Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what the timetable is for his Department to begin the process of negotiating new climate change commitments with the UN; and how the devolved administrations will be engaged in those discussions.

The UK is a party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) individually as well as through the EU and we are bound by all the obligations of the Paris Agreement under international law. This includes the requirement to prepare, communicate and maintain successive nationally determined contributions.

The UK is firmly committed to the Paris Agreement and to our emissions reduction and climate finance efforts under it. We have demonstrated our commitment domestically – we were the first country to introduce legally binding emissions reduction targets through the Climate Change Act, and we have recently published our highly praised Clean Growth Strategy, which is ambitious and robust in setting out how we will decarbonise the UK economy through the 2020s.

Leaving the EU will not affect our statutory commitments under our own domestic Climate Change Act and indeed our domestic binding emissions reduction targets are more ambitious than those set by EU legislation. Our Clean Growth Strategy includes the commitment that our future approach to tackling climate change is at least as ambitious as the current schemes we have in place.

The Devolved Administrations were consulted in the formulation of many of the policies in the Clean Growth Strategy and in the development of EU legislation. We will continue to work with the Devolved Administrations as we develop and implement the policies and proposals that we have set out.