News

Environment Secretary tells of vital role of landscape architects in combating climate change

2nd November 2007

Landscape architects play a crucial role in the fight against climate change, Environment Secretary Hilary Benn told a Landscape Institute conference yesterday (Nov 1).
The Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs told the conference, entitled “Climate Change: The Challenge for Landscape Architecture,” that urban and landscape planners showed the world how to live in ways that were not damaging to the planet.
The two-day conference saw a host of leading practitioners from the UK and overseas demonstrate how policy and practice are being effectively developed in landscape architect to combat climate change.
In the keynote address, Benn told the audience: “You bring together the skills, knowledge and passion that we need for the 21st century in the way that engineering shaped the 19th century. We need you in the fight against climate change. You can show people how it can be done.
“Your Institute has established a record to be proud of - whether greening gardens or greening the 2012 Olympics, from being leaders in the design of cleaner, greener neighbourhoods to pioneers of green energy and green infrastructure projects.
“My predecessor in this job used to say that we are consuming resources as if we had three planets. We don’t. We only have the one. This is our greatest challenge – to live with the earth’s capacity.”
Benn said that the Landscape Institute had “established a record to be proud of” and that it was those least able to cope with climate change that suffered the most.
He also spoke of the need to devote more time and energy to green infrastructure and of the importance of international collaboration.
“If Britain packs up tomorrow, if we all decamp to Mars and we take our climate, two per cent (of greenhouse gas emissions) disappears. Even if all of the rich countries of the world upped sticks and went to live on Venus and took our emissions with us, because of the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, because emissions are rising from the developing world as they develop, economically, the remaining countries would be left with a problem.
“If you think dealing with climate change is going to be expensive, yes it is going to cost us a bit, but it’s nothing compared to the cost of not dealing with climate change.”
Other speakers at the conference, held at Regent’s College London, included Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, John Handley, Professor of Land Restoration and Management at Manchester University, eco-entrepeneur Andy Middleton and television producer David Barrie.