International Climate Action

Barry Gardiner Excerpts

Thursday 26th September 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

Order. Before I call the shadow Secretary of State, it might be helpful if I indicate an intention to move on at 1.50 pm.

[Barry Gardiner (Brent North) (Lab)]

I thank the Secretary of State for advance sight of her statement.

The climate emergency is worse than we feared. Yesterday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its special report on oceans and the cryosphere, which set out the danger starkly. Sea levels threaten nearly 1 billion people who live in low-lying coastal regions, and tipping points in the permafrost could release hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon. The report makes it clear, yet again, that we must do everything to reduce emissions as fast as possible to limit global warming to 1.5°, beyond which climate breakdown will be catastrophic.

The purpose of the UN climate action summit was to spur on greater climate ambition towards that aim, but none of the world’s large polluters met the challenge. China, India and the EU were all unable to announce tougher nationally determined contributions. Brazil and the USA refused even to turn up. Our country must step forward to fill that vacuum of political leadership on the world stage.

The UK’s commitments at the summit need close scrutiny. The new Ayrton fund that the Government have announced allocates £1 billion to help British scientists and innovators create new clean technology. That is great, but the funding has come from the aid budget. We should not siphon off overseas development assistance to spend on UK universities and firms. They should be funded by non-ODA finance, so will the Secretary of State explain why the funding diverts precious resources from mitigation in climate-vulnerable nations? If she claims that the money is classified as aid because it will help export clean technologies to the developing world, perhaps she can today commit to following Labour’s lead and pledge to provide to the citizens of the global south free or cheap access to green technologies that we develop here.

The Government’s pledge to double international climate finance, while welcome, also raises questions. Will the Secretary of State confirm that that money will be disbursed predominantly through grants rather than loans, which unfairly saddle the poorest nations with debt to pay the costs of a problem they did little to cause? Climate change is already wreaking hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage on those communities. Will she commit to devoting any of the resources to covering loss and damage caused by climate disasters? After all, the Government perpetuate the fossil fuel economy for the poorest nations abroad, completely undermining our international climate finance. From 2013 to 2018, UK Export Finance gave £2.6 billion in export support to the energy sector, of which 96% went to fossil fuel projects, overwhelmingly in low and middle-income countries. Will she therefore commit today to ending taxpayer support for fossil fuels abroad, as so many other countries have done?

What we do abroad matters more than ever. The UK is hosting the UN climate conference, COP 26, in Glasgow next year. It is the most important climate summit since the Paris agreement. The right hon. Member for Devizes (Claire Perry) is president of COP 26, but COP presidents are normally Ministers in their Governments, and she has indicated her intention to stand down at the next general election. I therefore ask the Government what staffing resources the office of the COP president will be provided with; how much funding the Government intend to provide for COP 26 preparations; what regular reports the COP president will be able to give to Cabinet; and what objectives the COP president has been set by the Cabinet.

Those resources must be provided because at COP 26 we will need to use our diplomatic leverage to persuade other nations to bring forward much tougher NDCs. I am deeply concerned that staffing levels are inadequate. In 2009, under the Labour Government, the Foreign Office had an army of climate staff 277-strong. Seven subsequent years of austerity halved that. When the Prime Minister was Foreign Secretary, the number of officials working full-time on climate change fell to 55. Do the Government intend to restore the workforce to levels last seen a decade ago in recognition of the diplomatic resource that is now required to support the agenda of a UK-led COP 26?

The failures of the UN climate action summit raise the stakes of COP 26 so much higher. We cannot afford for the talks, or those at COP 25 in Chile, to stumble. The issue of climate breakdown is far greater than the party-political divides that afflict this Parliament, and I urge all Members to find common ground in the pursuit of a healthy and stable climate. In that spirit, I make an offer to the Secretary of State: I and my colleagues in the Labour party are fully committed to doing everything we can in a cross-party manner to ensure that COP 26 delivers the highest possible ambition.

[Andrea Leadsom]

I thank the hon. Gentleman. He and I worked together on energy matters some years ago and I welcome his willingness to work cross party on the issue, about which I know he cares a great deal and on which he is extremely knowledgeable. I also pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband) for his excellent efforts on the Climate Change Act 2008, from which so much of the UK’s ambition in this space derives. I encourage the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) to work cross-party. I will be delighted to meet him and his colleagues to discuss how we can take the matter forward in a shared endeavour to tackle global climate change.

The hon. Gentleman asked some specific questions. I will try to answer them all, but if I cannot or if I miss some, I would be delighted to meet and tackle them further. He is right that the recent IPCC report provides the best available science on the wide range of impacts of climate change on the ocean and the cryosphere, and outlines potential measures for building resilience to those impacts. The Government welcome the report. We are very concerned about the impact of climate change on the oceans. Of course, as island nations, the United Kingdom, its overseas territories, our Commonwealth partners and close friends are especially dependent on a healthy and sustainably managed ocean, so we will be looking carefully at those recommendations.

The hon. Gentleman is right to ask about the tougher NDCs not being met at the climate summit, and he will be aware that those targets are supposed to be raised by February 2020. The UK is committed to doing that and we will, of course, be urging all others to raise their NDCs by next February.

On the Ayrton fund and its use for scientific work, the Government’s recently published green finance strategy committed to aligning all UK overseas development aid with the Paris agreement so that all our development finance is consistent with climate-resilient and low greenhouse gas development pathways. Such aid is, of course, essential because so much of the problem for vulnerable communities overseas is related to climate change, so those things are inextricably linked. Again, I am happy to speak to the hon. Gentleman more about that.

On grants versus loans, they will almost all be grants. Again, we can speak further about that.

On fossil fuel export finance, as the hon. Gentleman will know, the Committee on Climate Change has made it clear that, actually, achieving net zero requires a transition through lower-carbon fossil fuels, and I point again to the fact that, in just the past six years, we have gone from a 40% reliance on coal—the dirtiest fossil fuel—to only a 5% reliance today, which is quite an achievement. There is much more to be done, but we recognise there will be an ongoing need to use fossil fuels during the transition period.

On staffing resources for COP 26, the hon. Gentleman will be aware that the president is a prime ministerial appointment. I will be working closely with my right hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry), the COP president, to make sure that all the parliamentary updates will be made available on time. I will also be working closely cross-party. The UK has a huge ambition to decarbonise and to retain our global leadership in tackling global climate change.