Did Brexit bring sustainability benefits?
A reflection on a few silver linings (Part 5 of my Panorama interview)
I think, on balance, the UK leaving the EU has been a disaster. It's not been a good move, and it’s certainly not something I would recommend to any other country. It goes against evolution, really.
A lot of my work is studying what makes living systems thrive. The trend towards integration is what brings progress.
What it shouldn't be is is a command-and-control type system, but joining things together, increasing communications, connections, trade, making it easier for the flow of energy and information and people—this is what drives evolution and progress. So when we start to break things up again, that's literally devolution; that's things disintegrating, and that's generally not a good thing.
We're now far enough along that we can see the impacts, and the impacts on the economy have been really bad. Many opportunities, we don't have access to anymore. The red tape now for doing trade and having agreements and the flow of people and goods between the UK and Europe is much more fraught with problems. So the transaction costs have gone way up.
It's also changed the mindset. Because if you start thinking and acting like you are an island, then you become very inward focused, and therefore you also lose competitiveness.
But there are a few exceptions in the sustainability space. For example, we've put in place an Agricultural Act where we're paying farmers for doing good for the environment. We call it public money for public goods. And so if a farmer does something that sequesters carbon, or that increases biodiversity, they get paid for that. They don't only get paid for crops. So this is a good thing, and probably wouldn't have been possible under the EU agricultural scheme.
In the construction industry, we have a law that requires “biodiversity net gain”. So construction companies, when they build, have to increase biodiversity by 10%. So these are things where we've taken back some control and done some good things. Under the Conservative government, we were going backwards on environment. The EU at least held us to a certain standard, which is quite a good standard. Once we were out, we were actually backtracking on many things. That's starting to change now under Labour, so we may make more progress.
Dr Wayne Visser is holder of the Galp Chair and a Professor of Practice in Regenerative Business, Innovation and Technology at Católica Porto Business School, as well as a Fellow and Head Program Instructor at the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.