Climate Change: COP 26

Duke of Montrose Excerpts

Thursday 18th November 2021 Lords Chamber

[The Duke of Montrose (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Young, on securing this debate; it is such a hot topic and noble Lords have already emphasised that.

Like the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, I was able to attend a couple of days of the conference, as my family has a long association with Glasgow. I declare my interest as a land manager in that area. Glasgow is very proud to have been chosen as the venue for such a prestigious conference. Noble Lords will be aware that it has been on a big transition from an area dominated by heavy industry. Now, it likes to brag that in 2020 it was called a “Global Green City” and rated as the fourth city in the global destination sustainability index. This accolade could have attracted Boris Johnson but, by coincidence or otherwise, it had considerable advantages for a conference being held in the midst of the Covid epidemic. It was far enough away to reduce the number of voluntary participants and objectors, but not so far as to deter foreign visitors. As it was, there was an unending emphasis on Covid prevention. There appear to have been about 30,000 or 40,000 people attending the venue, so at times there were queues in a massive orderly scrum. All told, my impression was of a copious air of optimism, endless ambition, followed by copious promises—but no great sense that the latter would match the other two demands.

The first day that I attended, there was an event entitled “Making the global transition to clean power a reality”. There was a great parade of banks and investment institutions promising a variety of funding streams to expand renewable energy generation. There was also an emphasis that the programme in south-east Asia, let alone the rest of the world, would have to build connections to 150 million homes that are currently without electricity as part of seeing that nobody was left behind. There then was a session based around the 42 countries that are offering to phase out the use of coal in their energy mix. We learned that south-east Asia contributes 50% of world carbon emissions, mainly from coal. As we know, however, in the final agreement, India and China agree only to phase down coal.

On the second day, I attended a session chaired by my noble friend the Minister. In a great innovation for COP, delegates actively addressed forest, agriculture and commodity trade and its effect on nature. This included the promise that 75% of forest supply chains will become sustainable.

There was then a session on acceleration to sustainable agriculture. We were conscious that we will need three times our present level of food production in 40 years’ time. In the end, there were two schools of thought. One was that, if all existing promises are kept, we might be able to contain warming to 1.8 degrees. We were more familiar with the other: that we could control it to just 2.6 degrees. Can the Minister tell us how we can fulfil our ambition?