Rio+20 Summit

Martin Caton Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Martin Caton (Gower) (Lab)]

As a member of the Environmental Audit Committee under the committed leadership of my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley), I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this important debate. I shall pick up on some of the issues that she raised and ask how we can help to make the Earth Summit in Brazil in June a meaningful driver of sustainable development. I am also pleased to follow the hon. Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer), a colleague on the Committee. I am not convinced that I want to look through his shale gas window, but I agree with many of the other points he made.

Twenty years after the original Rio summit, which adopted the Brundtland commission concept and established the three-pillar approach to sustainable development, which ties social and environment goals together, it is right to look back at how far we have come, or indeed to admit how far we have not come, since ’92. To paraphrase the UN Secretary-General, the trends on the three pillars of sustainable development are at best mixed. There has been significant economic growth overall, but the benefits have not been universally felt. He pointed out that income poverty remains an enormous problem in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia; large disparities between regions remain on other millennium development goals, including school enrolment, and maternal and child health; and 1 billion people are still under-nourished. Yet only half the countries with data on their millennium development goals are on track to meet their targets.

The environmental protection pillar has probably shown the least progress. The Secretary-General said that pressure on ecosystems continued to increase, as did the loss of forests and biodiversity. Sadly, the world has failed to respond to the dangers that it recognised 20 years ago, which is enormously disappointing, because in that time the scientific evidence on the consequences of failing to tackle climate change has become stronger. We have also learned a lot more about what is happening to ecosystems, biodiversity, the nitrogen cycle and the other processes that the Stockholm Resilience Centre identifies as the planetary boundaries within which humanity can operate safely.

Our Committee took evidence from a range of organisations, and the picture painted of progress was pretty well uniformly gloomy. The International Institute for Environment and Development said that

“we are currently losing the battle for sustainable development”;

Oxfam stated that progress since 1992 has been “weak”; and the Foundation for Democracy and Sustainable Development identified

“signs of erosion in the overall global political commitment to sustainable development”.

Why then has the world failed to respond anything like as robustly as it should to the threats the planet faces? There is probably a multitude of answers, but the underlying one is that most people in the world have not been convinced of the severity and urgency of the challenge, and even if they have, they are far from sure that action at any level will be effective. A “business as usual”, or a “business more or less as usual”, scenario therefore wins by default. We need to use the run-up to Rio as an opportunity to combat that inertia and make the case for action, so that the summit can enable a renewal and more concerted response to the threats, but also the opportunities, that we face.

One option that has arisen out of discussions in the run-up to Rio has been the establishment of new international goals. Colombia submitted a proposal for the introduction of UN sustainable development goals. That seems to have been reasonably well received, albeit with two not unreasonable caveats: first, there is no time before June to draw up and agree a detailed set of such goals, and secondly, the new goals must complement, not undermine, the existing millennium development goals. Indeed, the Committee considered the establishment of sustainable development and consumption goals at Rio—even if at first in broad-brush terms—as a way of shifting effort contributions from the developing to the developed world.

The two main themes for Rio, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stoke-on-Trent North said, are to build a green economy in the context of sustainable development, and poverty eradication. The UN Secretary-General envisages that involving a multi-track approach encompassing taxation, public procurement, public investment in sustainable infrastructure, public sector support for research and development, and reconciling social goals with economic policies. In my view, taxation has a vital role to play in incentivising more sustainable behaviour. It helps to make environmentally damaging activity less economically attractive and encourages environmental goods. One problem in this country, however, is that the Government do not have a definition of an environmental tax. They have abandoned the previous Government’s definition, which reflected the international norm—basically, if a tax has an environmentally beneficial effect, it is an environmental tax—and the Treasury is now considering a new definition. Perhaps the Minister will tell us whether the UK delegation will have a new definition to take to Rio to inform its negotiating position in this policy area.

The green economy debate also focuses on the valuation of ecosystems services, the role of regulation, the need to measure sustainable economic performance by a yardstick that goes beyond gross domestic product so that human well-being becomes central, and the need to ensure that the green economy is a fair economy—fair across the planet, and within regions and countries. There is every prospect of those themes being adopted at Rio as essential requirements of a green economy, and I hope that the Government will press the case.

The EAC report on carbon budgets called for the introduction of mandatory emissions reporting by business to help to tackle climate change. Various organisations and bodies have called for Rio+20 to agree a mandatory regime for sustainability reporting, and we agree with them. That sort of transparency will help the private sector to move more quickly to play its part in creating that green economy.

The other main theme for Rio is the institutional framework for sustainable development. The UK is not in as strong a position on governance issues as it was a few years ago. The Government have badly weakened the capacity for the objective assessment of their own environmental performance, with the abolition of the royal commission on environmental pollution, the withdrawal of funding from the Sustainable Development Commission and the removal of the watchdog role of Natural England and the Environment Agency. On the other hand, the UK devolved Administrations have a role in promoting sustainable development. I represent a Welsh constituency and believe that the Welsh Assembly Government have a valuable contribution to make on the governance question. Perhaps the Minister will inform the House how the Government intend to facilitate input from Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales before and during Rio. Furthermore, the Select Committee heard evidence in support of an international court for the environment. Although it must be recognised that that would not be universally welcomed, the idea has real merit and should be pursued.

A real danger in the run-up to Rio is that ambitions will be diminished by the global economic crisis, that we will return to the old, sterile, economy versus environment agenda, and that in practice Governments will choose to define a green economy as “full steam ahead but with a bit of environmental window dressing.” That will not do. Across the globe, it is clear that environmental protection and enhancement are too often being forced into second place by the economic imperative.

The message from our own Government and the lead party in the coalition is mixed. Good things have been done and said. I broadly welcome the green investment bank, the natural environment White Paper, the establishment of the natural capital committee and the national ecosystem assessment. I thought the Secretary of State’s speech on this very subject to environmental non-governmental organisations and industry representatives in the Guildhall on 9 February, despite a few gaps in detail, took us in exactly the right direction—the direction we need to head in if anything meaningful is to come out of Rio.

On the other hand, a rather different message is coming from parts of the Government—that environmental protection is a barrier to economic growth. We see all environmental regulations being reviewed as potential red tape, the EU habitats directive described by the Chancellor as gold-plated without any supporting evidence, the mishandling of the solar feed-in tariff issue, and strong resistance to the use of wind energy by large numbers of Government Back Benchers, resulting in the industry reconsidering major investment in renewables in the UK.

Let us be clear that uncertainty about any country’s absolute commitment to the strongest possible outcomes at Rio will help to make such beneficial outcomes less likely. One way to overcome such uncertainty is for the Prime Minister to commit himself to attending the summit with the determination to secure substantial progress in the international commitment to sustainable development.