LOCATION Commonwealth Secretariat

SPEAKER Foreign Office Minister Baroness Kinnock

EVENT Young Commonwealth Climate Change Summit

DATE 28/10/2009

In the twenty first century we face two great challenges; the battle against poverty and the management of climate change and I believe that if we fail on either one of them we will fail on the other; they are so interconnected.What we know is that a four year drought has pushed as many as twenty three million people to the brink of starvation in East Africa. Close to four million of those adrift are in Kenya where one person in ten survives now on only emergency rations. 

Aid agencies are warning that when the rain does come there will be floods and we will see a huge increase in malaria, dengue fever and other effects of waterborne diseases.

That’s why we need to have a strong agreement in Copenhagen, as far as possible on two degrees centigrade.  We will need action on finance, on technology transfer, on deforestation, on adaptation and on mitigation. The realities, friends, are that the implications of inaction would be disastrous for millions and millions of people.

The gains that the world’s poorest countries have made are threatened at this time and, indeed, could be lost.  Fifty three per cent of African disasters are climate related and one third of African people now live in drought prone areas. By 2020 yields from water fed agriculture in Africa will have gone down by fifty per cent, so imagine what that effect would have on food security on that continent.

So how are you meant to adapt if you come from the developing world? How are you meant to adapt if you come from the Port-au-Prince in Haiti and you live on the side of a hill and the floods come, and you live under sheeting and your home is washed away?  How are you meant to adapt to that? How are you meant to adapt if you live on the Ganges Delta and you have flooding? How if you’re a mother in Malawi do you adapt if you find that you can’t get food, you can’t get fuel, you get can’t water because of the pressures of climate change on your environment?

Also of course as far as women are concerned it is women who depend heavily on natural resources being reliably available for their day to day activities and for feeding their children. And it’s also the case if that woman in Malawi needs water and they have to travel even further to collect the water because of drought then the ones who generally go will be the girls so what happens to the girls? They will be pulled out of school. So you have that knock on effect as well. 

There will be one hundred and fifty million environmental refugees by 2050. Archbishop Desmond Tutu famously said that what we’re talking about here is an adaptation apartheid because adaptation is virtually impossible for those who are facing such enormous pressures. 

Every year the effects of climate change are killing three hundred thousand people and that three hundred thousand people is a huge number of people, equivalent to many tsunamis and many other disasters. Ninety per cent of those dying are in the world’s poorest countries and that is, of course, in spite of the fact that they are responsible for only eight per cent of the global economy. So the poor walk on the earth and they leave the lightest carbon footprints. One country’s emissions are quite simply another country’s climate change problem.

So now let’s adopt an ambitious set of targets at EU level. I know you’ve been discussing that this morning. If you think back to the Millennium Development Goals and the achievements we made there, the chain of events was that we had an EU decision taken on MDGs and putting in timescale predictable funding for developing countries then subsequently we had the Gleneagles G8.

So what we need before Copenhagen is the European Union, twenty seven member states, to agree a clear ambitious set of targets. Europe must look and sound united. If we don’t do it in Europe the foot draggers will not put in place the finance and the mitigation that we need to see. Therefore finding ways to make low carbon growth possible in the poorest countries is what we have to do too. The challenges are enormous. We’re talking of a view of growth, a completely new view of the kind of growth we want to see and a substantive new scale of change that has to happen.

We have to get onboard the Brazils and the Indias the other big emerging economies who will need to have financial support if they are to put in place the kind of green technology that they will need if they’re going to meet the target that we need to see them achieving.

So what we’re talking about is that nine billion people living on the planet in 2050 will have to generate no more than about two tons of greenhouse gases per year each. Now EU countries average about ten to twelve tons per head of population while for the US it’s twenty four tons per head of population.

We should welcome the new agreements that the Japanese have made since they had the new Government there and China and Indonesia - we’ve seen some movement from some of the big players. But we do recognise that the negotiations and the process are still going at a glacial pace; we need to see them moving forward much more swiftly and effectively.

What my Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has put forward is a proposal that we should adopt a working figure of a hundred billion dollars a year by 2020. Now he’s the only one who’s put a figure on the table and I very much welcome what Gordon Brown has done on this. And I would say very firmly that the British Government has been at the vanguard of efforts to raise awareness about climate change and to actually say that we’re going to put our money where our mouth is.

And that’s certainly the case as far as financing climate change is concerned because we have said very clearly that ninety per cent of the finance that we will generate in the UK will be new money, additional money, not recycled money from overseas development assistance. You can’t take, rob Peter to pay Paul. 

It’s not possible for countries who are depending on funding for their budgetary obligations on healthcare on getting medicines, on dealing with maternal mortality, on child mortality rates, they need to have additional money put in place. And the ten per cent that will not be additional money will still, as far as the UK is concerned, have to have a strong and clear poverty focus in it.

So what we’re talking about is matching what developing countries can raise with what developing countries can do. And I’m very conscious of the fact that the rich world are the polluters and it is our responsibility and our duty to fulfil the obligations that we have otherwise your generation and future generations will face the most dismal, grim future. It’s something we can’t step back from; it’s something we have to grasp now.

And just finally to say that Ed Miliband, who’s the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate, has said there is no plan B if Copenhagen doesn’t succeed. We have to succeed. Never mind talking about it’s going to be a failure, don’t say that, don’t allow people to say it, you must believe that this can be done and you must help us to build a momentum, your voices have to be heard.

I’ll be going to CHOGM, I’ll be saying all these things as many times as I can to leaders of your Governments and to others to ensure that we do have a strong reaction from all the Commonwealth countries including your own around this table. We’ve got to act together, we have no other option. 

Thank you.

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