Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what recent assessment she has made of which Commonwealth countries are most at risk from rising sea levels.

Sea level rise assessments are undertaken at a global and regional level by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The 2014 Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) provides the most authoritative recent evidence. It reports with ‘high confidence' rises of mean sea-levels of between 0.32m and 0.98m and an increased frequency of storm surges by 2100. AR5 also assesses the impacts of these changes, highlighting the vulnerability of Small Island States and low lying coastal countries, a number of which are Commonwealth countries.

DFID is supporting assessments and programmes in some low income Commonwealth countries to help them prepare for sea-level rise. These include Commonwealth countries such as Samoa, Kiribati, Vanuatu and Tuvalu where over £20 million of UK support is being provided through multilateral funds; and Bangladesh where over £120m of UK bilateral climate support is being used to help the estimated 78 million people vulnerable to sea-level rise and other impacts of climate change.