Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what estimate he has made of the proportion of known fossil fuels that need to be left in the ground to prevent global temperature changes above 1.5 degrees centigrade.

The Department has not made its own estimates of the proportion of global fossil fuel reserves that need to be left in the ground to prevent global temperature changes above 1.5 degrees centigrade.

In order to answer questions such as this, the Department is funding, along with NERC, a research programme on Understanding the Pathways to and Impacts of a 1.5 °C Rise in Global Temperature. Research from this programme will feed into a Special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on the 1.5°C ambition, due to be published in September 2018.