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

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what assessment his Department has made of the potential effect of the UK leaving the EU with no deal on his Department’s ability to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 13 in the UK.

Leaving the EU with or without a deal will not affect our commitment to achieving Sustainable Development Goal 13. We remain a signatory to the Paris Agreement; will honour our commitments to provide climate finance; are co-leading with Egypt the Resilience and Adaptation theme at the UN Climate Action Summit in September; and we have bid to host COP26 in 2020 in partnership with Italy. Underpinning all of this is our domestic ambition, which will continue to be enshrined in law through the Climate Change Act 2008. Building on our Clean Growth Strategy, on 12th June, the Government laid draft legislation to set a new net zero greenhouse gas emissions target for the UK, to be delivered by 2050.

The UK’s first Voluntary National Review (VNR) will be published shortly. The VNR will review UK action both domestically and internationally in support of Goal 13. It will also outline key challenges and next steps, recognising that while significant progress is being made, there is more work to do.