Climate Change Bill [HL]

I support the amendment moved by my noble friend Baroness Miller. Everybody understands that there is an international dimension to every aspect of climate change. That is clearly the case in areas of mitigation, but it has to be the case in adaptation as well. We would not suggest from these Benches that there should be an international report with the same detail as in the United Kingdom one. That is not the point that we are trying to make. However, there needs to be an international dimension within the report. That is important not just in its own right but also morally. The various adaptation measures are needed, particularly in the developing world, because of emissions from the developed world over the past 100 years. We have a moral and ethical responsibility to see what is going on in the rest of the world. That needs to be recorded in our official governmental, national assessment of adaptation requirements worldwide. There is also a very practical reason for doing that. If adaptation abroad does not happen, that will not just affect those nations and those communities, although, believe me, they will be very greatly affected. There will equally be knock-on effects for us within the timescales that we are talking about, whether in forced migration on a scale far greater than Polish plumbers, in biodiversity and the migration of species or in the transmission of illness. The Minister is well aware of bluetongue and we are going to see more of that. How we stop it is a difficult mitigation issue. I strongly support the idea that we should include this international dimension in terms of adaptation, partly and importantly because of an ethical consideration of our own history and the much greater effects that climate change has on lesser developed societies, but also because the effects of those changes, our lack of ability to adapt abroad and our requirement to help on the international stage will come back to us in future years.