Climate Finance: Tackling Loss and Damage

Debate between Clive Betts and Dan Carden

Tuesday 5th September 2023 Westminster Hall

[Dan Carden (Liverpool, Walton) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Betts. I congratulate the hon. Member for Dundee West (Chris Law) on securing this debate and his excellent contribution. I also congratulate the Chair of the International Development Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion), and my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury) on their powerful contributions.

This is an important debate. In March this year, I was proud to be elected president of the Forum of Young Parliamentarians of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which is like a United Nations of legislatures. It represents 180 national Parliaments around the world. I vow to use the position to make young people’s voices heard on the world stage. I hope my contribution will be a small part of fulfilling that promise, because young people will be not only the victims of climate change but the greatest contributors to action against it. It is a profound injustice that those least responsible for causing the climate emergency will suffer the worst of its consequences. At the same time, debt burdens and increased food and energy prices mean that many climate-vulnerable countries have less fiscal capacity to deal with those consequences—for adaptation, mitigation, loss and damage, or the resulting harms to health, the environment and ways of life.

I welcome the confirmation, in an answer to my written question, that it remains the Government’s intention to deliver £11.6 billion of UK international climate finance between April 2021 and March 2026. I hope, however, that the Minister will stand up to those in his own party who would like to see the UK abandon that commitment. I urge him to take the opportunity today to clarify how the UK will meet its commitments within the existing timeframe, including front loading climate finance and showing how that climate finance will be new and additional.

To meet our commitments, however, we need to go further. We must properly tax the big polluters; we know that fossil fuel corporations knew the harms their products were causing. They covered up the science for years, funded disinformation and spread doubt, delaying action that could have saved countless lives. Those very same companies are currently raking in obscene, record-breaking profits, predominantly due to the effects of the war in Ukraine. Polluters must begin compensating for the destruction they have caused to our environment and to the lives of the people who have done the very least to cause the climate emergency.

Research from Greenpeace has shown that the fossil fuel industry made enough in profits between 2000 and 2019 to cover the costs of climate-induced economic losses in 55 of the most climate-vulnerable countries nearly 60 times over. It is the responsibility of the richest countries, which set global tax rules, to make that a reality. The importance of doing so could not be clearer. Estimates have shown that the world’s most vulnerable countries can expect to suffer an average GDP hit of 19.6% by 2050 and of 63.9% by the beginning of the next century. Even if global temperature increases are limited to 1.5 °C, vulnerable countries face an average GDP reduction of 13.1% by 2050 and 33% by 2100.

Even if 1.5 is kept alive, a properly functioning loss and damage mechanism is urgently needed. Failure to do that will be felt particularly acutely across the continent of Africa, with eight of the top 10 worst affected countries being there. In the first six months of 2022, there were 119 climate and weather related events in developing countries, causing £26.2 billion worth of losses in the countries affected. That shows the scale of the challenges we face as part of an international community.

My colleagues have made the case for a moral responsibility for loss and damage. It is also in our economic self-interest, however, to take greater action now. We must build on the breakthrough agreements of last year’s COP. Now is the time to operationalise the loss and damage fund—to put the money in and to get it working—in order to direct finance to those communities with the greatest need. I will continue to make those calls, alongside colleagues, and I will be proud to make them at COP28, which I hope to attend in my new role later this year. The Minister should rest assured that young people will continue to make those calls until they are listened to.

[Mr Clive Betts (in the Chair)]

We now move on to the Front Benchers. I think they may have worked out that there is more time than their allotted 10 minutes, although they are not required to take longer and I would like the mover to have a bit of time at the end to wind up.