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Enough diagnosing the crisis. It’s time to redesign the system.

Photo Sue Croxford

We know what is happening. Are we prepared to redesign the systems that are making us vulnerable? Here are 15 places to start.

Over the past few weeks, I have been struck by how many apparently unrelated stories are beginning to say much the same thing.

Heatwaves are affecting productivity and food prices. Farmers are dealing with drought. Wildfires are becoming a more familiar feature of British summers. Rivers are running low at precisely the time we need more water.

Alongside this, we need more homes, renewable energy, battery storage and data centres to support an increasingly digital economy.

And suddenly everything appears to be competing for the same resources.

Food or solar panels. Farmland or housing. Water for communities or water for data centres. Nature or growth.

These choices are increasingly presented as inevitable. I am not sure they are.

Why have we created systems that repeatedly force food, water, energy, nature, housing and economic development to compete with one another?

They are, after all, connected.

Meadow on a sunny day

© Matthew Marshall 

Food depends upon soil, water, climate and biodiversity. Cities depend upon functioning water systems and tolerable temperatures. Businesses depend upon people being able to work safely and productively. Homes need water and energy. Our economy ultimately depends upon all of them.

Much of the infrastructure and land use we inherited was designed for different conditions.

For generations we drained wetlands and straightened rivers to move water away. We sealed soil beneath roads, pavements and development. Trees and hedgerows disappeared from many landscapes. Cities were built with hard surfaces that absorb and retain heat. Agricultural systems became extraordinarily productive, while in places soils lost organic matter and some of their ability to hold water.

Our measures of economic success largely failed to notice the depletion of the natural systems beneath all of this.

As the consequences became more apparent, we created separate policies and programmes for flooding, drought, overheating, biodiversity loss, food security, water supply and public health.

Perhaps the solution isn’t another policy for each symptom.

Perhaps it is time to change the operating system.

A tree shading a street, a wetland holding winter rain, a healthy soil holding summer water and a river allowed to occupy its floodplain are not environmental luxuries. They are working infrastructure.

Once we begin to see them that way, some very different possibilities emerge.

There are plenty of reasons for optimism.

South Korea’s remarkable reforestation shows what can happen to severely depleted landscapes within a generation. Cities around the world are putting trees back into streets to reduce temperatures. Wetlands and floodplains are being restored to hold water. Farmers are rebuilding soils. Urban areas are replacing impermeable surfaces with systems that allow rain to soak into the ground.

Much of this is neither experimental nor particularly mysterious.

We know how to do it.

What would happen if we began joining these things together and doing them at scale?

Here are fifteen places we might start

1. Put water back into the landscape

For a long time, much of our approach to water has been about moving it somewhere else.

Drain the field. Straighten the river. Pipe the rainwater away.

A country increasingly experiencing both drought and flooding needs landscapes capable of holding water again. Restored peatlands, wetlands, floodplains and rivers can slow, store, filter and gradually release it.

2. Treat soil as national infrastructure

Soil rarely features in conversations about infrastructure, yet almost everything begins there.

Healthy soils store water, carbon and nutrients. They support biodiversity and underpin food production.

Rebuilding soil organic matter and biological function is an investment in national resilience, just as surely as building a reservoir or improving an electricity network.

3. Protect our best food-producing land

Food security matters, particularly as climate change begins to affect food production around the world.

Protecting productive land does not require us to set farming against renewable energy, nature or development.

It requires us to understand which land we need for food, water, nature, energy, housing and infrastructure and to plan those needs together.

4. Make new development water-positive

Some of the areas where we hope to build most are already water-stressed.

Growth cannot simply assume that additional water will appear.

New development should reduce demand, reuse water wherever possible and contribute to restoring the water systems and landscapes upon which it depends.

5. Make our towns and cities rain-ready

We have spent decades covering soil with surfaces designed to keep water out.

We can reverse some of that.

Permeable streets, rain gardens, sustainable drainage, wetlands and restored urban streams can allow water to soak into the ground rather than sending every drop immediately into an already overloaded drainage system.

6. Put shade back into our towns and cities

Anyone who has walked from a treeless street into the shade of a mature tree on a hot day already understands this.

Trees cool streets. They intercept rainfall, support wildlife, improve air quality and make places more pleasant to live.

As our climate warms, tree canopy becomes part of our heat infrastructure.

7. Retrofit Britain for heat

We have rightly spent years thinking about how to keep buildings warm and reduce the energy needed to heat them.

We now need to think equally seriously about keeping people safe during prolonged periods of heat.

Homes, schools, hospitals, workplaces and care homes all need to be ready for the climate we are moving into.

8. Restore nature at landscape scale

Nature cannot recover indefinitely within islands.

Nature reserves remain immensely important, although wildlife also needs to move through farmland, rivers, woods, wetlands, parks, gardens, towns and cities.

Connecting these places gives nature room to recover and landscapes greater capacity to adapt.

9. Build renewable energy with nature

We need renewable energy. We need food. We need nature.

Good planning should allow us to pursue all three.

There will always be difficult choices, although better spatial planning and thoughtful design can remove many of the conflicts we currently assume are unavoidable.

10. Make major infrastructure account for its ecological costs

Data centres have brought this into sharp focus.

Infrastructure consumes land, water, energy and materials. Those demands need to be visible when decisions are made.

Where will the water come from? Where will the energy come from? What happens to the landscape around it? What could the development restore as well as consume?

These are economic questions as much as environmental ones.

11. Move public money towards resilience

Every pound of public investment shapes the future in some way.

It makes little sense to spend public money restoring rivers, soils and habitats while other spending continues to make those same systems less resilient.

Investment should progressively leave our landscapes, communities and infrastructure better able to cope with the conditions ahead.

12. Measure what actually matters

GDP remains an important measure of economic activity.

It tells us remarkably little about what may have been depleted in producing that activity.

Soil can deteriorate. Rivers can become polluted. Natural resources can be consumed. Health can decline. Climate risks can increase.

Economic activity may continue to rise.

A serious conversation about prosperity has to include the wealth contained within healthy people, communities and living systems.

13. Give communities more power to shape their places

National government cannot redesign every street, river catchment, neighbourhood and landscape.

Nor should it.

People understand the places where they live. Given the power, resources and opportunity, communities can become active participants in making those places more resilient.

National ambition and local agency need each other.

14. Design for the whole life of what we build

Buildings and infrastructure last for decades, sometimes centuries.

Their impact begins with the materials we extract and continues through construction, energy and water use, maintenance, adaptation and eventual reuse or demolition.

Looking at whole-life environmental performance changes what good development looks like.

15. Put nature at the heart of economic strategy

Perhaps this is where all the others lead.

Nature has spent too long sitting in the environmental chapter of the plan.

Healthy soils produce food. Wetlands hold water. Trees cool cities. Rivers support communities and businesses. Peatlands store carbon. Functioning ecosystems reduce risks that otherwise become economic and social costs.

Nature is infrastructure.

Seeing it that way changes the conversation.

The apparent choice between nature and prosperity begins to look increasingly strange. Prosperity ultimately depends upon functioning natural systems.

This is larger than a climate plan or a nature plan.

Perhaps it is the beginning of a different way of thinking about Britain: one that starts with the simple reality that our economy and society exist within the living world, not outside it.

We already know how to restore wetlands and rebuild soils. We know how to plant trees, design permeable streets, reconnect habitats, generate renewable energy and build differently.

Across Britain, people are already doing these things.

What we have not yet done is connect them at anything approaching the scale required.

We have become very good at describing the crises facing us.

I think we are ready for a rather more interesting conversation.

Let’s eat our Weetabix, show some grit and get on with it. 

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