Owen’s World

A good while ago when I was in possession of a brain that could remember and even examine and develop sensible, related, inquiring thoughts, I worked as an environmental consultant. Generally, I’m reasonably average at things but I seemed to have some facility at this kind of thing. For once, I’d set aside the pub and worked hard and got a distinction in a Masters in Environmental Planning and Management. Luckily the external examiner of my dissertation was a director of a consultancy I wanted to work for and he offered me a job.

One of the first projects I worked on relates very much to the area about which Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary, has chosen to speak. Have a look if you fancy.

The gist is simple: Mr Paterson is, in principle, in favour of development on ancient woodland providing that this is offset. He emphasises that this is likely to occur only in cases of ‘major infrastructure’.

The reasons for this being galloping gormlessness are many, but let’s focus on two.

Firstly, the idea that loss of ancient woodland can be offset with new planting.

That project I worked on 16 years ago was concerned with finding a way of evaluating public resources – woodland, heathland, open coast, whatever – so that we might more comprehensively appreciate their value and, when necessary, be able to identify what we needed to replace if any was to be lost.

We came up with a methodology that could be applied nationally, to any development proposal, to help ensure decision making was transparent, to protect the total of our, the public’s, natural, cultural, recreational and historic assets. It was a remarkably simple. That Masters wasn’t really needed, but then no-one gives you a job unless you have a bit of paper telling them you’re supposedly not dim.

Ancient woodlands were the classic example used to explain the idea.

In order to adequately identify what makes an acre of ancient woodland so precious and different to, say, a young acre of coniferous plantation, you have to look at both not in terms of the benefits both provide. If any woodland is to be lost, it should only be lost when compensated for not by a similar area of new plantation but by replacing ALL of the benefits that would be lost.

Amongst many things, ancient woodlands give us:

highly developed, established ecosystems
particular and often rare biodiversity
historic value
cultural heritage
carbon sink
fuel
aesthetic/sensory value
recreational value

The process also examined – for each benefit – the scale at which these benefits were important (eg is its biodiversity value of importance national, local, international), along with the comparative uniqueness or rarity or each element, and so on, building up a complete picture of what is valued about the resource and why.

To be able to adequately compensate for the loss of an area of ancient woodland each of these benefits has to be comprehensively supplied by whatever is created to offset it.

Clearly, a non-ancient, monoculture woodland has fewer benefits and is therefore more ‘replaceable’.

Secondly, while the notion of offsetting is appealing and has some uses, in practice it is often highly flawed. The principle is simple and is most commonly applied to carbon, the idea being that if you emit carbon – either by an action (such as flying) or loss of a sink (such as a woodland removal) – this can be compensated for by planting trees in sufficient quantity.

Fine, you’d think, as long as the equation is equal, and this is where things become complicated. For an equation to work, you need to be able to balance out both sides of the sum.

Even offsetting something as relatively uncomplicated as felling an acre of bog standard 20 year old coniferous forestry – where the benefits are likely to include its value as a carbon sink, fuel/wood, some limited biodiversity value (coniferous monocultures tend to have relatively low species diversity), and recreation (if publicly accessible) – is tricky to do accurately, even when considering only the carbon aspect.

It’s not as simple as flattening it and developing, and planting an acre of coniferous plantation elsewhere to offset it. The new plantation is of saplings rather than 20 year old trees so its value as carbon sink value is considerably reduced, creating a huge carbon lag compared with the existing acre. Biodiversity and recreational value will experience a similar lag – where these benefits are lost, before they eventually catch up over decades.

Even if you manage to offset the lag by planting a much increased area, the sum is incomplete unless you take into account the carbon value of the land before it was planted with trees. Open fields – if we assume it is they that will be replanted – have their own carbon value, as well as potential agricultural, recreational and other quality of life benefits. These need to make their way into the equation.

We must also consider time depth: even when dealing with a simple, coniferous monoculture of relatively limited ecological value, for the public to maintain its assets, there have to be guarantees that new plantations will be allowed to mature and that the benefits we get from them are protected in perpetuity. And what of that newly planted woodland: how long will it stand and what happens to the wood when it is harvested?

It sounds complicated – and that is the point: when it comes to our natural, cultural and historic assets, decision making is complicated – what this process does is make sure that however you go about it, the thinking is transparent. And hopefully stops vested interests clouding the truth.

It ensures that essentially irreplaceable resources, such as ancient woodlands, are valued as such, not treated as you might new forestry. It also ensures that where development is to take place, valuable assets that belong to us all are not lost, or that if they are to be lost no-one can pretend that we aren’t losing something precious.

16 years ago this approach was developed using public money, in a cross-agency project funded by the department Owen Paterson finds himself in control of. Perhaps he should look at it again. At the moment, he’s doing a very passable impersonation of someone who either has limited grasp of what his role is or someone who doesn’t care. Neither prospect is overly encouraging.

To accept that ancient woodland can be offset with new planting is to believe that ancient woodland is just a collection of old trees. Such thinking allows us to demolish St Paul’s Cathedral to be offset with a similarly sized pile of new bricks, or to replace our loved one with a random person of similar build who will sit at the other end of the sofa and have sex with us every third Friday.

What a dry, colourless, joyless view of life, of the world. Behold, in Owen’s world: a bloke with a bit of wood and some wires stuck to it; a chap with a pig’s bladder.

The clue to his thinking may be in the small print. The idea that the loss of ancient woodland is possible only in cases of ‘major infrastructure’….like, just for instance, HS2.