P4P celebrates over five-years of cross-party action on climate and nature

Yesterday we were thrilled to welcome over 160 of our supporters to celebrate five years of cross-party action on climate and nature.

Lord Ravensdale opened the event by thanking our outgoing Chair, Baroness Hayman, for her extraordinary work as founding Chair and for epitomising the cross-party collaboration that has been so integral to the group’s success in achieving legislative change.

“You’ve demonstrated what political leadership on climate should look like and what it can achieve - that's the legacy you leave: a blueprint for climate leadership that we can all learn from”.

Lord Ravensdale, P4P Vice-Chair

Baroness Hayman said that one of the things she is most proud of is that Peers for the Planet has been able to bring together the expertise of so many people from inside and outside of Parliament – enabling the group to work together on 60 pieces of legislation, debate 180 amendments and achieve 4,000 mentions of climate and nature on the floor of the House since the group launched in 2020.

She said in the second part of this decade, we will need to work even harder to make progress - and today is about coming together to reinvigorate ourselves for the hard work ahead.

 “Seeing everyone in this room gives me an enormous sense of the energy there is behind the drive to tackle climate change, and we need that energy. Nature needs us working, the planet needs us working - and it needs us working smartly and working together”.

Baroness Hayman, P4P Director

Sir Stephen Fry’s speech painted a vivid picture of what he called the “enormous gathering currents” of artificial intelligence, advances in science and technology and climate change. He said these are conjoining and building together into a tsunami which is heading towards us, of which many of us have our backs to.

These currents, he argued, require firm, believable, authoritative institutions to guide and protect us, even though many of our domestic and global institutions are now less trusted, less funded, and less believed in than before.

He warned that, through propaganda and the enormous power of social media, some are trying to make net zero a “laughable and dirty word”. To counter this, we need to find better ways to communicate the immense triumph of net zero and action on nature loss, where there are many marvellous stories to be told.

He said we must face up to the fact that we are currently losing the argument - and urged us to shift how we speak about the future.

“We know about the state of our rivers here in Britain - they are full of raw effluent, contaminated and polluted. But you might say, more seriously, the rivers of our discourse, the rivers of our culture and social life, are polluted and contaminated too.”

Sir Stephen Fry

Sir Stephen closed with a powerful message to urge everybody in the room to communicate what we are dreaming of is a great future for this planet, and to ensure what we have to say is “thrilling, full of optimism, and full of the promise of remarkable future”.

P4P’s new Chair, Baroness Kathy Willis, said that one of the privileges of running a College at the University of Oxford, is that she is surrounded by enthusiastic students who are really up for taking on these challenges, which should give us all hope that we can succeed.

She also reflected on her own challenges as a new Peer only a few years ago trying to navigate the strange customs of the House of Lords, and how in Peers for the Planet she has found a transformative vehicle for change – that provides the science and understanding to help Peers confidently stand up and make the case for positive change.

“I think we do have to really work out how to make a better place and a positive difference. I'm an optimist. I think we can, and we will do this, but it's going to require everyone from every political party to be working together to do that”.

Baroness Kathy Willis