20150323_R4
Source: BBC Radio 4: Today Programme
URL: N/A
Date: 23/03/2015
Event: Helen Ghosh of the National Trust: "climate change, we think, is the big threat to us"
Credit: BBC Radio 4
People:
- Dame Helen Ghosh: Director General, National Trust
- John Humphrys: Presenter, BBC Radio 4: Today Programme
John Humphrys: The National Trust looks after a lot of our great buildings and parks, and it is saying today that the biggest threat to our natural heritage is climate change. Really? Well, Helen Ghosh is the Director General of the National Trust - morning to you.
Helen Ghosh: Good morning.
John Humphrys: Just give us a quick idea of how much of your - of the stuff you look after is the built environment and how much parks and things.
Helen Ghosh: Well, we're one of Britain's largest landowners - we have around a quarter of a million hectares - that's about 600,000 acres - of countryside, whether that's the uplands, the lowlands, we have 700 miles of coastline. So our countryside and the natural heritage is fantastically important.
John Humphrys: And you get more visitors to that than you do to the buildings.
Helen Ghosh: We do, we get around 200 million visits, every year, to our countryside, and around 20 million visits, every year, to our houses and gardens.
John Humphrys: Right. Now, climate change is the greatest threat, based on...?
Helen Ghosh: We would say - and I think this is absolutely in the tradition of the National Trust - that we always try and focus on the conservation challenge of the day, whether that was green spaces for the urban poor in the 19th century or the decline, the destruction of the country house in the 20th. We would say that now the main challenge to our conservation purpose is the destruction of habitats, of wildlife, the fact that we see precious species 60% in decline - who would ever have thought that the house sparrow and the hedgehog would be going to become rare? Two causes for that, we believe - first, intensive land management. No surprise, in the sense that farmers have followed the money, that's -
John Humphrys: And we've been talking about that for at least 70 years.
Helen Ghosh: Indeed we have, but that's got us to where we are today. For the future - and we see this on our coastline, in our countryside, even in our houses - climate change, we think, is the big threat to us.
John Humphrys: In which case, should you not logically be saying "Stop coming to visit us, stop getting into your cars and polluting the atmosphere and sending all that CO2 up there"?
Helen Ghosh: Well, we do what we can to encourage people to come to our places using public transport, or indeed just to turn up on foot.
John Humphrys: You know they don't, most of them, and most people can't - you know, I mean you can't walk to the Lake District from London.
Helen Ghosh: Indeed you can't. But, as I say, we work with local public transport providers. More importantly, we are trying, ourselves, to get at the causes as well as the symptoms. So, by 2020, we'll be getting 50% of our energy that we use in our houses and properties from renewable energy sources - lots of hydro schemes, across the country, lots of biomass boilers. And we're also going to cut our energy use ourselves, by about 20%.
John Humphrys: Is that going to make a difference, really?
Helen Ghosh: Well, what can make a difference, with an organisation the scale of us, is showing people what good looks like. So we will be looking at our own land, the 250,000 hectares, working with our farm tenants to try and make sure that land is farmed in an environmentally friendly way, that we get production but we also get the bees and the butterflies. We'll be working on a landscape scale - which is what you really need, to solve this problem - with partners, people like the RSPB, other landowners, big businesses, to try and solve the problem. We can show what good looks like. We can show how we can collectively tackle this problem.
John Humphrys: Helen Ghosh, many thanks for talking to us.
Helen Ghosh: Thank you.