Copenhagen Climate Change Conference

My hon. Friend has made a crucial point. I have been very conscious of this in the discussions that I have had about Copenhagen. We need the broadest possible coalition in every country of the world on these issues, involving not only civil society and Governments but businesses, faith groups and the whole broad spectrum of people. Copenhagen will be hard enough, but the big challenge will be to sustain consensus on these issues across time, across developed and developing countries, across different Administrations in those countries and across different political systems. That is the scale of the challenge that we face in relation to climate change. The fourth area that I want briefly to touch on is the need for a comprehensive agreement on forestry. Deforestation is responsible for 18 per cent. of global emissions, or about one fifth of the overall problem that we face. I think I am right in saying that, in Peru, an area of forest the size of 64 football fields is being cut down every 90 minutes as part of the process of deforestation. Any global agreement must therefore include forestry, and the UK has put forward some concrete ideas to make that happen. A key part of this is to find a way of incentivising people who live in the forests to manage them sustainably; that has to be the answer. There are good examples of sustainable forest management, but there are also difficult questions around the governance of these issues.