Mass extinctions of plants and animals unavoidable without halting climate crisis, warns head of Natural England

The key focus at the Cop26 climate summit will be on slashing the fossil fuel dependency poisoning our atmosphere and heating up the planet, but it is not just cutting emissions that will get us to net zero by 2050, it is also the restoration of the natural world. Although he readily acknowledges the scale of the challenge at Glasgow, noting that the emissions cuts announced by governments since the Paris Agreement in 2015 “don’t add up to a sufficient level of action to avoid warming going well beyond 2C, nevermind 1.5C”, the overriding impression he gives is one of cool confidence that our planet may not be quite as doomed as some have suggested. He suggests the worsening climate crisis “has been, for some time, expressed as a future risk, with some people perhaps regarding it as an abstract risk, but with Covid we saw these things are real, and if we don’t attend to them in advance then we suffer some pretty serious consequences.” In his role as chair of Natural England, the most important discussion Juniper wants to see at Cop26 is around the interconnectedness of the biodiversity crisis and the climate crisis, and how beginning to solve one of these crises not only helps solve the other, but is a basic requirement of doing so. Perhaps, as a result of this, his mission at Natural England is entirely unambiguous: under the banner of the “nature recovery network”, the organisation – a non-departmental body overseen by Defra – is restoring large areas of habitat, in a way which, Juniper says, benefits not only ecosystems and the wider environment, but also people. Speaking about adaptation to the crisis, he says: “Peatland recovery projects are a good example of that as they are natural sponges which catch rainwater, and as we expect more rainfall into the future, the targeted recovery of these ecosystems achieves several things at once – carbon capture, wildlife recovery, flood risk reduction, and reflecting the fundamental nature of how climate and nature are connected.” Ahead of the summit in Glasgow, it appears there is recognition for the natural world’s role in bringing down the threat level.