Climate Change: Extreme Weather

Lord Howell of Guildford Excerpts

Wednesday 9th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

The noble Lord is of course right. My right honourable friend the Minister Greg Barker is currently in New York, ensuring that negotiations at an international level are very much focused on going forward for 2015 and on the sort of commitments that we want from the international community. Closer to home, the noble Lord is of course aware that we have invested over the course of this Parliament over £3 billion in trying to respond to issues such as floods. We are now protecting 20,000 more houses over the 165,000 houses that were already protected through the measures that we have taken.

[Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)]

My Lords, what my noble friend says about adaptation is welcome. Would she not agree that now may be the time to consider switching our colossal expenditure on attempted mitigation to adaptation to what is widely believed by many experts to be coming in the way of more extreme weather, in line with the recommendation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s working group? Would the Minister accept that our current mitigation efforts seem to be producing not a vast improvement in carbon emissions but, in fact, an increase in our carbon footprint, more burning of coal, increased fuel poverty, and the driving away of investment from this country to where power is cheaper, raising the prospect of blackouts and general environmental damage? Is it not becoming obvious that some change of direction in our climate and energy policy is overdue if we are to achieve our green goals?

[Baroness Verma]

My noble friend raises a range of very important issues. Of course, climate is measured in average conditions over the long term, but I agree with my noble friend that it is about both adaptation and mitigation. We cannot have one or the other; we have to have both. It is important that, going forward, we encourage not only ourselves but the international community and our partners to respond to the serious issues of increased carbon emissions.