Rio+20 Summit

Martin Horwood Excerpts

Tuesday 28th February 2012 Commons Chamber

[Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) and all the other speakers of all parties with whom I agree on many issues. Speaking as a Liberal Democrat, as a former member of the Environmental Audit Committee and, indeed, as a former GLOBE delegate to the Cancun climate change summit, I feel as though I am speaking among friends here on many of these issues. I commend the Environmental Audit Committee for its report, for its mission to raise the profile of Rio+20 and for its role in securing this debate today.

Twenty years ago, I was involved in raising the profile of the original Earth summit. I then worked for Oxfam, and we were sending out tens of thousands of mailings to Oxfam supporters, trying to get them to lobby their MPs. I remember that a young campaigner called Caroline Lucas was working there at the same time. Whatever happened to her, Mr Deputy Speaker? Even then, we were trying to link the issues of global poverty, global justice and global sustainability, and trying to persuade people that they were absolutely inseparable. In the intervening 20 years, it has become even clearer that that is the case. The risk of climate change, and the risk that it poses to the global economy, as well as to people’s lives and livelihoods, is now even better understood. The risk of climate change accelerating beyond 2 above pre-industrial levels is also much clearer, not only from the United Nations framework convention on climate change reports but from domestic reports such as the Stern report, which catalogued in excruciating detail the risks of flooding, famine and disruption, and the challenge that they would pose to global economics as well as to people’s lives.

Even then, we predicted that the first people to suffer the most from climate change and environmental disaster would be the poor. Sadly, that has proved to be the case. With hindsight, it was probably true even then, as environments in the horn of Africa and the Sahel were beginning to change on a permanent basis. The risks to the poor in countries such as Bangladesh are even clearer now. This is also true in the UK, and even more so now. In 2007, my constituency was extremely badly flooded, and it was the uninsured and the underinsured—those on low incomes—who often suffered the most. We know that that kind of extreme weather event, even in relatively wealthy countries such as ours, will be much more frequent thanks to climate change. It is even clearer that we cannot separate climate change and environmental sustainability from issues of poverty and social justice. Only by taking concerted action across rich and poor nations, forested and deforested nations, and those nations that are the most and least vulnerable to climate change, can we tackle this global challenge. We are, as someone said a few years ago, all in this together.

Alongside carbon emissions and natural resource use, Rio+20 must tackle the issues of poverty, food, energy access and water. I do not entirely agree with the support expressed by the hon. Member for Sherwood (Mr Spencer) for GM technology. There are other ways to tackle food production, including introducing more efficient food production, as the hon. Member for North Antrim said. Less wasted food in the richer countries would be a significant contribution, as would the fairer distribution of land and better education and training for poor farmers in many parts of the world. All those things can work together to make the whole planet more efficient at producing and distributing food.

Several hon. Members, including the hon. Members for Gower (Martin Caton) and for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart), have highlighted the many failures in development and environmental protection over the past 20 years. In the graphic phrase of the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness, many of the scientific indicators are still flashing red. And yet, many things that have happened during those 20 years have given cause for hope. Many people thought even 20 years ago that the UNFCCC process might run into the ground and expire very quickly, but despite some close calls, especially in Copenhagen, it is still on track. It is still a UN-led process incorporating more or less all the countries of the globe, and that in itself is an encouraging development.

Several hon. Members have said that monitoring and verification are a crucial part of the process, and we have seen significant progress in that regard. There is a significant prospect of reconciliation between China and the United States on those issues, which offers the prospect of whatever follows the Kyoto protocol being a more robust and verifiable process. We have also seen the setting of high-level millennium development goals, and the acceptance by many nations that those goals can provide a driver for international and domestic action, even though we know that many of them might be missed.

In this country, the use of domestic legislation has been important, as the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness said. The Climate Change Act 2008 set the 80% target, and this Government have produced the natural environment White Paper, which is a truly radical document. If the policy of valuing natural capital that it advocates were put into practice and were to make a difference to the detail of Government policy, we would be taking a massive step forward. We have also heard the promise to establish the world’s first green investment bank, and seen the prospect of the green deal making a radical difference to energy efficiency.

There have also been many other smaller, less high-profile initiatives, such as the local sustainable transport fund proposed by the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), and his promotion of alternatives to travel. He has done many of those things on a small scale, to make sustainable development approaches work across different Departments. However, we need to embed that right across Government to make sure that it functions right across Government. I commend my hon. Friend, too, for securing an abstention in the recent European vote on biofuels, which I think was a positive step. We have seen progress at the European level as well. The establishment of the European Commission’s emissions trading scheme may be flawed and limited, but it was a first step towards international action on limiting emissions, which has been copied worldwide.

A great deal of action has been taken by what we are nowadays supposed to call non-state actors—or people, as we used to call them. In business and, significantly, non-governmental organisations, in politics and for the Environmental Audit Committee and the media, this is an issue that has become high profile, leading to a great deal of action at the local and individual level as well as the governmental level.

What are the key messages for Rio? First, it is right for us to support the high-level goals. I strongly urge that they should include goals on resource use as well as on development and carbon emissions.

In opposition the Liberal Democrats produced a document called “Our Natural Heritage”. It highlighted the risk of things such as nickel, tin, tungsten, zinc, bauxite and oil becoming rarer in some cases and perhaps even running out in the next 50 years; or, if they did not run out, becoming much more expensive and more environmentally damaging to extract. The economic risks as well as the environmental risks were pinpointed, and we suggested introducing an anti-waste and resource efficiency Act to parallel the Climate Change Act 2008, to monitor and set objectives for sustainable resource use and reduce the associated risks. I still commend our publication to Ministers. One policy we got through from this document was the local green space designation to protect green spaces important to local communities. I can see why that was a politically attractive one to pick out, but I think our proposed resource efficiency Act would have been even more important. If the Rio high-level goals helped to contribute to promoting governmental goals on resource use and worldwide goals, that would be significant.

Other issues have been raised for Rio, including crimes against the environment, which I believe is important, as is challenging the primacy of economic growth as an indicator of the quality of success of economies.

Finally, the political message conveyed by who attends the summit is particularly important. It is welcome that the Secretary of State has committed to attend. I would love to see the Deputy Prime Minister flying the Lib Dem flag there as well, but just for once we should put party advantage aside and strongly urge the Prime Minister to attend Rio+20 if he possibly can. I think that would send out exactly the right message—that, 20 years on, we are turning youthful idealism into real leadership and tangible action at governmental and global level.

[Dr Alan Whitehead (Southampton, Test) (Lab)]

The Rio summit of 1992 represented what many people saw as a comprehensive programme of aspiration towards an international understanding of sustainability and a move towards a sustainable world economy. As the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Mr Stuart) set out, a number of important things came out of Rio 1992, which I believe was signed up to in the end by 178 Governments. It was to a large extent informed by the unsurpassed definition of sustainability from Brundtland—that it is development

“that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

That is the famous part, but the central definition refers to other things from Brundtland, such as

“the concept of needs, in particular the essential needs of the world’s poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and, the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organisation on the environment’s ability to meet present and future needs.”

If anything, it is that second element of sustainability that we have let slip by over the 20 years since Rio.

As hon. Members have mentioned, Rio led among other things to an outpouring of local enthusiasm in the form of Local Agenda 21. I was an enthusiastic Local Agenda 21-er at that time, but we were probably naive about implementation and subsequently about what sustainability actually meant.

I was recently invited to an interesting seminar on sustainable aviation. There, I wondered whether the concept of sustainability might have been pushed a little to the margins. As far as the approach to Rio+20 is concerned, it is important to get clear what we mean by sustainability and what we mean in respect of the needs and the limitations that go with the sustainability concept. We must then address those matters very seriously in the Rio+20 discussions.

Things have certainly not happened since the original Rio along the lines that those who participated and lauded what happened there would have expected. Although considerable progress has been made with the millennium goals that were set at the Rio+10 summit in Johannesburg, most of them will not be met by 2015, partly because, as I think we now know, many Governments who say they will do things simply do not do them. Being clear about that at Rio+20 will be an important part of securing a realistic outcome from what it may achieve.

Rio+20 is likely to proceed on a much more sombre basis than earlier summits of this kind, but as other Members have pointed out, last year’s Durban summit on climate change demonstrated that expectations can sometimes be confounded, and I hope that we can approach this summit in that spirit. The fact that it has been demanded by the developing world rather than by developed nations makes a significant difference. It will look to the themes of Rio, but it will do so in terms of everyone’s development. It will consider the concept of a green economy in the context of sustainable development and the institutional framework that will make it possible, and I believe that it will do so in the light of the whole Brundtland report rather than just the oft-quoted first line. It must concern itself with the carrying capacity of the planet and with its concomitant—the need for global equity in the sharing of the resources that go into sustainable development.

It might be salutary to compare that starting line with what we thought obtained at Rio 20 years ago. The work of the Stockholm resilience centre at Stockholm university was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Martin Caton), and was examined in some detail in the Select Committee’s report. The centre asked what the planet could put up with in a number of areas before its sustainability threshold was breached. What were the planet’s sustainability boundaries? It considered 10 of them: climate change, ocean acidification, stratospheric ozone depletion, the nitrogen cycle, the phosphorus cycle, global freshwater use, land system change, the rate of biodiversity loss, atmospheric aerosol loading, and chemical pollution. That work made it clear that we have not only transgressed three of those boundaries—the rate of biodiversity loss, the nitrogen cycle and, of course, climate change—but have often done so in a startlingly profligate way, and are close to doing so in three other areas: ocean acidification, the phosphorus cycle, and land system change.

Rio+20, then, is not just about how the planet can carry sustainable development, but about how can we row back and make the planet sustainable again, in terms of the carrying capacity that the Stockholm resilience centre set out so carefully. We should, however, celebrate some of our international successes. For instance, as a result of an international convention, we have returned ozone depletion to a point at which carrying capacity has been restored, and have done so through international negotiation and discussion in a way that was not thought possible a few years ago. That analysis, however, tells us only some of the tale. The reason for our transgression of the boundaries that I have mentioned is, overwhelmingly, the extent to which the developed world has hoarded its access to the planet’s carrying capacity at the expense of all other countries.

This is about sustainable development, but it is also about a worldwide green economy that is based on fairness and equity. In that context, it is clear that the proposals that Colombia and Guatemala are bringing to Rio+20—there may not be time to organise their sustainable development goals properly, but I think they understand that, and see this as a starting point—do not counter the existing millennium goals. I refer to the adoption of sustainable development goals for all, not just developing nations, relating to combating poverty, changing consumption patterns, promoting sustainable human settlement patterns, biodiversity and forests, oceans, water resources, advancing food security, and energy sustainability. All those are sustainability goals for the whole world: they do not simply mean that the developed world is giving back some of what it took from the developing world in the first place.

I think that the promotion of global resources will inevitably have to be developed in order to promote those goals. I hope that the United Kingdom will support the idea of a global transaction tax—even if it does not support efforts to introduce such a tax at European level—with the proceeds going to the development of these sustainability goals.

[Martin Horwood]

I strongly support the hon. Gentleman in making that call. The Government may have been right to reject a financial transaction tax at an EU level, which would have meant a real risk of driving businesses to other financial centres. A global financial transaction tax would avoid that risk.

[Dr Whitehead]

The hon. Gentleman is right. I appreciate his continuing loyalty to his adopted coalition on the issue. I thought someone had to go it alone and advance this idea, but he is right: a global transaction tax that everyone could unite around would be a far preferable way of proceeding, particularly if that tax was clearly hypothecated for the purposes of global sustainable development and global equity.

I agree with what the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said about her approach to Rio in her recent speech to NGOs. Rio must be a workshop, not a talking shop. I also agree that being green is integral to sustainable economic growth and that we must put value on our carrying capacity so that it becomes an integral part of our economic transactions, not merely the fuel for them to take place. We must also add the essential ingredient of global equity in respect of resources. I hope the Secretary of State will pledge that the UK will push for that goal at Rio and call for the Colombian agenda of sustainability with global equity to be moved decisively forward.

That is the shape of the outcome I want at Rio. I do not want to be back here in 20 years talking about Rio+40 and wondering what might have been. By then it will be too late, as the Stockholm environment institute shows.

--- Later in debate ---

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I am very grateful for the opportunity to take part in this debate, and, as a member of the Environmental Audit Committee, I too want to pay tribute to the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Joan Walley) for her commitment to do more and more work on the environment across the whole House.

I want to focus in particular on recommendations 1 and 9 of the EAC report and the Government’s response to them. Recommendation 1 rightly observes that

“there has been inadequate progress on sustainable development since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.”

Sadly, I think that that is something of a grave understatement. Although there has certainly been some progress, it has been very slow and incremental, whereas the science demands an urgent paradigm shift. No wonder our report states:

“There is still far to travel. Some ‘planetary boundaries’ having been breached, and others approaching, make the task more urgent than ever.”

I agree very strongly with that. There is enormous urgency behind the agenda as planetary boundaries are indeed being breached. If everybody in the world lived as we do in the rich north, we would need another three planets to provide the resources and absorb the waste. I hardly need to say that we do not have three planets; we have one, and it is already looking pretty degraded.

Recommendation 9, however, claims:

“It would be unrealistic to expect the imperative for economic growth not to be high on the agenda of many countries going to Rio+20, developing and developed.”

My case is that as far as the developed countries are concerned, we need a different imperative high on our agenda. Indeed, the recommendation goes on to state:

“The Government should resist any moves there might be to use the financial situation to dilute the extent of the environmental and social aspects of the green economy discussed at Rio+20. Rather, it should emphasise…that environmental planetary boundaries will ultimately limit the room for growth.”

It is important to state in black and white that there are limits to growth. I know that that is not a popular perception or idea, but it is very clear that on a planet of finite resources with a rising population and rising expectations, infinite economic growth simply is not possible.

[Martin Horwood]

Does the hon. Lady agree with the economist Kenneth Boulding, who said:

“Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist”?

[Caroline Lucas]

I will forgive the hon. Gentleman for taking one of my best lines, but I think that that is a very important point. I am glad to see that our sources are moving in the same direction.

The source to which I want to refer is a film, “The Age of Stupid”. I do not know whether many hon. Members will have seen it, but it features Pete Postlethwaite as the sole survivor of a climate catastrophe. It is based in 2050 and he is looking back to today. He looks through all the newsreels—real, genuine newsreels with all the evidence that we have around us that climate change is happening—and he says, in words that still make the hairs on the back of my neck go up in a shiver, “Why is it, knowing what we knew then, we didn’t act when there was still time?” To me, that is just about the most important question that we could ask. Given that we have all this evidence that we must act, what is stopping us?

Part of it is to do with the fact that for too long, a shift to a green economy has been portrayed as though we were talking about shivering around a candle in a cave. It has been portrayed too often as being about hair shirts and we have assumed that if we scare the life out of people sufficiently with the terrible stories of what will happen—and it will happen if we do not get off the collision course with climate change—that, on its own, will be enough to motivate people to change their behaviour. Yet, as we have seen, the evidence shows that that is not what will motivate behaviour change.

Such change would be motivated by our painting a much better picture—a much greener, more compelling vision—of what a zero-carbon economy would look like and by our making the point that it is about a better quality of life. We should also make the point that the current economic model is not even working on its own terms, and we need look no further than the financial crash to see that. Not only that—it is not actually making those of us in the rich countries any happier beyond a certain point. There is a lot of evidence that once basic needs are met, beyond a certain point more and more economic growth does not make us happier. The stress on turbo-consumerism is not increasing our well-being. I could not put it better than Professor Tim Jackson, a professor at the university of Surrey who wrote the wonderful report, “Prosperity without growth?” He has said that we

“spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need to create impressions that won’t last on people we don’t care about.”

To me, that sums up more or less what we are doing wrong.

We need real change. We need to recognise that the economy is a subset of the wider ecology and the environment—not the other way around. We need to recognise that, although technology and efficiency have their parts to play, they are not going to get us there on their own. In a planet with a rising population and rising expectations, to think that efficiency gains and technology alone will get us off the collision course we are on is to be in fantasy land. We need behaviour change as well and more education on population growth—an issue that no one has put on the table yet this evening. Population is a controversial issue but it has to be part of our discussions about a sustainable future. I am talking not about anything coercive, but about education and the provision of family planning for those women who still need and want it in developing countries. I am talking about recognising that the impact of different populations is different in different places. The impact of our fewer numbers in the north is far greater than that of higher numbers in the south, but population still has to be part of the discussion.

Social justice also has to be part of the discussion. The aim of meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs does not apply only to the rich or those in the global north—it has to apply to every citizen. Under current trends, it looks as though there will be 9 billion people by 2050, and the real challenge we face if we are serious about a green economy is how future populations will be able to consume equally on a per capita basis and still remain within resource constraints. I suggest that that could only be feasible if we in the rich north significantly reduced our consumption patterns and our impact on the planet.

We have started to make some policies based on recognising the need for constraint, starting with the Climate Change Act 2008. I believe, and the science suggests, that we in the developed countries need to be reducing our emissions by something like 90% by 2030, so I do not agree with the targets in that Act, but the architecture in it is incredibly important. The Government could do much worse than to mark the 20th anniversary of the Rio summit by amending the Act, first, to set targets that are in line with the science and, secondly, to include traded or embedded carbon. For too long it has been too easy to outsource our responsibility for much of the carbon that is produced in order to make the products that we consume. The fact that the production happily happens over in China, with the impact going on to its balance sheet rather than on to ours, seems grossly unfair to me. If we are importing products from other countries, the carbon that is embedded in those products should be part of our calculations and audits.

There are also biodiversity constraints. Our consumption of resources has a knock-on effect for habitats, so that needs to be strictly regulated to prevent further loss of biodiversity and, where possible, to reverse the losses that have already happened.

Other hon. Members have talked about our current fixation with economic growth, which means that we over-emphasise the measure of that growth—gross domestic product—to the detriment of other measures of success. Really, our policy on growth is no more or less than a policy to increase GDP by a certain percentage each year, but as others have said, GDP measures do not differentiate the social value of different forms of economic activity or revenue and capital. A Government who use up their capital—the country’s natural resources—and treat it as national income, can boast of having delivered growth and increased GDP. We have seen that on a vast scale with the billions of pounds-worth of oil and gas from the North sea that has been treated as revenue with no thought to the fact that that income is a one-off boost to the economy. For 30 years it has made the UK economy look much healthier than it actually has been, and instead of the proceeds being invested wisely in the future—for example, on renewable energy facilities that we can use when the oil and gas run out—it has been used to fund consumer booms that have led to the inevitable busts.

Perhaps worst of all, the use of GDP as a measure does not count the full costs of production, such as the impact on our natural world and on people’s quality of life. DEFRA’s natural environment White Paper suggests that we can produce metrics of natural environmental value for transactions, but we need to be clear that simply saying that the natural environment has a value is not, in itself, sufficient to ensure that it is internalised in decision-making processes. I would also argue, as the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice) was in some senses, that it is impossible to put a value on some resources. What value do we put on a liveable atmosphere? That is a public good, not a private good. Relying on the markets to offer protection is therefore insufficient. We need regulation as well.

Businesses need to be hugely involved in the project, and in some respects are far more advanced in their thinking on this agenda than Ministers. We could learn from some of the businesses that are already beginning to think about what it would mean for them to live in a steady state economy, rather than one that was based on more and more production and consumption. As others have said, it is incredibly important that we send a very clear message about the importance of the Rio Earth summit, and we would do that by ensuring that our own Secretary of State is there, but I join other hon. Members who have said strongly that the Prime Minister also needs to be there to send a strong message that this matters, that this is urgent. The time that we have in this Parliament—the next three or four years—will be critical as to whether we invest properly in getting off the collision course that we are on with the climate crisis. It falls on our generation to do that. It is a huge responsibility, but it is also an awesome opportunity.