Here are the climate-related sections of speeches by MPs during the Commons debate Environment Bill (Fifth sitting).
09:28 Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)
I am fully dedicated to making sure that when the Bill gets on to the statute book, it has the purposes that we all, I think, agree on, and is a serious marker of what this country has to do to develop environmental biodiversity and a healthy environment—a healthy environment in which nature recovers, and we have clean water and, in the context of the climate change emergency, everything that will allow our natural environment to be in a healthy state for the future. I want the Bill to mark this House’s contribution to that process.
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10:54 Kerry McCarthy (Labour)
If we need an economic reason to pursue this agenda, as opposed to just caring about the environment and climate change, the World Economic Forum “Global Risks Report 2020” ranks environmental risk as the greatest systemic threat to our global economy, although I suspect that the report may have been published before coronavirus hit us. It says that the decline of natural assets will cost the world at least £368 billion a year, which adds up to almost £8 trillion by 2050, and the UK will suffer some of the biggest financial losses because of our trading patterns, consumption and so on.
From other debates, we know about the importance of our land and our oceans in terms of carbon mitigation—acting as natural carbon sinks. Land and oceans could offer as much as one third of carbon mitigation needed globally by 2030, to contain global warming at 1.5°. We have had that debate in the UK, about tree planting and peatlands and so on, but obviously, the huge forests of the world, such as the Amazon, are incredibly important. However, the world’s intact tropical forests are now absorbing a third less carbon than they did in the 1990s, owing to the impact of higher temperatures, droughts and deforestation. In the 1990s, the carbon uptake from those forests used to be equivalent to about 17% of carbon dioxide emissions from human activities. That figure has now sunk to around 6% of global emissions in the last decade. If dramatic action is not taken now to halt deforestation, tropical forests may even become a source of additional carbon into the world’s atmosphere by the 2060s.
The first is significantly to reduce global meat and dairy consumption and to give large areas of existing agricultural land back to nature. Another is to end the use of crop-based biofuels, to prevent further land conversion away from high-quality natural ecosystems. We also need to clean up global supply chains, to limit deforestation, which new clause 5 particularly addresses. This is one way that the UK can show leadership as we approach COP26. It would also show leadership towards one of the draft targets for the Convention on Biological Diversity at Kunming in China later this year, if that goes ahead.
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11:14 Rebecca Pow
This is such an important issue and many colleagues have touched on it. That is why it is really important that the UK establishes roundtables on palm oil and soya. Indeed, we have already done a great amount of work on some of these issues. For example, the UK achieved 77% certified sustainable palm oil in 2018, which is—staggeringly—up from just 16% in 2010. The UK has moved very fast on that issue. Eight of the UK’s largest supermarkets, representing a combined retail market share of 83%, have published new sourcing policies to deliver sustainable soya to the UK market. We will continue to work both with those businesses, through these roundtables on palm oil and soya, and with producer countries through our UK international climate finance projects to improve the sustainability of forest risk commodities.
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11:19 Richard Graham (Gloucester) (Con)
It is worth noting that we have significant renewable energy projects there, including some interest in tidal stream—we brought a delegation from Indonesia to Scotland recently. Through the Department for International Development’s climate change unit, we have worked on making their timber production sustainable and are now looking at how we can help them make the palm oil industry sustainable. The Minister makes an important point about how we can build a strong environmental footprint abroad.
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