G20 and COP 26 World Leaders Summit — House of Lords, 2021-11-03
Topic: Environment
Natalie Evans (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the noble Baroness and noble Lord for their comments. I am sorry that they were perhaps slightly more downbeat, so I will try to improve the mood by putting forward some positive facts about things that I hope are going on Starting off on the noble Baroness’s comments about the G20, this was the first G20 which committed to setting out long-term strategies to achieve net zero by or around the mid-century, and all leaders expressed support for keeping 1.5 degrees within reach, including accelerating action in the 2020s. However, I think the Prime Minister has been quite clear that we would have liked to have gone further, and, as the noble Baroness recognised was said in the Statement, there is work to be done over the next 10 days to try to keep the momentum going forward and make sure that we can get further with what we want to do. However, as the Statement said, as recently as 2019, only one member of the G20 other than the UK had made specific commitments to achieve net zero; today, 18 countries in the G20 have, so we are making progress. I will write to the noble Baroness on the climate diplomacy fund as I do not have those figures to hand On where we have got to, our leadership of COP has seen 90% of the global economy now covered by net-zero commitments, up from just 30% when we assumed the presidency, and if we take into account the significant new commitments, we are closer to 2 degrees rather than over 3 degrees, as we were when we took over the COP leadership. However, I stress again that this is not enough; we need to keep 1.5 degrees in reach, which is why the Prime Minister has called on all countries to commit to further action and why over the next few days we will be looking to negotiators to deliver on leaders’ calls to ensure that COP 26 accelerates this further action. As I said, we accept that there is a way to go, but progress has been made over the last couple of days and we are looking to ensure that momentum continues into this week The noble Lord asked about China. We welcome China’s commitment to net zero before 2060, and it signed the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use. It has committed to reach a peak in its emissions before 2030 and will then cut them to net zero by 2060, and of course it also pledged as part of the G20 commitment to stop funding coal projects overseas. Of course we will continue to engage with it and will continue to put pressure on it to move further and faster. I can assure the noble Lord that the Prime Minister spoke to President Xi before the summit and we will continue to work with international partners to move China in the direction that we would like to see it go On the noble Baroness’s comments about international development, as I said before and as she will know, we remain a world leader in international development. This year we provided over £10 billion towards poverty reduction, climate change and global security—a greater proportion of our national income than the majority of the G7. We are expected to be the third largest ODA donor in the G7 as a percentage of GNI this year and the third-highest bilateral humanitarian donor country The noble Baroness and the noble Lord asked about some of the various tax initiatives in both the G20 and COP 26 so far. We were pleased that the final political agreement has now been reached on the framework for the two-pillar solution on global taxation, as that was one of our priorities for the G7 presidency. The plan should be implemented to the 2023 timeline and we will continue to work with global partners now that we have reached this milestone to ensure that it is delivered On the IMF special drawing rights, the historic $650 billion SDR allocation has provided much-needed resources for vulnerable countries to pay for vaccine and food imports as well as increasing fiscal space for countries to pursue development priorities, including on climate and the environment. We have also been a leading voice on advocating for a new IMF resilience and sustainability trust, which will provide low-interest funding to vulnerable countries to address long-term structural challenges, and we are considering a sizeable contribution to that once it is established I hope the noble Lord will be pleased to know that progress so far has meant that $130 trillion of financial assets, equating to 40% of global finance, will now be aligned with the climate goals of the Paris Agreement thanks to the climate commitments made from 450 financial services firms. On the announcement that the Chancellor made today, the aim of the plans is for financial services to set out clearly their overall targets for decarbonisation, how they will align with the UK’s net-zero commitment, and what concrete actions they are taking to deliver this. To ensure that this is robust and to prevent greenwashing, we will set up a transition plan task force to set the gold standard for transition planning across the economy. Firms listed on the London Stock Exchange will have regulatory expectations that they set out transparently to consumers, investors and the public on what steps they are taking to align their business with net zero. Obviously it will then be for the market to determine whether those plans are credible. However, next year we will publish a net-zero transition pathway for this sector setting out how the financial sector will evolve out to 2050 The noble Lord and noble Baroness rightly asked about Covid and highlighted the fact that the G20 leaders have indeed adopted a target of vaccinating 70% of the world’s population against Covid by the middle of the year. They also agreed to establish a G20 joint finance health task force to enhance dialogue and global co-operation on issues related to pandemic prevention and preparedness responses. We are being ambitious in what we are doing. We are donating at least 100 million Covid vaccines within the next year, 30 million of which we aim to deliver by the end of this year. That is in addition to the £548 million we have committed to COVAX to provide vaccines to help deliver more than 1 billion vaccines to up to 92 lower-income countries. As I said, before the end of the year we will have donated 30 million of the Oxford vaccines but next year we will donate at least 20 million more as well as all the 20 million Janssen doses we have ordered to COVAX. I can assure the noble Lord that that puts us well on track to meet our commitment of 100 million doses by mid-2022 The noble Lord asked about supply chains. G20 leaders focused on the need for ongoing global co-ordination and action to address the huge price volatilities we have been seeing and they agreed to work together to better monitor and address supply chain vulnerabilities as economies recover and to support the sustainability of the global economy. In fact, the noble Lord will no doubt be interested to know that there was a dedicated session for like-minded partners that focused on how international co-operation to strengthen and diversify the supply chain ecosystem could happen, so a lot of work and discussion took place in that area. On HGVs, we are increasing apprenticeship training funding by £7,000, investing £70 million in HGV skills bootcamps and we are increasing testing availability by 50,000 a year so that we can address this issue.