Euroviews. Starmer must put nature at the heart of Labour's economic plans

After the last government became increasingly distracted from delivering for the British people, Labour’s landslide felt inevitable.

PM Keir Starmer now promises "action not words", but we must see that focus turn on the environment. It’s no longer about paying lip service — Starmer must do everything in his power to preserve the natural systems on which we all depend.

So far, Labour has hit the ground running on the energy transition — lifting the de facto ban on onshore wind, rejecting new oil and gas licenses in the North Sea and, as King Charles III laid out in his speech this week, setting up a publicly owned clean power company, Great British Energy, to encourage investment in renewables.

Yet the glaring gap is that we haven’t seen anything like this scale of action on nature and the biodiversity crisis.

This is despite the UK being one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, with disastrous consequences for food security and nearly one in six species threatened with extinction.

Starmer and his cabinet must move quickly. Nature is intrinsic to economic growth, jobs, and national security. Unless this is acknowledged and acted on, the new government will ultimately fail to regenerate the economy and secure our nation’s future.

This link between nature and the economy was clearly set out in the game-changing Dasgupta Review in 2019, commissioned by the Treasury, which pointed out that nature is a blind spot in economics that we ignore at our peril.

But despite the weight of evidence, the change in thinking needed to incorporate restoring and protecting nature into our economic strategy has not yet happened — even though it is more and more widely understood.

From business leaders committing to be "nature