Climate Change: Impact on Developing Nations

Viscount Chandos Excerpts

Thursday 11th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Chandos (Lab)]

My Lords, as the last Back-Bench speaker, I will try to be brief and avoid repetition as far as possible, let alone hesitation or deviation. I thank and pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, not just for her compelling introduction but, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, said, for her long record in this field in and out of government. I will focus my remarks exclusively on the role that sustainable media plays in international development generally, particularly in relation to climate change. I declare my interest, as included in the register, as chair of the not-for-profit Thomson Foundation, which, along with its sister organisation in Berlin, promotes sustainable media development and trains journalists in countries with either low incomes or low press freedom, or both.

Six weeks ago, I attended the annual awards ceremony of the Foreign Press Association, addressed this year by Her Majesty the Queen. One of the award winners was the documentary film “Under Poisoned Skies”, directed by Jess Kelly for BBC News Arabic, which revealed the devastating effect on the health of local people caused by gas flaring in the giant oil fields of southern Iraq, over and above the deeply damaging level of emissions. So far, this film has had neither the ratings nor the political impact of “Mr Bates vs The Post Office”, but it demonstrates vividly the role of the media in raising awareness and prospectively spurring action against climate change and related threats to the health of people in developing nations.

“Under Poisoned Skies” was financed by the BBC World Service, whose funding since 2014 has been predominantly from the licence fee rather than the then FCO, following the ill-judged settlement between the BBC and the Government, which paralleled the later raids on the international development budget described by the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, and other speakers.

Policies to combat climate change cannot be imposed on developing nations: they must emerge with the wholehearted consent of those countries’ people, based on accurate and truthful information. That is why the Thomson Foundation strongly believes that local journalists in developing nations have a vital role to play in changing the narrative around the world’s environmental breakdown and climate change. The foundation, funded inter alia by the FCDO, the British Council and, through Berlin, the EU, provides online e-learning courses and webinars and holds competitions for environmental journalists and workshops in countries including Lesotho and Ethiopia.

Media developments straddled the FCO and DfID when they were separate departments, so if there were any positive arguments for their merger, as opposed to a continuation of the cross-departmental co-operation described by the noble Baroness, Lady Northover, this might have been one. It is therefore disappointing that November’s White Paper, welcome as it is in other ways, made no attempt to capitalise on the merged department by including any reference to the vital role that strong and free media plays in achieving international development objectives. Will the Minister urge his colleagues in the FCDO to incorporate the promotion of sustainable media as a priority in the international development policy that I hope will emerge from the White Paper?