The climate crisis: our January meeting

In his talk England’s Green and Pleasant, landscape architect Chris Churchman brought us up to date on the climate crisis, with particular reference to house-building and tree-planting.

Chris’s practice works with schools, residential schemes and on large-scale projects. Its projects local to us include Canning Town, Limmo Peninsula, Rathbone Market and Silvertown Quays.

Chris’s connection with the WI is his mum. She was his route into his profession too, after listening to a piece on Woman’s Hour about landscape architecture.

After decades in his profession, Chris is looking into climate change.

Chris started his talk with a look at quintessential English and Scottish landscapes: pastoral scenes, Langdale, Glencoe, and the literature that made them famous – the views we know made after most of our tree cover had gone.

“The biggest landscape change since Blake wrote Jerusalem”

To get towards net zero, we’re going to have to plant a lot more trees. So those landscapes will change. Chris told us about the push-pull between homes, which generate a surprising amount of carbon not just through energy use but through the building process itself, agriculture and tree-planting.

Chris explained the relative implications of staying within 1.5 degrees and the 2.7 degree increase if no cuts are made.

Looking at our history of carbon emissions, Chris showed that we’ve been making carbon emissions since stone age people lit fires but It was the early 1900s when it changed, with the emergence of coal-fired power stations and home heating.

Our Government has enshrined net zero in law by 2050. It has a target 300,000 new homes per annum. The theory is that new homes will be balanced by tree planting. But the scale of the tree planting that would be needed is huge. 

So Chris’s focus is on the health of our soils. Soils contain four times more carbon than in all the plant life in the world. Most of our soils have been depleted by intensive farming. Peat is a fantastic carbon store. Fens and bogs store 30 times more carbon than dry soils. We’ve lost about 90% of our peat bogs and farmers have been incentivised to farm by area.

So what can we do?

Domestically, we can use additives, for instance volcanic rock dust. Biodiversity funding streams are emerging to replace Common Agricultural Policy. Housebuilding could be done more sustainably and on brownfield sites. 

Chris’s four-point plan:

• Understand the problem
• Create a proper plan
• Pay a proper price for our environmental choices
• Don’t take landscape for granted

Q&A

There was a lively Q&A after the talk, covering the cost of carbon capture, the availability of information, seagrass and other coastal carbon stores, the process through which peat forms, refurbishment versus new build, the connection between farming and landscape, the under-use of wool, alternative housing, particularly with changing social structure, COP26 and the minefield around apparently environmentally-friendly choices that turn out to be resource-intensive. 

A big thank you to Chris, who will be talking to other WIs over the year.

Chris has waived his speaker fee, which will be donated instead to his chosen charity Save the Children.