The 11th Petersberg Climate Dialogue took place between April 27-28 and on behalf of 10 Downing Street, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab spoke re-iterating the government’s commitment to tackling climate change:

"While the world is rightly focussed on tackling the immediate threat of Coronavirus, other great global challenges like climate change and biodiversity have not gone away. Extreme weather events are not taking a break while we deal with other priorities and some of the world’s most vulnerable people continue to suffer as a result… The time will come when the threat of Coronavirus begins to recede. Nations will begin to emerge from lockdown and fire up their economies again, and when that happens, it will be the duty of every responsible government to see that our economies are rebuilt in a way that will stand the test of time. That means investing in industries and infrastructure that can turn the tide on climate change, and it means doing all we can to boost resilience by shaping economies that can withstand everything that nature throws at us….

This dialogue is not some distraction from the immense challenges that the pandemic presents, but an essential element to our strategy to rebound from it…. Together we must take the next great step in the fight against climate change."

Shared Earth has long been an advocate of sustainability, recycling and other ways of reducing carbon emissions. We welcome the government’s commitment to the fight against climate change, and we hope that as we return to a more ‘normal’ economy, this will not involve for instance large bailouts to the airline and auto industries, without examining travel and transportation as a whole and the UK’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050. Investing in the future means investing in creating green jobs and sustainable growth, not in outdated, polluting and carbon-intensive industries.

The UK cannot stop global warming on our own. We and other developed nations, with our high standards of living, also need to subsidise sustainable industries and initiatives in developing nations; they have a right to grow their economies, but we need to encourage them to do so in a way which contributes to the fight against global warming. We need to give UK businesses financial incentives for sourcing low-carbon products, and penalise, through higher customs duties for example, the import of high-carbon products. Carbon should have a price; polluters should pay for their pollution.

The Coronavirus has presented a challenge – what kind of world do we really want?