summit
Q: You gave a speech on the Rio+20 summit four months ago and you said the text for the summit agreement that was around at the time "lacks focus and ambition", "doesn't properly make the case for green growth" and "doesn't explicitly link natural resources, poverty, and the economy". Do those criticisms still apply?
A: It's getting better. They have cleared 70 paragraphs now and there are about 257 paragraphs to go. So the "zero draft", as it's named, is a very long, wordy, worthy document. They spent an extra week in New York trying to simplify it and I think it is a bit improved. But there's still a long way to go. [We published a copy of the 81-page draft text on the Guardian website last week.]
Q: You're going to Rio with the world economy in a mess. How much is that going to limit what you and other people attending Rio can achieve?
A: I don't think it limits it. I think it makes it essential, because really what we are dealing with in this financial crisis is a period of unsustainable development. These are the consequences of having grown and developed unsustainably. I think it focuses the mind on what it is we need to do differently so we don't find ourselves doing that all over again.
One of the strongest themes is green economy and so something that makes green economy inclusive – in other words, relevant to absolutely everybody, every nation – it's in all of their interests to be much more efficient with the way they use natural resources. We reckon in the UK alone we could save £23bn a year if we were resource efficient. So if there was ever a time to green your economy, now is a good time.
Q: Do you think, then, that the state of the economy increases the chances of a deal?
A: I think it does, because I think nations are very focused on the challenge of unsustainable development and the fact that resources are finite in a lot of cases, running out in some cases, becoming more expensive in other cases. All of that challenges how we use those resources. You can both save money and grow jobs through new technology if you green your economy. From our own calculations, growth in green goods and services has increased by £5.4bn [from 2009-10 to 2010/11]. That's evidence that, at a tough time, when people are saying where are the jobs going to come from and where is the growth going to come from, the greening of the economy actually does produce both.
Growth versus sustainability
Q: Clearly there are jobs that can be created in the green economy. But when I posted a blog inviting readers to suggest questions for you, someone [Newtownian1] said I should put it to you that green growth is an oxymoron. Isn't there an inevitable tension between the two ideas?
A: That is just so wrong. I don't accept that. You can, and you need to be, both green and growing. And you are crazy not to be green and growing, because you get much more efficient use of resources, and you get the growth and innovation through green goods and services. Globally, the market for that is worth £3.3tn. It's big.
Q: You can do both, but at some point there is clearly a tension between growth and sustainability, isn't there?
A: But the whole point of sustainable development is that you grow greenly.
Q: But there will be some people – not necessarily in this department – who will say "we're not necessarily worried about the green bit of the economy, because that's the future and it's a long way away, we just want growth and jobs now". So at some point isn't there an inevitable tension there?
A: I don't think that's accurate. The chancellor is the first chancellor in the history of British government to stump up £3bn for a green investment bank. You can't take that away from him. It's one of the very important vehicles we have in this country to green our own infrastructure. Other countries are really interested in that model. Another example would be the green deal, which demonstrates how big utility companies are willing to stump up capital up front to help people sustain themselves in their own homes.
Q: Are you saying then that, even at a theoretical level, you don't accept that there's a tension between growth and sustainability?
A: No, I don't accept that. It has not been helpful to see some commentators make an artificial distinction between green and growing. The straight answer is you can be both green and growing, and it's in our interests to be green and growing.
Q: I'm not contesting that. But if you can be green and growing, you can also have growth that isn't green – red growth, or black growth or whatever.
A: Well, I'm interested in green growth. That's my job.
George Osborne
Q: Talking about the chancellor, when he told the Conservative party conference last year that "we're not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business", wasn't the message that people heard that he thinks there is a tension between growing the economy and ...
A: I can't tell you what other people heard from that.
Q: How did you interpret it then?
A: We undertook an exercise in reviewing environmental legislation in this department and what we discovered was that we had a cannon of legislation that had not been revisited since it was put onto the statute book, and some of it was obsolete. And so what we did is reduce the burden of regulation without in any way reducing environmental protection.
Cutting regulations
Q: There was a controversy earlier this year when it was reported that Oliver Letwin had floated the idea of reducing all environmental regulations down to a 50-page document. At the time you said you weren't at the meeting and didn't know much about it. Have you established since whether or not that was a plan?
A: I wasn't there and it's obviously not true. It hasn't happened. I dismiss that, really.
Promoting GDP+
Q: At Rio you're promoting the idea of "GDP+", the idea that governments should measure more than just economic output. And you've set up a natural capital committee.
A: Yes. We've been asked, at a fringe event at Rio, to showcase our work on GDP+ and the natural capital committee. We're one of very few governments that has actually set up a natural capital committee that reports directly into the chancellor.
Q: How will that have an impact on policy making?
A: It will have a huge impact.
Q: How?
A: At the moment, when the government makes decisions, it makes decisions about resources without factoring in the true value of what nature provides for free. We just take it for granted. We assume the bees will just carry on polinating the trees, for example. Well, if they didn't it would cost the economy £400m. We know that because we have the scientific tools which will actually assess the value of the natural capital. Henceforth what it means is that decisions made by government have natural capital factored in.
Q: Can you give an example of where that has already happened?
A: It's a bit premature. The natural capital committee has only just been established and the ONS [Office for National Statistics] will give its first report on the working of the natural capital committee in July.
Q: But if you establish that bees are worth £400m to the economy, does that mean that anything that costs less than £400m that protects bees is worth doing?
A: It doesn't work like that. But it means that instead of assuming that pollinators just provide their services for free, we need to factor in that they don't in point of fact because if they disappeared and didn't exist, we would have to substitute for their service. So when we are making decisions about allocating budgets and resources and research funding to maintain bee health, one of the things we will be factoring in will be the need to maintain £400m-worth of contribution to the economy from the valiant army of bees.
Q: Another part of the GDP+ agenda is wellbeing.
A: Yes. The World Bank are interested in us talking about that at Rio. I'll give credit to the prime minister, because it was his idea, that you need to get beyond a narrow definition of GDP as just economic capital. And you need to understand much better the wider concept, including social capital. There is growing recognition around the world that GDP is a narrow definition of a country's true wealth. For example, if you factored in the value of natural capital in a country's wealth you would probably have a different batting order of the world's wealthiest nations because we are not resource-rich in this part of the world.
Q: If someone asks you at Rio what is the government doing differently as a result of this work, will you be able to give them an answer?
A: Well, for example, one of the things that we are able to calculate with the value of natural capital is that the benefits of planting trees in urban areas, or suburban areas, hugely outweighs the value of planting trees in open land because of the dearth of green space in urban areas.
Q: In the sense that people like having trees in towns?
A: Yes, they confer benefits. I think we calculate in our national ecosystem assessment that a tree in an urban areas confers £38,000-worth of economic and social benefits, as I recall the figure. That informs decision-making. You would think hard, when you are creating a development, about keeping the trees that are in place that are there already, but also planting more. We are trying to plant 1m more trees during this parliament. We will actively look to plant those in urban and suburban areas because we know now, with the science base, the benefit that brings.
David Cameron's non-attendance at Rio
Q: There has been a lot of criticism about the fact that the prime minister is not going to Rio. One of the readers who posted a question on the blog [OPatrick] said that Cameron's failure to attend made a positive outcome less likely and that this showed he was putting short-term political interests, "fear of being associated with another international failure of leadership", ahead of what was right.
A: I don't see that at all. The prime minister's attendance at Rio or not is no indication of the commitment of the UK government to a successful outcome at Rio. The evidence is very plain for all to see; for month and months we have been really actively engaged in trying to help Brazilians get a successful outcome.
It's just a simple straight practical issue for the prime minister that it's the Mexican G20 summit just before Rio and he can't afford to be out of the country for that length of time given all the difficulties that are in the eurozone. Everybody, I think, understands that. Not every prime minister is going to Rio. Some are just going for the day, and quite a lot are not going at all. Quite a lot of my environment ministers do not have, as I do, a deputy prime minister coming. I've got the deputy prime minister coming for the entire ministerial segment, not just flying in for a day.
Greenest government ever?
Q: When you were elected you said you would be the greenest government ever. By 2015, how will voters be able to establish whether or not you've achieved that?
A: In a variety of ways. I've already pointed to some of these. For example, we produced the first natural environment white paper in 20 years, which has got some real practical benefits for people on the ground. It has brought into being nature improvement areas, local nature partnerships, and these have been extremely popular. We were inundated with requests for these, things that actually help address the decline of species. I've pointed to the green investment bank. We've put sustainable development at the heart of the government. You see expression of that in the planning reforms. That represents a significant step forward. If in the past we have seen a lot of unsustainable development, the government has recognised that the plannning process needs to ensure that sustainable development is what we see going forward.
Q: What do you say to someone who said that's fine, but we'd like to measure this with some kind of indicators?
A: You can measure it however you like. We constantly measure our progress in our national biodiversity strategy. We have committed ourselves at Nagoya to certain indicators to protect and enhance biodiversity and these are now enshrined in our national strategy. So we have accepted and adopted those. We were one of the first countries to do so, one of the first countries to sign up to the Nagoya protocol.
Q: What was the previous greenest government ever? If you can look at governments and say whether they are green or not, there must have been a previous greenest one.
A: Governments have been getting progressively greener. You have got to give a bit of credit to Margaret Thatcher who, as a scientist, was one of the first prime ministers to understand the significance of climate change. But I think this will be the government that is greener than is any that has gone before. There existed no green investment bank until this government came along. No one else had put sustainable development at the heart of the planning process. And there are a certain number of key things that are distinct and more ambitious.
Meat and sustainability
Q: Another reader who posted a question on the blog [tivic] said that if the government is really serious about sustainable development, it should encourage people to eat less meat. Do you accept that?
A: It entirely depends how the meat is produced. There are big differences in the way meat is produced. I don't think you can narrow it down to that. Sustainable development requires a holistic approach to the way we lives our lives, the use of all natural resources in a sustainable way, of which meat is one fraction. But I might say to you that as part of being more sustainable we need to look at using water more wisely.
Water
Q: You wrote an article about water for the Guardian in the days when we used to worry about water shortages and you highlighted various things that individuals can do to save water, like using a bowl for the washing up. Exhorting people like this – does it actually work?
A: I think there is some evidence that it does. People are sometimes unaware how much water they are consuming. For example, although I'm a housewife, I did not realise until comparatively recently that a washing machine will use 60 litres of water to do a full wash. How would that inform my decision-making? I would probably wait for a full load. You can't always do that, because if you've got little children, you've sometimes got to get on and wash it right then. People want to do the right thing. The thing is to make it easier for people to do.
Q: But aren't financial measures like water metering – about which your white paper says very little – far more likely to change behaviour?
A: Water meters tell you how much you use. They don't reduce what you use.
Q: Well, if your bills start to go up …
A: The reason why they are not a panacea is that if you go to some parts of the country that have above average rainfall, if you go up to the north-west, people would find it very hard to understand why you would want to meter in a part of the world that probably has more water than it needs most times. It's not a one-sized-fits-all approach. The thing is to find appropriate measures for people who want to use that water wisely. You have got much higher penetration of uptake of water meters in parts of the country that are traditionally drier than you get in parts of the country that are traditionally wet.
Q: On these personal lifestyle issues, are you a particularly green person?
A: I try to be. But I'm not a saint.
Q: If you had a scale, with George Monbiot on 10 and Jeremy Clarkson on 1, where are you?
A: I'm somewhere on the spectrum. The really interesting thing is that since my childhood, per capita consumption of water has, if I'm not mistaken, trebled. It has certainly doubled. And one of the main reasons for that is appliances. Well, I'm largely in charge of those appliances in the home. So I am now much more aware in running the home in how I can use water more wisely. Everybody knows the thing about bathing, showering, whatever. I don't want to be prescriptive because there isn't a one-sized-fits-all approach. Everybody has different circumstances. Everybody knows ways to save water. I try to do my best.
One of the really key things that came out of this episode of water shortage, and now in places some surfeit, is the key to this is interconnectivity.
Q: What do you mean by that?
A: What I mean by that is that water is very heavy to move around. So what is absolutely key is connecting up water companies to each other, so they can move water from an area of plenty to one with a dearth, but also connecting up within their area. Take a water company like Yorkshire Water. After their drought experience in 2005, what it did is connect its bore holes to its rivers to its reservoirs, so that it could move water between the sources that it has. What is essentially happening is a new national network is being created, so that we can move the water around more effectively. It's very expensive to pipe water long distances. So what you really want is to have local connectivity, so you can move it around over shorter distances.
Conservative party chairmanship
Q: You were Conservative party chairman for a while. After the local elections, Ken Baker and Richard Ryder and others started saying that the party needed a chairman in the House of Commons. [Lord Feldman and Lady Warsi, the two current co-chairmen, are both in the Lords.] What do you think about that?
A: Honestly, I don't think it makes any difference. Actually, the party chairman's role is very much out and about. The party chairman has to get around the country a great deal, meeting the activists. It's actually quite difficult to combine with heavy frontbench activity. So having this co-chairmanship is quite a good idea, I think.
Gay marriage
Q: Where do you stand on gay marriage? Some members of the government are saying they are not in favour, some are saying it should be a priority, some are saying it's not a priority.
A: It's a free vote. When the vote comes round up I'll make my mind up about that one. I've been so busy dealing with flood and drought and one thing and another.
Using projectors in the Commons chamber
Q: When you gave evidence to the environmental audit committee, you said that one of the reasons why you did not make a statement in the Commons about the climate change risk assessment you published earlier this year was because in the Commons you cannot present data well.
A: No. Because one of the things about the climate change risk assessment, of which I'm immensely proud, is that it represents the work of over 200 scientists worldwide. What they did was superimpose their models, using the power of a supercomputer, to get the very best scientific assessment of the likely impact of climate change on the economy, to a quite fine-grain detail. You can get it down to a regional level. The illustrations that go with that, the graphs, the maps - there's no facility within the Commons. What you really need is a projector.
Q: Is that a realistic prospect?
A: I think we should have. Of course I think we should have it. It would be immensely helpful. For what I have to deal with, flood, drought, maps are always involved. The ability to be able to project the evidence into the chamber would be immensely helpful.
Q: Are there any other parliaments that do that?
A: I've no idea. I don't sit in any other parliaments. But what we did, and I think this was the right thing to do, we laid on a presentation in both the Commons and the Lords of the climate change risk assessment. I think they found it really helpful. The alternative is just to have a statement at the despatch box, without these scientific illustrations and graphs and maps. It would have been more difficult to do without the illustrations. My decision to do it in a committee room made it possible for the scientists to explain it to constituency MPs. People were looking very closely at the map. They were saying, "right I'm a coastal constituency, so your map shows this is the likely impact of coastal erosion in my area".
The chamber is a lovely, lovely building but it isn't geared up for modern, visual media. And maybe we could find a way. There must be a way. In churches you are able to have draw-down screens. There must be a way to do that. But so far it hasn't been found.