COP28

Thérèse Coffey Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stuart]

The hon. Gentleman is right to highlight the success of the loss and damage fund being operation-alised, but also to highlight the fact that it does not match the need for the quantum of finance. He asked me how we will be working on that. We have been delighted to contribute £60 million, of which £40 million will be going directly into the fund to help get it going. However, if we are to get it to the scale we require, it is going to need more than donor finance, which is why we have explored, and will continue to explore, options for innovative financial flows. So much of the change we have made there, even if there was an opportunity for increased debt, would not be debt financeable anyway, and that is why, as he said, we must make sure that those who are most vulnerable are rightly dealt with.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned the increase in production from oil and gas in the North sea. We are not seeing an increase in production; we are actually seeing production expected to fall at 7% a year. It is falling faster than is required globally. The IEA says that countries should be looking for a 3% to 4% reduction, and we will be reducing at 7%. As he knows, the UK has cut its emissions more than any other major economy on earth, has the most ambitious plans of any major economy to 2030 and, I believe, is the only one to have put into law a 77% reduction in the mid-2030s.

It is in that context, as we lead the world in reducing demand for oil and gas, that, none the less, our dependence on imports will grow. So it makes no sense whatsoever to see Scottish workers thrown out of their jobs in oil and gas, while we simply bring in imports from abroad with higher emissions, and lose the very subsea and engineering capabilities that we need for floating offshore wind, carbon capture and hydrogen. There is a complete disconnect in this crazy opposition to the maintenance of an already declining industry, which is fundamental to delivering the energy transition. Even if I have little hope for the right hon. Member for Doncaster North, who has always managed to have inconsistent and incoherent thoughts in his head all at the same time, I am hoping that perhaps the Scottish nationalist party can come to its senses and support Scottish workers and the energy transition.

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

I strongly welcome this statement. I congratulate the Minister and my noble Friend Lord Benyon on the negotiations, but also officials such as Alison Campbell and many of the officials in the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who played a blinder in working towards and securing the agreement. I also want to pay tribute to the Minister for single-handedly making it possible for so many MPs to attend COP28. I pay tribute to him for doing that, recognising his previous presidency of GLOBE International UK.

I would like to say to my right hon. Friend that I was particularly proud of the mangrove breakthrough moment. I am conscious that the combination of nature and climate going together started very strongly in Glasgow and has accelerated. May I seek assurances from my right hon. Friend that we will commit to the £11.6 billion international climate finance funding? I know we have already started spending some of that. Will he also consider some of the approaches to things such as saltmarshes, the UK’s equivalent of mangroves, to make sure that continuing integration is part of our policy?

[Graham Stuart]

I thank my right hon. Friend for her question. I also thank her for her attendance at the COP and her continuing passion and ability to communicate the importance of nature as a value in itself, but also how, dealt with in the correct way, it is complementary to development and to the maintenance of carbon sinks. Nature, and making sure that an understanding of it is central to our thinking, is so important.

My right hon. Friend thanked my officials, and she is right to do so. When Dr Sultan al-Jaber made the historic announcement of the UAE consensus, the central text of the various texts we agreed was that on the global stocktake. Having thanked the two Ministers who led the work on the stocktake, he immediately thanked Alison Campbell and Mr Teo from Singapore for their fundamental role. Our officials and my team were very much involved in drafting and pulling together words, and I was delighted to be supported by them as we met those from Saudi Arabia to China, India and other partners. I pay tribute to all those countries that, just like us, had to move from their initial positions to find a consensus.

My right hon. Friend mentioned the presence of MPs. My first COP was in 2005 in Montreal, and I remember feeling then that the elected parliamentarians, who make the political weather, were not properly accounted for. When I look back to that historic Climate Change Act 2008, I am proud of the fact that my then party leader, the noble Lord Cameron, was the first party leader to support it—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) could just be quiet for a moment, I was talking about parliamentarians. It was a combination of Friends of the Earth working with Back-Bench parliamentarians and a new green Conservative party, and an early-day motion—an instrument here that is often looked at askance—that triggered the Climate Change Act, which has been significant not only for the UK, but for the world.