Climate Change: Impact on Developing Nations

Lord Whitty Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Whitty (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, and to recognise that questions of health, development, poverty and climate change are all interrelated. I thank also the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, for initiating this debate. I must declare that I am a shortly-to-retire member of your Lordships’ Environment and Climate Change Committee, and therefore will concentrate largely on that aspect.

Yesterday’s edition of the Times—which is not normally regarded as an ultra-green broadsheet—reported clearly and with alarm that last year was the hottest on record and probably the hottest for over 100,000 years. It also indicated that it was one of the most disappointing years for the COP process; although the Minister and the UK delegation were helpful in ensuring that it was not quite the disappointment that the petrostates and some of the fossil fuel companies were looking for, it still did not go sufficiently far forward to say that we were on target for the 1.5 degree limit to global warming that was set in Paris, which was concluded to still be possible at the Glasgow COP 26 but now looks to be within 0.02 degrees of being reached already.

I have three essential points. First, this more rapid than expected rise in temperature and the level of carbon emissions, with rising sea levels and extreme floods, extreme heat, wildfires and so forth, means that the very existence of some nation states which are party to the COP process is at stake. Obviously, the low-lying islands of the Pacific and some in the Caribbean are first in line, but there are large areas of other countries, such as low-lying areas of Bangladesh, where agricultural and industrial land could easily be flooded within a relatively few years.

It all makes the case for establishing an effective loss and damage fund, as was agreed in principle but does not seem to have been followed up sufficiently by other nations. The threat has already been sustained to the land, biodiversity and very existence of many of these islands. As far as Britain’s commitment is concerned, we have been more forthcoming than most rich countries in making our contributions to all the bilateral and multilateral arrangements. But we have not even ourselves fulfilled all our commitments, and many other countries are further behind.

What constitutes our ODA budget, let alone our abandonment of the 0.7% target referred to by the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, is also a complex story. I am indebted to the Library for its briefing on this. The largest single element of ODA expenditure covers refugees in this country. The largest sums of bilateral aid to other countries, by far, were to Afghanistan and Ukraine. I recognise that there are good geopolitical and humanitarian reasons for those contributions, but I am not sure that they should be classed as development. Ukraine is still a developed country, although it is scarred by a vicious war, and Afghanistan is probably the country least threatened by rising sea levels. Pacific nations, which are most at risk, received a very small proportion of aid from Britain. Multilateral aid, as I say, is yet to be fully forthcoming.

My third and last point is that the whole process of COP and the IPCC recommendations mean that we need differential targets for richer countries, less-developed countries and large countries such as India and China—although there are disputes about whether they are to be regarded as developing countries, they are some of the biggest polluters and emitters. They need much sharper targets than we will give to the poorest developing countries. We need formally to recognise that in the COP process, otherwise unity across the nations will not continue.

We need to do that and to recognise not only that we were big polluters historically but that most carbon in the atmosphere has been put there not since 1945 but since 1990, when the world leaders in Rio recognised the truth of the science for the first time. That we have recognised that and let the globe warm to the extent that it has is a rebuke to us all.