Professor Natalie Seddon delivered a sobering keynote on nature at the National Emergency Briefing. Not only did she explain that nature and security are inherently intertwined, but moreover, without resilient nature both at home and further afield, our economy and our wellbeing are at risk of damage from severe shocks to collapse.
Explore the core themes below, and OnePlanet’s key actions around each one to date.
- Nature is not a ‘nice to have’. It is critical infrastructure.
Natalie explored this through a lens on nature as national infrastructure which should be understood in terms of long-term resilience and as worthy of investment.
The thinking behind this was that when healthy and sufficient in connectivity and coverage, nature protects people, housing and other physical infrastructures from flooding, extreme heat, food scarcity, and even national health crises.
2. Nature degradation and destruction expose the country to new and heightened risks.
Nature as a preventative measure for healthcare and as a teacher for education were highlighted by Professor Seddon.
OnePlanet has an ongoing multiyear partnership working at landscape scale with the South Downs National Park Authority to deliver their commitment to restore 60% of nature by 2060. This will reduce the local risks to people and services due to climate change or ill health, taking an approach which brings in the hyper-local at a strategic level. Also, we hope that this work will act as a model for other large scale landscape projects who want to deliver resilience (as the other side of the coin to risk) through nature recovery and community involvement.
3. Key sites for global biodiversity and cultural diversity matter for the UK’s wellbeing and wealth.
Action within UK borders will not be sufficient to avoid threats to national security, a global perspective on action is essential.
Young people have been ahead of policy makers in their thinking on resilience and connectivity for some time. Our Young Leaders Manifesto co-created in 2023 with young people around the UK highlights the core need to ‘Understand interconnected global resilience’ and to ‘Celebrate local knowledge’.
A combination of global and hyper-local approaches may seem disparate from a policy perspective, but OnePlanet is designed to bridge the gaps between decision making and action on the ground by speaking a common language. This also applies to collaborating between nations too.
4. A call for immediate economic reform.
The UK’s focus for the next decade should be to reform the economy to reward ecological regeneration and stewardship, rather than the current model which rewards extraction and delays to nature-positive action. Natalie specifically called for the UK leaders in politics and community to ‘cultivate a culture of care’. We must end the commodification and extractivism which thrive within our economy, and which ultimately operate as ‘investments in its own demise’.
We are committed to bringing the community into the co-delivery of strategy at the local scale, having access to strategy which affects them and to respond to it. There is a levelling of the playing field which we try to enable through helping decision makers and the community speak the same language. This doesn’t stop at people. Rights of nature can be equally brought into the conversation, reporting and accountability as the community or as national policy. Check out the Charter for the Rights of the River Ouse mapped here. We would love to see more rights of nature mapped into OnePlanet and collaborated with strategically for better outcomes for people and planet.
Check out the other blogs in this series:
Climate and Energy – By Ben Gill
National Security and Economics and Climate – By Pooran Desai