Britain: a leader in tackling climate change? Far from it, says new report

Britain's true contribution to global warming is much higher than official figures show, ministers admit. And it has been rising rapidly at the very time that they have been boasting that it has been falling. The admission undermines the Government's claim to be in the vanguard of cutting the pollution that causes climate change – on the eve of negotiations among the world's most powerful leaders this week.

Global warming will be high on the agenda of the G8 summit that opens in Toyako, Japan, tomorrow – along with the rise in oil and food prices, Third World development and Zimbabwe. It will also be the focus of simultaneous talks with the leaders of China, India, Brazil and other large developing countries.

Ministers have long presented Britain as a leader in tackling climate change, and last week a report published by WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) and Allianz, the insurance company, concluded that it was performing better than any other G8 country.

But figures revealed last week in an obscure government report – snappily entitled Development of an Embedded Carbon Emissions Indicator – tell a much more sobering story. Produced by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Sydney University for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), it concludes that Britain is responsible for 200 million more tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year than official figures admit, an increase of 37 per cent.

And whereas Britain has been officially reporting that its emissions have declined by 5 per cent since 1992, the report says that the true picture reveals that instead they rose by 18 per cent.

The difference is in fuller accounting. The official figures are confined to totting up only the amount of pollution emitted from within a country's borders, and excludes what is produced from international aviation and shipping. The report includes such transport emissions and those produced in other countries in making goods for export to Britain, mainly in the Third World.

The Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn, said last week: "These findings reinforce the need for a global approach to tackling climate change. We must help businesses and individuals to understand and reduce the environmental impacts of the products and services they produce, sell or consume, wherever in the world they are made."

The Trade and Development minister Gareth Thomas yesterday visited South Africa to help its wine industry assess the "carbon cost" of its exports.

The report is particularly important because it casts new light on emissions from China and India and other big developing countries just as they are becoming a focus of international negotiation. The US, in particular, insists that these nations must take action to curb the pollution before it is prepared to take strong measures itself.

But the findings show that large amounts of their emissions are produced in making goods for rich countries, whose polluting industries migrated there in the 1990s. Studies by the prestigious Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and the New Economics Foundation have concluded that up to a quarter of China's emissions came from exports to the US and Europe.

In Japan, top diplomats from the G8 countries are struggling over the weekend to try to ensure that the summit makes progress on addressing global warming – or, at least, does not slip backwards.

Last year – after intense pressure from Tony Blair and the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel – the summit agreed to "seriously consider" reducing worldwide emissions by at least 50 per cent by 2050, after an isolated President George Bush held out against agreeing to the target.

Toyako was supposed to be the summit when – after time for such consideration – a firm commitment was made. But until late last week the target was not even mentioned in the draft communiqué, prompting fears that the leaders would take a sharp step backwards. Now, after pressure from Britain and other countries, it has been included, but it is still far from clear that the US will accept it.

But Gordon Brown's main focus will be on securing backing for plans he has been quietly pushing forward for the past three years for a major fund to help developing countries evolve clean sources of energy. The Prime Minister has personally persuaded the World Bank and other development banks to devote billions of dollars to the fund, if national governments agree to set the money aside.

He also wants to reinvigorate a faltering drive to tackle Third World poverty that was launched with great fanfare at the G8 summit in Gleneagles three years ago. Then the leaders pledged to increase aid by $50bn a year by 2010, but they are now set to fulfil less than half this target.

Oxfam, the development charity, estimates that making up the shortfall could save five million lives and points out that, in the meantime, rising food prices are greatly worsening the plight of the poor. It says that they have already driven another 100 million people into dire poverty; other estimates suggest they could double the number of the hungry to a staggering 1.7 billion.

Britain will also press for an initiative to increase the number of midwives and health workers in developing countries – at present more than half a million women a year in the Third World die in pregnancy or childbirth – and to revive world trade negotiations.

(By Geoffrey Lean, The Independent, 06/07/2008)