Greens leader Zack Polanski gives speech at summit

Good morning. Thank you very much. Before I begin my speech, I just want to echo actually what we just heard. There are so many brilliant and determined people in this room, whether you're a charity, a campaigner, or whatever you're doing in this sector. So before I spoke or gave a speech, I really just want to say thank you.

Thank you for every single thing that you're doing. I know how difficult things have been, particularly this summer. Thank you for your resilience and your determination because that's how we're going to protect our planet and nature. So thank you.

We all know the first duty of any national government is to keep us safe, not to hide the threats we're facing, not to bury the truth about what's coming if we do not change course. But last year, our government did just that. They buried a vital report over fears it was too negative. They thought no one would notice, but we did. Tireless campaigners fought to get it published because its implications were stark for our safety, for our security, for our very ability to feed ourselves.

We've still only seen snippets of that report, but even those are chilling and they demand urgent action. Too late. Weeks ago, on yet another boiling hot day, I walked over charred ground in Oxford and burnt wood crunching underneath my feet. I looked out over the expanse of blackened trees, twisted metal, and I thought about what had been there before. A thriving business.

Birds singing in the trees, mammals rumaging through the bushes, and it was all gone. All that's there now is dust and an eerie silence left after an inferno raged through the area. This report is part of that because I remember the disgust I felt when I saw that the National Trust had to pay for their own firefighting equipment to save the land they were dedicated to protecting for all of us and nature. I remember hearing of families in Manchester waking up in the middle of the night to the smell of smoke. panicking, they left the hob on or a candle burning, rushing to check that their kids were okay, and then hearing on the news that what they smelt was the hills burning miles away.

Something really changed this summer, didn't it? Here in Britain, we knew what it felt like to be too hot for too long and what it meant for heat to be truly dangerous. We saw the effects of climate breakdown firsthand. But as you know, that is only half of the story because that fire did not rip through a healthy countryside. Those flames did not engulf a country where the natural world is thriving.

Many people in this room and older people often tell me this. They'll remember the lovely sights of hedgehogs snuffling across your garden as a child. sometimes even with their babies which I recently called are called hoglets by the way uh with hoglets in tow but that's a distant memory now not many kids growing up today will be able to imagine those strange spiny creatures in their own back gardens whether it's the sight of hedgehogs or the wheeling call of the swifts so many things we're losing fast what do you hear less of when you're walking in the woods. What do you see less of when you're sitting in the park? You know, I often say we live in ripoff Britain, a country where wages have stalled, rents have risen, and bills are out of control.

We're not a poor country. We have so many riches, but we're paying a high price for a low standard of living. But it's not just our bills and our wages where we're being ripped off. It's the very world around us that is being robbed from us. Just as the biggest corporations are taking money from those who can least afford it, they're extracting value from our natural world.

None of this is an accident. Those choices which have felled our trees, poured pesticides on our fields, and polluted our rivers, those choices have authors. But they can be reversed. And we're at a turning point. If we get this right, we change the way we feel about this planet of ours.

We connect with people and places around us in a new way. We find a love for our place not based on narrow nationalism, nor race, nor migration status, but on the roots that run much deeper than all of those things. the roots which unite us. Because twice in the past six years, we've been starkly reminded how vulnerable our planet is. Just a few years ago, a deadly virus ripped through the population.

We can remember, right, staying at home for months on end. I'm sure lots of us here can remember those months full of uncertainty and fear, our lives on hold. The very way many of us clung to our well-being was those daily walks around the park. I remember those laps around the park because those became the center of our days and how much I appreciated that slowly changing landscape as warm summer or warm spring melted into summer. And then there was this summer as the heat grew unbearable, burning our skin, muddying our thoughts.

Often the only reprieve was the shade of a tree or the cooling waters of a river or sea. And both the pandemic and this summer's extreme temperatures brought into stark relief what it means to have access to nature and the consequences for those who don't. Nearly 3,000 people died from extreme heat this summer. That's the equivalent of over 30 full double-deckers. So many people forced to stay in their homes for days on end.

Windows and curtains closed trying to wait out the heat. But some people whose bodies were under such intense strain their hearts or kidneys could simply no longer cope. 3,000 people. And those deaths were not evenly distributed. They fell on older people, the sick.

People in flats, in postcodes with no park nearby, sitting in the shade of trees should not and must not be a privilege. But right now, we know it is because for decades, ordinary people have been locked out from accessing the natural world that is on their doorstep. There are grouse moors on the edge of cities that workingclass communities have never even been able to set foot on. Huge expanses of land fenced off for a tiny number of rich people to go and shoot at birds for fun. But people are starting to say enough.

In Sheffield, campaigners are fighting to bring back the land back into community ownership. Open it for everyone to be able to walk the fields, breathe in the air, hear the birds sing. And that community right to buy for land, which those campaigners are fighting for, is not and never will be a radical idea. And don't let anyone tell you it is. It's a simple justice principle for land.

It belongs to all of us. And of course, it belongs to nature. And we know that is just one part of the puzzle because the government currently has a target for everyone to have access to green or blue space within 15 minutes. Absolutely right. And what are they doing to achieve this?

Absolutely nothing. That would be a place to start, right? Making vague commitments into legally binding targets with a real plan behind it. It is time to be ambitious beyond unlocking access to what's already here. We need to see a new generation of country parks to connect urban areas with the natural world.

giving kids who grew up in concrete jungles a taste of what it feels like to have grass between their feet, to run until they're breathless in the wide open air. Put simply, access to the natural world is lifegiving. But right now, it's being stolen from so many of us because the same corporations, they're squeezing the life out of our communities. They're sucking it out of our nature, too. For instance, let's talk about pesticides.

The toxic pesticide neocottenoids, they were banned for outdoor use in the UK in 2018, but since then, they've been waved through. It was emergency authorizations year after year at the sugar industry's request. Pesticide companies and artificial fertilizer companies are making a killing while farmers the farmers are struggling to even make ends meet. And nature collapses as a result of these pesticides. This isn't an accident.

It's a business model. or we often talk about water companies because they are literally pouring sewage, as you all know, into our rivers and seas. They're allowing billions of liters of water a day to leak out of pipes that haven't seen a penny of investment. And they're selling off reservoirs while we're facing a drought. We have handed our most precious and vital resource to private companies and somehow hoped that they'll act in our best interests.

But why would they when presiding over decline and failure has seen them rake in astonishing profits? Since privatization, shareholders of the water and sewage corporations have been handed 85.2 2 billion pounds. And how much have they invested? Less than nothing. This is the ultimate ripoff.

Handing over billions to companies who are putting us at risk of water shortages. And as Temp's water, they face yet another financial catastrophe driven by greed. It is time for the Labor government to step up and make good on the promises that Andy Bernham made to bring water not under some vague handwaving public control but into full public ownership so that every single penny we pay in bills goes towards protecting our water security now and in the future. because nature in the UK is in freef fall and private companies have been driving this destruction and as I've said they're cashing in on the results and it's a familiar story because it's exactly the same as the climate chaos caused by the fossil fuel industry. Company profits pile up while communities, our communities are left to absorb the environmental degradation.

Enough is enough. We must back the people who are on the front line of defending our land and nature and securing our precious natural resources. The farmers who right now are watching their crops fail through drought and flooding. Their costs soaring and they're wondering how they're even going to make it just another season. Meanwhile, the corporations have captured the supply chain above them.

The agrochemical companies, the big supermarkets, the processes processes. While the farmers are struggling, they are all profiting. We can turn this around. Fund farmers to work in harmony with the natural world to repair, rebuild, revitalize, and restore the proper working of our ecosystems. And crucially, we need to get bolder about making the big companies piling up profits pay their fair share to fund it.

If we get this right, we secure our food supply and give farmers their livelihood back. We can restore our woodlands, our streams, our fields. Hear birds sing and bees buzz again. See those hedgehogs in our back gardens. But if we get this wrong, the consequences are so stark.

Look, I'm a politician that talks a lot about hope. And hope is incredibly important. But we can't begin to act on hope until we face the truth, until we know exactly what is going on and then conduct and enact a plan to make that change. So to conclude, I want to go back to where I started the buried report because it was written by the joint intelligence committee that's made up of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. It said this, and I quote, "Without significant increases in the UK food system and supply chain resilience, it is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food." Let me repeat.

It is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security. It's not just one report, by the way. There's another one from 2024 uncovered by investigative journalists at the Times. This one said that Britain's food and water supply are almost certain to be on a decline and collapse trajectory and our food security is at risk of catastrophic failure. Decline and collapse.

Catastrophic failure. We've already seen how fragile our food systems are this year alone with farmers warning we could see empty shelves as a result of drought and flooding. And the government are whispering we should start stocking up on tin food and bottled water. And these buried reports lay bare how unprepared we are right now for what is coming. This is what nature loss means.

Not just the silencing of bird song, the pollution of once clean rivers and seas, but food price inflation set to hit 10% by the end of this year. A 12% reduction in GDP by 2030 if nature loss continues. And I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone in this room, but there is no economy without the natural world. So today I have a question for our prime minister. Will you tell the truth?

Will you release the full unredacted report? And will you act on the truth? Will you enact a new nature, biodiversity, and national security bill and put resilience at the very heart of this government?

Friends, this summer we saw our countryside burn and our city parks turned to dust. But it was just a bleak preview of what is to come if we continue if we continue to allow the greed of corporations to come above the survival of our natural world and all that relies on it. So where's the hope? You're the hope in this room and so many people who are willing to keep working to make a difference and call on this government for change. Because this must mark the turning point where we say no more loss, no more quieting of bird song, no more steady trickling of sewage and poison into our rivers.

And to all of the journalists who are in this room, I just ask you and I ask you respectfully, will you put these questions to the prime minister? Next time you speak to him, will you ask him about the reports his government is keeping buried? There is no more hiding of the truth. Instead, let's look at the loss we have suffered in the face and decide actively to change course. Because we can go into the future without fear.

because we can know we have the ability to create a flourishing rich natural world across these aisles on which we our children and our grandchildren can not only survive but alongside with nature we can all thrive. Thank you.