In response to Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s Budget statement, Joanna Elliott, Senior Conservation Director at Fauna & Flora International (FFI) said:
“This was a Budget rightly focused on getting the country through the pandemic crisis and rebuilding after. It offered a big opportunity to chart a course for the ‘green recovery’ the prime minister has advocated.
“But in a year when Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak would like the world to look to them as green champions, the Budget – likely the last before COP26 in Glasgow or COP15 on biodiversity in China – displayed a lack of urgency and missed an opportunity for the UK to set an example by demonstrating how the spending power of government can be put to work to reverse the twin biodiversity and climate crises.
“Coming just weeks after Rishi Sunak’s own department published the Dasgupta Review on the economics of biodiversity – setting out a clear blueprint for a move away from nature-blind economic thinking, and towards a world where nature is placed at the heart of all economic decisions – the lack of green ambition in this Budget statement comes as a big disappointment.”
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