Climate: Behaviour Change (Environment and Climate Change Committee Report)

Lord Bilimoria Excerpts

Wednesday 7th June 2023 Grand Committee

[Lord Bilimoria (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Environment and Climate Change Committee and its chair, the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, on its report, In Our Hands: Behaviour Change for Climate and Environmental Goals. It clearly addresses the twin crises of climate change and nature loss, and the role of government—although we as a country are committed to net zero by 2050—and it refers to the Committee on Climate Change about behaviours, drawing on the CCC assessment that 35% of emissions reduction up to 2035 require decisions by individuals and households to adopt low-carbon technologies and choose low-carbon products and services, as well as reduce carbon-intensive consumption.

The report points out very clearly that the public are ready for leadership by the Government in this area, and the Government must do far more. It also speaks of the role of organisations in civil society and local authorities to work on this. Business can do a lot. I am an adviser to the Climate School, a wonderful initiative which trains employees in companies. When a company sets a goal of net zero by 2050, what does that mean to the employee and how can they understand the whole concept of climate change, net zero and what role they can play? Much more needs to be done on that. The report makes many recommendations about changing behaviour, including government needing to provide a positive vision and clear narrative. The information is not enough. It talks about fairness, which is absolutely true, and business having a critical role, and that is what I will focus on.

Of course, we have led the way by being the first country to legislate for reaching net zero with the Climate Change Act. In fact, 2019 marked the first year in which low-carbon electricity overtook fossil fuel power in the UK, and our offshore wind industry is respected around the world. In his wonderful report, The Economics of Biodiversity, Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta of the University of Cambridge says that nature is “our most precious asset” and that 1 million plants and animals are under threat of extinction. To quote my noble friend Lord Rees, an authority in this area,

“Our Earth is 45 million centuries old. But this century is the first when one species—ours—can determine the biosphere’s fate”.


I was privileged as president of the CBI to spend a lot of time at COP 26, where business played a much bigger role than ever before. An impact report from the goal 13 platform found that 79% of businesses believe that climate is a mega-trend and that 89% of businesses have at least one climate-related target. Almost two-thirds of FTSE 100 companies have committed to net zero by 2050. That is wonderful.

My noble friend Lord St John spoke about the circular economy. There is no better example of the circular economy than my own business and industry, brewing, where nothing goes to waste. A huge proportion of bottles are recycled to make bottles, spent yeast is used to make Marmite, spare grain is used for cattle feed, CO₂ is captured and reused, and the water is treated and the effluent water reused.

Technology plays a major role, which the report refers to. At the University of Birmingham, of which I am chancellor, we developed the world’s first retrofitted hydrogen-powered train, which was up and running at COP 26 in Glasgow. His Majesty the King was on the train, as was our Prime Minister at the time.

We need to accelerate investment. There is a lot of investment, but we need to work much faster: we have not started building even one small modular reactor. We do not spend enough on R&D and investment: only 1.7% of GDP, versus the USA and Germany, which spend 3.1% and 3.2% respectively. Climate finance has not been addressed enough in this report. A huge amount of private finance needs to be addressed. All this change and transition, including with homes, will lead to the creation of 240,000 new jobs, a lot of which will be in SMEs.

To conclude, we should be looking forward to COP 28, led by its president, Sultan Al Jaber, the business ambassador, Badr Jafar, and Razan Al Mubarak, the IUCN COP 28 champion. To cite the president, there is a lack of finance. Some four times the amount of finance is required than is available at the moment, and we need “a business mindset”, as he said. The scale of the problem requires everyone working in solidarity. We need partnerships not polarisation, and we need to approach this with a clear rationale and execute a plan of action.