Aldersgate Group calls for ‘Beyond Carbon’ economic strategy
Greenwise Staff
1st February 2010
Water and other resources should be given equal importance to carbon by policy makers if the country is to remain competitive and provide jobs.
This is the conclusion of a new report by the
Aldergate Group, a coalition of companies, NGOs, professional bodies, MPs and others, calling for high environmental standards in economic policy.
The report – ‘Beyond Carbon: Towards a Resource Efficient Future ‘ – to be launched today calls for a policy step change that does not just promote a low carbon economy, but low resource consumption in that economy.
"There is understandably a focus on carbon in policy making at the moment,” said Sir John Harman, former chairman of the Environment Agency and lead author of the report. “However, there are equally pressing resource demands across many areas of the economy, which need to be addressed, such as water resources against energy use, food production against biofuels, natural habitats against agricultural intensification and so on. All of these will require a strong policy response and each will need to be addressed sector by sector."
The report welcomes the Government’s Low Carbon Industrial Strategy, but says resource efficient policies should, like carbon emissions reductions, become key economic objectives for the Treasury and other Government departments.
Among other things it calls for “true resource pricing” and “life-cycle management”.
‘Biodiversity pricing’ was brought up this month by Environment Secretary Hilary Benn who believes that we risk losing this resource if its not part of “our economic systems and markets”.
Sector by sector approach
The Aldersgate report examines three sectors – water, food and materials –and concludes that a one-size-fits-all approach cannot work because the resources for each sector differ so greatly and the market structure of each is so different. Instead, resource efficient policies should take a “sector by sector” approach.
For the water sector, characterised by a small number of very large companies operating in a closely regulated manner, the report recommends the regulator's role be enhanced to take some decisions on environmental grounds alone, rather than simply focusing on supplying water at least short-term cost to the consumer.
For the food sector, which is a big contributor to greenhouse gas emissions but is made up of a large number of small enterprises, the report recommends a regulatory response that takes into account the “complex interplay between land, water and nutrient resources”, while it says significant improvements would need to be made in food chain economics to produce more with less and to reduce waste through the system. Far greater efforts would have to be made to drive sustainable consumption as well, the report concludes.
“Each of the case studies shows that there are some common general principles of economic management for a resource efficient world, but each sector requires its own approach, and some of the measures will require us to step away from traditional economic thinking," Harman said. "We have made a number of policy recommendations in this paper but they will need support across Government departments through policies on spatial planning, the remits of regulators and specific targets in key sectors. It is now in Britain's interest to build and expand on this approach to promote low resource consumption as a vital part of securing future competitive advantage, because the economies of the future will be the ones that make best use of the available resources."
The report will be launched in a joint meeting of the Aldersgate Group and the All-Party Parliamentary Environment Group at the House of Commons this evening.