Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what recent steps his Department has taken to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions relating to consumption.

All UK domestic and international GHG emissions reduction targets are based on territorial emissions. The UK has driven down territorial emissions by 44% over the past three decades, the fastest reduction of any G7 country and in October 2021 we published our Net Zero Strategy which delivers a comprehensive set of measures to support and capitalise on the UK's transition to net zero by 2050. Nevertheless, measuring consumption-based emissions provides helpful insight and supports policy development, enabling us to keep track of our carbon footprint and informing our efforts to reduce this.

Many of our policies to reduce emissions will help reduce consumption emissions. One example is the Resources and Waste Strategy which sets out steps to improve resource productivity by reducing consumption of raw material. The strong link between material resource efficiency (or resource productivity) and GHG emissions related to consumption, as measured by UK Carbon Footprint, means that measures to improve resource productivity should help reduce our consumption related emissions. The measures in the strategy include reforms to waste collection and packaging, the launch of the Waste Prevention Programme and a commitment to double resource productivity by 2050. Additionally we will continue to monitor levels of raw material consumption (our 'material footprint') and resource productivity via the set of indicators, Monitoring Progress, which was launched under the Strategy.