Climate Change Bill [HL]

I shall speak to Amendment No. 183B. We debated the role of the climate change committee at some length earlier today. We on these Benches do not believe that the expertise lies there for dealing with matters of adaptation. The climate change committee has an extremely important role, and it should concentrate on it. We have spent some considerable time describing what it should do and how it should work. Although it does not need to be of the same stature and importance per se as the climate change committee, an independent scrutiny committee for adaptation is needed. In terms of climate change and climate change policy, there is a natural divide between adaptation and policy concerning stopping carbon and other greenhouse gases that cause climate change. A climate change committee can do one thing, but an independent scrutiny committee can do the other. We believe very strongly that there needs to be a mirror committee of statute concerned with adaptation. It would let the climate change committee get on with its area and this committee could look at adaptation. In this amendment, we have listed the areas that this committee should look at. We also would want to add it—I have not included them at this stage—ecology and biodiversity in relation to adaptation, which are key areas in addition to those I have listed in the amendment. Adaptation is a key, but small, part of this Bill, yet we know that if the world was perfect we would not need adaptation. Through flooding, rising sea levels and the other indicators of climate change that we see nationally and globally, we already know that we need to have a very active adaptation programme and strategy. It is right that it is part of this Bill—the Government have put it in—but we need it to be stronger and to take up a much greater role in this legislation. As part of that, we want in a way to copy the Government’s ideas for an independent committee, but to have this for adaptation as well. This is key to the combating—perhaps not the mitigation—and the tackling of the problems that we have already stored up for ourselves over the past 50 years of industrialisation.