Sustainable Development Goals

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Justine Greening]

My right hon. Friend is right, and she speaks from a position of authority. Like my right hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Mr O'Brien), she is well respected, both for her service as a Cabinet Minister and for her tireless work with charities such as Tearfund. She is absolutely right: we were one of the key players that recognised the need to fuse the two agendas, of sustainability and climate change and of tackling poverty, successfully if we were to achieve the goal that my Department works faithfully to achieve of eradicating absolute—

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

Government Members say that they want a bipartisan approach and nowhere is that more useful than on the issue of climate change, because we need a long-term strategy. Why does the right hon. Lady resist having separate climate change goals within the sustainable development framework?

[Justine Greening]

The hon. Lady is somewhat misinterpreting the Government’s position. If she looks at the report by the high-level panel of experts co-chaired by the Prime Minister, she will see that it includes a range of targets and goals in relation to climate change. I shall come on to that later but, as I have said, no one can deny that the UK has played, continues to play, and will play a leading role in climate change discussions, not least because that flows into the work that we do in international development, for example, setting up the international climate fund and investing nearly £4 billion in projects that can help to tackle development and, in many cases, give a real lead in addressing climate change.

Since the report by the high-level panel, the open working group on sustainable development goals—a group of 70 member states mandated at Rio+20 to deliver a proposal on those goals—the UK has pushed for the highest possible level of ambition. We have been consistent in our drive for member states to agree an inspiring and workable agenda centred on the eradication of extreme poverty, with sustainable development at its core, ensuring, as I said to the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green), that no one is left behind.

As part of that, we have consistently argued for a strong health goal that focuses on strengthening health systems and on ensuring effective health outcomes for all women, men, girls and boys at all ages. We have clearly stated that the framework must fully integrate environment and climate change, and it must have a strong goal on gender equality focusing on improving prospects for women and girls. I was disappointed that there was no explicit reference to the importance of having a strong gender goal and the mainstreaming of women and girls’ issues in the development framework. I hope that we can continue, as we have done in the past, to have cross-party consensus on those issues to make progress.