Rio+20 Summit

Debate between Nick Clegg and Mary Creagh

Tuesday 26th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh (Wakefield) (Lab)]

I thank the Deputy Prime Minister for the advance copy of his statement.

The original Rio declaration sought to eradicate poverty, reduce unsustainable production and consumption, and promote greater co-operation to protect the world’s ecosystems. It is as relevant today as it was 20 years ago. Expectations were low for this summit, and those expectations were met. I pay tribute to the Deputy Prime Minister and the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who worked as part of the EU delegation to prevent the summit from reaching abject failure.

There was a glimmer of hope. Ban Ki-moon’s zero hunger challenge aims for a future in which everyone enjoys their basic human right to food and in which global food systems are resilient. It aims to provide access to adequate food all year round, increase small farm productivity and see zero waste of food. We welcome the UK’s contribution of £150 million to help meet the zero hunger challenge.

Will curbing land grabs by large companies and improving land rights, especially for women, be on the agenda of the high-level meeting on hunger that will take place during the Olympics? What does the Deputy Prime Minister make of the Prime Minister’s comments yesterday that a future Conservative Government would consider handing out some state benefits “in kind” rather than in cash? Does he think that handing out food vouchers to the poor is a good idea, when the Brazilian zero hunger scheme was based on the Bolsa Família, which gave money directly to families in poverty and let them choose how best to feed their children? How will the zero hunger initiative tackle food poverty in the UK, where the Trussell Trust charity estimates that it will feed 130,000 people this year, 45,000 of whom are children?

The Deputy Prime Minister mentioned that the Prime Minister, alongside the Presidents of Liberia and Indonesia, will co-chair a new UN committee to establish a new set of millennium development goals to follow those that expire in 2015. How will the new goals relate to the sustainable development goals that will emerge from Rio?

There was progress in the field of energy, with the Secretary-General’s sustainable energy for all initiative, which received pledges of $323 billion in funding to bring clean energy to more than a billion people in developing countries. We welcome that. We also welcome the Deputy Prime Minister’s announcement at Rio that the UK will introduce carbon reporting for 1,800 quoted companies from April next year, as set out in Labour’s landmark Climate Change Act 2008. That was, sadly, the weakest option that the Government consulted on. It creates the anomaly that British Airways will report its carbon footprint as a public company, but that Virgin Atlantic, as a private company, will not. However, we are the first country in the world to do it, which gives us a temporary, green competitive advantage to make up for the Government’s disastrous handling of the solar feed-in tariffs.

The agreements on biodiversity, oceans and the trade in endangered species are welcome. However, the Government have refused to guarantee funding for the UK’s wildlife crime unit after next April. Does he agree that that unit is on the front line of fighting the illegal trade in endangered species, and will he argue for its benefits at the heart of Government?

Sharing the benefits of the planet’s biodiversity equally is an important building block for what happens after Rio, yet the Government have still not ratified the Nagoya protocol, which was agreed last year, on access to and benefits from genetic resources. What assessment has he made of the action we need to take to comply with the protocol, and will the Government show leadership in the EU by ratifying it?

We know that sustainable development starts at home. Far too often, the Government have been found wanting—they abolished the Sustainable Development Commission and failed to introduce marine protected areas, and their implementation of their forests policy was disastrous. Will the Deputy Prime Minister therefore tell the House how the Government will change how they do business to reflect the Rio conference outcomes?

Will the Government publish a UK action plan as a framework for the changes that they seek after Rio? Does the Deputy Prime Minister agree with his right hon. Friends the Secretaries of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, for International Development and for the Foreign Office that the Government need to invest more in a resource-efficient economy and low-carbon jobs to reduce costs and protect the UK from rising oil prices and energy dependency?

The Deputy Prime Minister should be in no doubt that the Opposition will work with him across party boundaries to achieve the long-term solutions that our planet needs. Rio showed that the solutions to ending hunger and deforestation, and to securing clean energy and water for the poorest, are all out there. We just need to scale them up.

The scientists tell us we must act now and businesses stand ready to play their part. The tragedy is that the politicians did not agree concrete mechanisms by which those things can happen, but as the Deputy Prime Minister has said, Rio was not a destination but a milestone on a long road. We stand ready to support the Government to make the change we need to deliver the future we want.

[The Deputy Prime Minister]

I thank the hon. Lady for her recognition of what I think is our shared commitment to the agenda discussed at Rio. I totally share her support for the zero hunger initiative; I attended a session in Rio at which the initiative was discussed. She asked about the hunger summit that will be held this summer. I do not know the precise agenda, but she referred to the importance of legal rights to property and land, which are crucial to dealing with hunger sustainably.

The hon. Lady asked about the interaction between sustainable development goals, ill-defined though they were at the Rio summit, and the work on the post-2015 agenda. The Government’s strong view is that the sustainable development goals as defined by the group of 30 representatives, which will be established in September, must feed into the wider review of the millennium development goals through the high-level panel that has been established by the Secretary-General.

I will not disguise from the hon. Lady the fact that within that procedural complexity, there are a lot of sensitivities. Candidly, some developing countries have hitherto felt that their voice is not strongly enough heard in some UN processes. The Prime Minister and his co-chairs will work hard to ensure that the voices of the developing world are properly listened to in the review of the MDGs to allay the concern that precisely the part of the world that will benefit most from the process is shut out from it. We need to do quite of lot of work to ensure that the different acronyms and processes do not start becoming rival acronyms and process—that is a danger.

The hon. Lady mentioned the sustainable energy for all initiative, which I am glad she supports; it is an outstanding initiative. I hosted a preparatory meeting of the group on the initiative in London some months ago. We had hoped that the Rio declaration would adopt the initiative as a core conclusion. In the event, because of the nervousness of some participants on what the initiative means and its implications, it was “recognised” in the declaration. We would have inserted a stronger verb, but none the less, as with all those initiatives, we now need to exploit that recognition and work on it.

The hon. Lady complained that the proposal on greenhouse gas emissions reporting does not go far enough. We have to start somewhere. We are the only country doing this. Some people complain that we have already gone too far and are imposing too many burdens on business. Other business groups, such as the CBI, have welcomed the proposal. I think we are breaking new ground, and I hope she will welcome that rather than cast aspersions on it.

The hon. Lady will know that the Darwin initiative is a robust initiative that we are using to monitor the plight of endangered species. Finally, she rightly said that these summits make sense only if one acts consistently with them at home. We are rightly proud of our record: we are the first country to establish a green investment bank; the green deal, which will be up and running in the coming six to eight months or so, will be the largest initiative of its kind for installing energy efficiency measures and bringing down energy bills in homes up and down the country; and the green sector, the green economy, is growing by about 5% a year, employs close to 1 million people in this country and actually runs a trade surplus. That is something we should cherish and celebrate. The carbon floor price is another major innovation of the Government, while the electricity market reform, which is one of the most ambitious legislative and regulatory overhauls of an electricity market I am aware of anywhere in the developed world, is explicitly designed to ensure that we have a sustainable energy mix for future generations.