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SDG: 14 Life below water

Life below water

THE CHALLENGES 

The UK Government has committed to reach Net Zero by 2050. Carbon capture and storage will play a critical role in delivering the UK’s Net Zero Strategy, drawing down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or preventing emissions from entering the atmosphere in the first place. One of the primary routes for long-term storage of this captured CO2 is in deep geological sites within the UK’s continental shelf, such as saline aquifers or depleted oil fields. 

This is highly ambitious, especially as there is currently no GCS operating in the UK. False starts over the past two decades have led to the UK with less progress than countries such as Canada, USA and Norway. Nevertheless, the UK has suitable geology, the necessary infrastructure and the industrial skills base to achieve the government’s target. 

On current trajectories (as of July 2024), the UK cannot meet the Net Zero target unless all sectors move towards Net Zero simultaneously. The government is attempting to kick-start a large-scale carbon capture storage (CCS) and geological carbon storage (GCS) industry. Endurance is one such site in the Southern North Sea, which will begin to store CO2 before 2030. 

This Sprint used the Endurance site as a case study and has mapped out what evidence and regulatory gaps need addressing in order to ensure safe offshore GCS. The research assessed the tension between CO2 storage capacity and the risk of leakage or additional carbon loss through disruption of carbon currently stored in the marine ecosystem.  

THE SOLUTION 

This Sprint looked at three key areas as pivotal to enabling safe GCS deployment in the UK offshore continental shelf: the sub-surface environment, the marine environment, and governance, and embedded recommendations in the report. 

  • It should be considered how data, interpretations and modelling studies that underpin the storage permit and licence application process can be scrutinised by independent authorities.  
  • Blue carbon stocks need to be assessed in their full extent, and not, for example, overlooking water column carbon stocks. This quantification can now be done using advancements in satellite-based marine carbon data products. 
  • The UK Levelling Up and Regeneration Act in 2023 created significant planning uncertainty for developers as it consolidates ministerial power to make final decisions for an infrastructure project like GCS. Legislators may wish to issue a statement of use, clarifying which projects are eligible for special environmental exemptions. 

For detailed recommendations in each area, read the full report. For recommendations for policy and regulators, read the policy brief. 

THE PATHWAY 

The research team comprised of five work packages across Earth Sciences, Biology, Law, and the Smith School for the Environment and Enterprise. 

The academic team engaged with key stakeholders, including the North Sea Transition Authority, British Geological Survey, the Crown Estate, BP and CEFAS. This Sprint also engaged with similar activities in other North Sea bordering countries. Collectively, these collaborations developed methodologies to ensure that the storage of CO2 in offshore geologic reservoirs is conducted in a practical and safe manner. 

During the Sprint, the team held a workshop, hosting over 50 stakeholders from different industries at the Oxford Martin School in March 2024. To capture the event, the researchers produced a report summarising the content and discussions from the workshop. 

What happened next?

The Sprint was formulated in the context of the UK’s target of target of capturing and storing 20–30 million tonnes of carbon per year by 2030. However, in December 2024 the current government concluded this target is not achievable and has not yet updated its goals, which has undermined the UK policy urgency for acting on the Sprint’s recommendations.

The Sprint has published in the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control.

The Challenges

If the UK is to meet its own and international biodiversity targets, it needs to be able to properly measure the impact of economic development projects on biodiversity. It also needs to be able to deliver social welfare benefits alongside nature restoration, as well as balance trade-offs between commitments to economic development and biodiversity improvements.

At the time the Sprint was planned, HM Treasury had commissioned the Dasgupta Review of the economic case for biodiversity, set bold targets for nature recovery, and were updating their ‘Green Book’ guidance on government investments. The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the UK government were gearing up for the launch of Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG) policy under the Environment Act. However, BNG as formulated at the time had potential to further disadvantage already-disadvantaged groups, and scalable approaches to measuring biodiversity for governmental and industry end-users were unavailable, despite being fundamental to making progress.

This Sprint aimed to identify just and actionable pathways to BNG, supporting an integrated approach to renewing and restoring nature, working directly with HM Treasury and Defra. The Sprint tackled three interlinked issues:

  • How to robustly measure the biodiversity impacts, positive and negative, of business and governmental investments
  • How to reconcile commitments to invest in biodiversity improvement with the economic and social welfare of people most affected by these investments
  • How to deliver sustained, socially just welfare improvements – together with biodiversity gains at the landscape level – using spatial modelling and an exploration of scenarios for development.

The Solutions

  • The Sprint team found evidence that scoring by the Biodiversity Metric may not reflect invertebrate diversity and abundance. This presents a concern in how habitats are valued under BNG.
  • Most early BNG in England has been on-site, but findings from the Sprint team indicated that people have a preference towards off-site offsetting. The Sprint team propose that access should at the very least not be diminished, and BNG should be integrated with access to nature targets where possible.
  • Spatial modelling results showed current BNG offsetting practices are insufficient, and demonstrated that by incorporating ecological and economic information into the targeting of offsets, the offsets can provide a significant contribution to addressing the challenge of biodiversity loss and deliver substantial ecosystem service co-benefits to disadvantaged communities.

The Pathway

Tackling this challenge required layered multi-disciplinary outputs. The Sprint team combined social sciences expertise for local stakeholder engagement, modelled work to assess national, regional and local scales, and completed biodiversity fieldwork. Continuous stakeholder engagement through workshops and webinars lent a transdisciplinary dimension to shaping these layered outputs. The Sprint team also hosted a two day nature Recovery Symposium in March 2023, bringing together researchers working on the science that could underpin planning for nature recovery with decision-makers and practitioners working within government, industry and civil society, to discuss how science could best be deployed to support decisions for nature recovery (further details in this report).

What happened next?

This Sprint developed a best practice ‘Biodiversity Net Gain checklist’ for Local Planning Authorities who evaluate the Biodiversity Gain Plans submitted with planning applications. This was a bottom-up approach to supporting effective policy implementation, as having a strong BNG element within the Local Plan creates a solid foundation for planning and executing effective BNG policy.

DEFRA stated that findings from the research would directly inform policy, and HMT confirmed the research was fundamental to what it was trying to achieve. BBOWT has acted on some of the fieldwork advice relating to BBOWT and farmer-owned land. A webinar presenting the Checklist to the Planning Advisory Service demonstrated how it could reduce to the types of errors from early adopter councils using the Biodiversity Metric. Following engagement with Oxford University’s Estates and Facilities Biodiversity Sub-group, the team submitted a successful SRF bid to work on the Begbroke science district as a living lab, which has incorporated the learning from the checklist and committed to a target of 20% BNG for the site.