Biodiversity

Given what the Minister has just said, he will perhaps reflect on the fact that, in the horn of Africa, we have seen what are often referred to as the first climate change wars. The desertification that has gone on there has seen the collapse of civil society and has spawned the lawlessness that has given rise to piracy on the high seas around the horn of Africa. From that perspective, we see countries such as our own and the US, and international shipping generally, spending millions of pounds in that region on insuring ships and providing navies to escort and safeguard ships in that region. Yet we spend nothing, relatively, on sorting out the ecological and environmental problem of the desertification that has caused that piracy in the first place. Does he not agree that that is the case?