Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, what additional steps the Government is taking to work with partners in south America to help protect the Amazon rainforest and work together on climate change.

The UK is engaging with international partners to ensure momentum and ambitious, collective action on climate ahead of a rescheduled COP26 in Glasgow in November 2021. As part of the UK's COP26 Presidency we are working with Chile, the current COP Presidency, to call on all countries to submit new Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that represent their highest possible climate ambition. Tackling climate change remains a high priority for this Government. The Prime Minister has committed to double the UK's International Climate Finance funding to at least £11.6 billion between 2021/22 and 2025/26. In South America, the UK is one of the leading donors of climate finance. The UK runs major programmes on sustainable agriculture and deforestation with stakeholders in Brazil, Colombia, and Peru, and has committed £120 million to Partnerships for Forests, a programme which supports sustainable businesses which create jobs and protect forests. This programme operates in a number of locations, including the Amazon region.

The Foreign Secretary recently raised the issue of climate change and the need to protect the Amazon rainforest with his Brazilian counterpart. We are keen to work with our South American partners to protect natural systems, like rainforest, which are on the front-line of the fight against climate change, and on the transition to sustainable land use, which is critical to raising the next 1.5 billion people globally from poverty. It is vital to ensure that our land-use, agriculture and fisheries management policies adapt so that our ecosystems can continue to support people and biodiversity. To this end, the UK has been working with a number of countries to create an ambitious 'Leaders' Pledge for Nature'. This Pledge commits leaders to take ten urgent actions to put biodiversity on a path to recovery by 2030. So far, 78 countries have signed the Pledge, including Bolivia, Colombia, Paraguay, and Peru.

In August 2020, the Government launched a consultation seeking views on whether it should introduce a requirement on larger business using forest risk commodities to undertake due diligence on their supply chains. The consultation attracted over 60,000 responses, which we are analysing carefully. We will publish the Government's response to the consultation shortly.