Thank you very much for this invitation.
I think I can be briefer than Matthias, because he has set out the European Union's position, which is the United Kingdom's position because we are a member of the European Union, and this is a joint position of the whole of Europe. But what I thought might be helpful for the committee is if I just tried to give you a sense of what the context is in Britain for this whole debate.
Until perhaps four or five years ago, the issue of climate change was seen as an environmental one and a soft issue, almost an esthetic issue. In the last few years we now see it as a hard international security issue, and I have circulated a paper to the committee that explains that climate change is now at the centre of our national security strategy. The national security strategy indeed says that, and I quote: “Climate change is potentially the greatest challenge to global stability and security, and therefore to national security.”
So this is an issue that's at the centre of our national policy and at the centre of foreign policy, so that I, for example, at the British High Commission in Ottawa have three members of staff working almost full time on the issue of climate change, and I have one in Vancouver, and that was a decision made by my foreign secretary, that he would reduce my resources in some areas but insisted that because this was the top priority for the foreign office, I should have the resources to be able to conduct effective policy in this country on that subject.
Because of this reframing of the issue as a national security issue, we have now created a department of government for energy and climate change to try to integrate policies that were previously conducted separately—and often there were conflicts between policies being driven on the environmental side and on the energy side, for example. So we have tried to integrate that, and the effort has been very much driven first by Tony Blair and more recently by my Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, who see this as a central issue for national policy.
So it's at the top of the agenda of the foreign service. It's at the top of the agenda of the Treasury, because of the financing implications and the economic implications. It's at the top of the agenda of the Ministry of Defence because of the security implications. It's at the top of the agenda of the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Health—really, across government, and as I say, we now have a department of government dealing with it.
The other piece of context I wanted to explain to the committee is that this is an issue that has cross-party support in Britain, so that the Conservative Party is very strongly in favour of this agenda and is driving it in Britain as hard as the government is. Indeed, when we had a climate change act, which again is set out briefly in the paper that I've circulated to you, but which was a very ambitious piece of legislation with huge economic implications, you might have expected a bill of that ambition to be very highly contested in Parliament, but that actually passed in Parliament almost without opposition. So there's a very wide political consensus.
And that consensus is also shared by our business community. This is, I think, something of interest because in the early 1990s there was a famous headline in The Economist that said “Bye bye greens — See you in the next boom”, the assumption being that—in those days it wasn't so much climate change as the issue of the ozone layer and so on and the beginnings of the discussion of sustainable development—all of that would collapse with the economic recession because it was a sort of luxury. It was something for the good times that we could afford to put aside.
This time, despite what have been very difficult economic circumstances in Britain as a result of the market crash, the consensus has remained extremely strong, including in the business community, that this is not an agenda they can afford to abandon. Indeed, they see huge economic opportunity in trying to be ahead of the curve and trying to drive the agenda rather than be pulled along by it.
So we've had the Confederation of British Industry, which is our main business lobbying group, if anything, urging the government to be more ambitious. And the business community is very strongly behind the transition that we believe needs to be made in our economy to convert to a low-carbon economy.
I know you only want me to speak for six minutes, so I will stop there.
All I want to say for Copenhagen is that we share entirely the positions that have just been set out by Matthias Brinkmann, but I would list them under three headings.
We want an outcome that is ambitious, which means not only that the world signs up to the two degree Celsius goal but has the ambition to drive short- to medium-term targets that will actually get us there. That means peaking our greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 through a combination of developed and developing country action. It will mean including aviation and shipping and deforestation within the agreement, so it has to be ambitious.
It has to be effective. If it's to be effective, then it must be universal. We would like to have a single legally binding agreement, which I realize won't be negotiated at Copenhagen, but that we hope can follow political undertakings made at Copenhagen. It must have adequate monitoring, reporting, and verification so the undertakings people make can be properly tabulated. And I think we need to develop a global carbon market if we're to have an effective agreement.
So it must be ambitious, it must be effective, and finally it must be fair. If it's to be fair, that means we have to take on common but differentiated responsibilities. My Prime Minister has set out a view that we need annual financing flows of about $100 billion by 2020. We've subsequently agreed in the European context that should be €100 billion. That would include a contribution from developing countries, because we think all but the very poorest should also be contributing to the financing flows that are needed. To be fair, we have to take account of the capacity of different countries to pay and to contribute, and the net flows will naturally be toward developing countries, which will need help in managing the transition.
Thank you very much.