Rio+20 Summit

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) and all the other speakers of all parties with whom I agree on many issues. Speaking as a Liberal Democrat, as a former member of the Environmental Audit Committee and, indeed, as a former GLOBE delegate to the Cancun climate change summit, I feel as though I am speaking among friends here on many of these issues. I commend the Environmental Audit Committee for its report, for its mission to raise the profile of Rio+20 and for its role in securing this debate today. Twenty years ago, I was involved in raising the profile of the original Earth summit. I then worked for Oxfam, and we were sending out tens of thousands of mailings to Oxfam supporters, trying to get them to lobby their MPs. I remember that a young campaigner called Caroline Lucas was working there at the same time. Whatever happened to her, Mr Deputy Speaker? Even then, we were trying to link the issues of global poverty, global justice and global sustainability, and trying to persuade people that they were absolutely inseparable. In the intervening 20 years, it has become even clearer that that is the case. The risk of climate change, and the risk that it poses to the global economy, as well as to people's lives and livelihoods, is now even better understood. The risk of climate change accelerating beyond 2 above pre-industrial levels is also much clearer, not only from the United Nations framework convention on climate change reports but from domestic reports such as the Stern report, which catalogued in excruciating detail the risks of flooding, famine and disruption, and the challenge that they would pose to global economics as well as to people's lives. Even then, we predicted that the first people to suffer the most from climate change and environmental disaster would be the poor. Sadly, that has proved to be the case. With hindsight, it was probably true even then, as environments in the horn of Africa and the Sahel were beginning to change on a permanent basis. The risks to the poor in countries such as Bangladesh are even clearer now. This is also true in the UK, and even more so now. In 2007, my constituency was extremely badly flooded, and it was the uninsured and the underinsured—those on low incomes—who often suffered the most. We know that that kind of extreme weather event, even in relatively wealthy countries such as ours, will be much more frequent thanks to climate change. It is even clearer that we cannot separate climate change and environmental sustainability from issues of poverty and social justice. Only by taking concerted action across rich and poor nations, forested and deforested nations, and those nations that are the most and least vulnerable to climate change, can we tackle this global challenge. We are, as someone said a few years ago, all in this together. Alongside carbon emissions and natural resource use, Rio+20 must tackle the issues of poverty, food, energy access and water. I do not entirely agree with the support expressed by the hon. Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer) for GM technology. There are other ways to tackle food production, including introducing more efficient food production, as the hon. Member for North Antrim said. Less wasted food in the richer countries would be a significant contribution, as would the fairer distribution of land and better education and training for poor farmers in many parts of the world. All those things can work together to make the whole planet more efficient at producing and distributing food. Several hon. Members, including the hon. Members for Gower (Martin Caton) and for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), have highlighted the many failures in development and environmental protection over the past 20 years. In the graphic phrase of the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness, many of the scientific indicators are still flashing red. And yet, many things that have happened during those 20 years have given cause for hope. Many people thought even 20 years ago that the UNFCCC process might run into the ground and expire very quickly, but despite some close calls, especially in Copenhagen, it is still on track. It is still a UN-led process incorporating more or less all the countries of the globe, and that in itself is an encouraging development. Several hon. Members have said that monitoring and verification are a crucial part of the process, and we have seen significant progress in that regard. There is a significant prospect of reconciliation between China and the United States on those issues, which offers the prospect of whatever follows the Kyoto protocol being a more robust and verifiable process. We have also seen the setting of high-level millennium development goals, and the acceptance by many nations that those goals can provide a driver for international and domestic action, even though we know that many of them might be missed. In this country, the use of domestic legislation has been important, as the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness said. The Climate Change Act 2008 set the 80% target, and this Government have produced the natural environment White Paper, which is a truly radical document. If the policy of valuing natural capital that it advocates were put into practice and were to make a difference to the detail of Government policy, we would be taking a massive step forward. We have also heard the promise to establish the world's first green investment bank, and seen the prospect of the green deal making a radical difference to energy efficiency. There have also been many other smaller, less high-profile initiatives, such as the local sustainable transport fund proposed by the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), and his promotion of alternatives to travel. He has done many of those things on a small scale, to make sustainable development approaches work across different Departments. However, we need to embed that right across Government to make sure that it functions right across Government. I commend my hon. Friend, too, for securing an abstention in the recent European vote on biofuels, which I think was a positive step. We have seen progress at the European level as well. The establishment of the European Commission's emissions trading scheme may be flawed and limited, but it was a first step towards international action on limiting emissions, which has been copied worldwide. A great deal of action has been taken by what we are supposed to call non-state actors nowadays—or people, as we used to call them. In business and, significantly, non-governmental organisations, in politics and for the Environmental Audit Committee and the media, this is an issue that has become high profile, leading to a great deal of action at the local and individual level as well as the governmental level. What are the key messages for Rio? First, it is right for us to support the high-level goals. I strongly urge that they should include goals on resource use as well as on development and carbon emissions. In opposition the Liberal Democrats produced a document called ““Our Natural Heritage””. It highlighted the risk of things such as nickel, tin, tungsten, zinc, bauxite and oil becoming rarer in some cases and perhaps even running out in the next 50 years; or, if they did not run out, becoming much more expensive and more environmentally damaging to extract. The economic risks as well as the environmental risks were pinpointed, and we suggested introducing an Anti-Waste and Resource Efficiency Act to parallel the Climate Change Act 2008, to monitor and set objectives for sustainable resource use and reduce the associated risks. I still commend our publication to Ministers. One policy we got through from this document was the local green space designation to protect green spaces important to local communities. I can see why that was a politically attractive one to pick out, but I think our proposed Resource Efficiency Act would have been even more important. If the Rio high-level goals helped to contribute to promoting governmental goals on resource use and worldwide goals, that would be significant. Other issues have been raised for Rio, including crimes against the environment, which I believe is important, as is challenging the primacy of economic growth as an indicator of the quality of success of economies. Finally, the political message conveyed by who attends the summit is particularly important. It is welcome that the Secretary of State has committed to attend. I would love to see the Deputy Prime Minister flying the Lib Dem flag there as well, but just for once we should put party advantage aside and strongly urge the Prime Minister to attend Rio+20 if he possibly can. I think that would send out exactly the right message—that, 20 years on, we are turning youthful idealism into real leadership and tangible action at governmental and global level.