One in five of the UK’s environmental protection policies has been put together at an EU level. This collaborative approach has been essential, argues Craig Bennett in his Resurgence Talk, given that environmental problems know no boundaries.

Polluted seawater washing up in the morning on a beach in Kent could easily be washed up on a beach in the Netherlands by the afternoon.

Bennett says it was EU legislation that led to Britain’s cleaner beaches and imposed much tougher standards on emissions from its power stations in order to tackle the problem of acid rain. 

Huge risk

Brexit now poses a huge risk to these and many other environmental protections and we have less than two years to work out what we’re going to do about it, he argues.

He says the EU withdrawal bill offers little hope, arguing it will be a “cut and paste” job of EU legislation into UK law without any of the detail.

For instance who will enforce these new laws? He says we currently have the European Courts of Justice, the European Food Safety Agency and the European Environment Agency to turn to.

Meanwhile in the UK, over the past five years, the Environment Agency has had its budgets halved and lost a third of its staff, he notes.

Bennett argues that the biggest tragedy of Brexit is not only what we stand to lose in the coming year, but our inability to have any bandwidth to progress on future issues. 

This speaker

Craig Bennett is chief executive of Friends of the Earth.