THE forthcoming meeting of the General Synod is a critical moment for nature. At its heart lies a motion urging the Church Commissioners to commit themselves to, and deliver, what has become known as the 30×30 (“30 by 30”) target: that 30 per cent of our land and water should be conserved and managed to protect and enhance biodiversity by 2030.

This is not a new idea: it has been building since 1992, gaining the force of international agreement at the 2022 UN Biodiversity Conference. Since then, the UK Government has pledged its support.

The shorthand description is “rewilding” (News, 1 May); but this is not always the most helpful word. It can suggest something like the abandonment of any kind of management or use of land. This is not what the Global Biodiversity Framework envisages. It speaks of developing active policies to preserve or restore the full natural resources of the land, and of assessing any kind of land usage in the light of this priority.

Some responses to the motion before the Synod have implied that its acceptance would involve the virtual pauperisation of existing tenants, at a time when conditions for UK farmers have hardly ever been more challenging. Other responses have been insistent that the fiduciary duty of the Commissioners must oblige them to resist any course of action that would adversely affect their income.

BUT the reality is a bit more complex — and its complexity has been fully set out in an independent legal opinion prepared by the Worshipful Professor Mark Hill KC, which answers some of the critical points that have been made.

There are two main lines of argument in Professor Hill’s text. One is a simple point: it has been clarified that fiduciary duty should not be assumed to override considerations connected with the fundamental values and policies of an institution. This is a commonplace in discussing the challenges of “ethical investment”, not only for the Church, but for many other bodies. Contrary to some rather selective reading of the High Court judgment of 1992 in relation to the late Bishop Richard Harries’s celebrated case against the Commissioners, regarding apartheid-era investments in South Africa, trustees such as the Commissioners do have the liberty of declaring certain kinds of investment to be ethically inconsistent with the convictions of the institution that they administer.

But there is a second point. There is a good deal of credible evidence that “rewilding” policies do not have to be detrimental to profit — and also that (as the 2021 Dasgupta review, The Economics of Biodiversity, emphasised) the restoration of the full capacity of agricultural land in a way that is consistent with the Global Biodiversity Framework is, in fact, a defensible enhancement of the real overall value of the land in question.

Sir Partha Dasgupta has pioneered the idea that, when we make economic decisions, we have to incorporate costs that are not just about short-term calculations of profit. Above all, these include the costs of environmental degradation and the loss of biodiversity. Such costs are cumulative, serious, and wide-ranging. Deliberate policies to minimise or reverse such degradation are an attempt to preserve resources, not to reduce them.

Will tenants of the land in question be happy with this? Again, there is evidence that, in other contexts, tenants have been eager to obtain permission from landlords to experiment with “rewilding”.

If the obvious and immediate effect of such a policy were indeed to pile burdens on an already appallingly stressed sector of the population, we might well have good reason for thinking twice about the motion. But, against the background that bodies such as the Crown Estate and the National Trust are developing good practice in this area, and that many agricultural professionals have a genuine and serious interest in this area, it is clear that there is more work to be done here in consultation with farmers to shape an intelligent assessment of where appropriate pilot projects can be identified.

BUT, finally, is this really an ethical issue of such magnitude that it justifies a clear and, perhaps, challenging declaration of policy of the kind that the motion calls for?

The basic point is that, for Christians, following on from the radical perspectives of the “jubilee” vision of Hebrew scripture, the land is not a dead assemblage of passive raw materials, but an environment in which life is given and received between diverse kinds of creatures — humanity included.

To conserve the range of gifts represented in an environment, and to seek to honour what is offered by that diversity, is a way of being properly receptive to the action of God. Ignoring the network of lifegiving in which we are involved would be a form of deep and long-term self-harm. Giving more space for biodiversity is a way of recognising our involvement with other kinds of life in the world that we share.

The Commissioners have already shown a willingness to accept this basic perspective. I hope that there will be some more granular work to clarify attitudes and possibilities within the Commissioners’ estate, and that the Church can expand its sense of responsibility for preserving life at every level — in a world in which that aspiration often looks extremely vulnerable.

The Rt Revd Lord Williams of Oystermouth is a former Archbishop of Canterbury.