Climate Change: Cancun

Lord Eden of Winton Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howard of Lympne]

My Lords—

[Lord Eden of Winton]

My Lords, while acknowledging that getting so many nations to agree—

[Lord Howard of Lympne]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend and the Government on their Statement. As someone who had the honour of representing the Government at the first earth summit in Rio in 1992, I well recollect how difficult these conferences can be. Now that the momentum lost at Copenhagen has to some extent been resumed as a result of the efforts which my noble friend has described, will he tell us a little more about what our Government, together with our partners in the European Union, intend to do between now and the Durban conference in order to maintain that momentum?

[Lord Marland]

Again, I should like to pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Howard who was instrumental in persuading the Americans to come on board in Rio in 1992 and has great experience of these matters. As he rightly knows—he would have learnt this at Rio—and as we have heard since, it is our determination, working with the EU, to show real leadership in this and to press hard to turn what is a loose but generally agreeable statement into something practical. We should not set high expectations for ourselves to be ratified in legal language by Durban, but ensure that the transparency issues, which are critical to this agreement, the production and announcement of the transparency and how the targets being set by each country are established, are held up to public attention.

[Lord Eden of Winton]

My Lords, in view of the critical importance of rain forests in the general effort to achieve the objectives that the Governments have set themselves, will my noble friend say a little more about REDD-plus? Given all these good intentions and a widespread understanding about the importance of rain forests, their destruction still continues at a considerable rate. Little effort seems to be made to slow down the production of soya beans, palm oil and cattle ranching. When will we get effective, tangible action on the ground?

[Lord Marland]

It is absolutely fundamental that the Brazilians and the Congo Government associated themselves with this agreement. Those two countries have a massive forest issue. It is not possible for me to give fixed dates, but, for once, we have an agreement that something will be done. We are going to establish a map to show where the forests lie, which we hope will form the boundaries for no-go areas for deforestation.