Cyclone Idai

Baroness Tonge Excerpts

Thursday 28th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

On the co-ordination that we are responsible for, we have committed some £5.8 billion to international climate finance. We are taking a leading role in resilience, ensuring that the ambitions set out in Paris are actually met and putting resources behind that. So we are doing all that, but this is a complex situation and international co-operation is needed to address it.

[Baroness Tonge (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the Minister may recall that some 20 years ago there were images in our newspapers of a woman giving birth to a baby in a tree in Mozambique. The disaster then was made worse by a shortage of helicopters and large Antonov aeroplanes that could get helicopters to the area. Has this been corrected? Are there enough helicopters to help people in south-east Africa at the moment?

[Lord Bates]

We could not say that there were enough, but what the international organisations are doing is quite remarkable. The Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs at the UN, led by Sir Mark Lowcock, formerly of DfID, has been doing an incredible amount of work in this area. The UNFPA is dealing with that particular point but so is the WFP, the IOM and UNICEF. They are all working to ensure that people get the help that they need.