UK set to drop $14.76 bln climate pledge - The Guardian - Reuters.com
UK set to drop $14.76 bln climate pledge - The Guardian | Reuters
UK set to drop $14.76 bln climate pledge - The Guardian
July 4 (Reuters) - The British government is planning to drop its flagship 11.6 billion pound ($14.76 billion) climate funding pledge, the Guardian reported on Tuesday.
A document given to the British Foreign Office, which was seen by the Guardian, said "Our commitment to double our international climate finance to 11.6 billion pounds was made in 2019, when we were still at 0.7 [% of GDP spent on international aid] and pre-COVID."
The British Foreign Ministry and the Britain government did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
Government officials calculated it would have to spend 83% of the total aid budget on the international climate fund to meet the 11.6 billion pound target by 2026. Civil servants wrote that this would "squeeze out room for other commitments such as humanitarian and women and girls," the Guardian report added.
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's climate policies have come under critique after British international environment minister Zac Goldsmith resigned last week, saying that Sunak was "uninterested" in environmental issues.
Goldsmith said Britain had "visibly stepped off the world stage and withdrawn our leadership on climate and nature."
Britain's climate advisers on the Climate Change Committee(CCC) also said last week that the nation has lost its position as a global leader on climate action and was not doing enough to meet its mid-century net zero target.
The CCC found that Britain had fallen behind in areas including improving energy efficiency in buildings, rolling out heat pumps, curbing emissions from industry and increasing the rate of tree planting, which must double by 2025.
Britain's Met Office, its national weather service, said yesterday that last month was the hottest June on record in the country, warning that human-induced climate change was making such temperature records increasingly likely.
($1 = 0.7862 pounds)
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Related Knowledge Center: Climate economics
Climate change is now a driver of the world’s economy. The impact is profound:
- Catastrophic weather events — hurricanes, floods, droughts, high temperatures — are more frequent and more extreme. The cost can be measured in both the initial damage caused and the longer-term impact on the economy.
- Vulnerable communities are increasing climate-related investments, hardening infrastructure and taking other protective measures.
- Investment in carbon capture and storage technologies is increasingly rapidly.
- Governments are making investments and crafting regulations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
On top of all of this is the cost of uncertainty. As the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released in 2018 by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, says, “The assumption that current and future climate conditions will resemble the recent past is no longer valid.”