14:30 Mark Lazarowicz (Edinburgh North and Leith) (Lab/Co-op)

However, I do want to suggest some main themes on which a new list or programme—whatever form the new international development agenda takes—can be based, and the reasons why. My first theme is responding to climate change and environmental sustainability. There are two reasons for that. The first is that the existing millennium development goal on environmental sustainability is arguably one where, in some areas, some of the least progress has been made overall. The second is that the extent and urgency of the threat from climate change is much clearer now than it was in 2000.

It is frequently the poor in the poorest countries who are the biggest losers from the potential effects of climate change. I do not have time to go into the detail today, but issues such as flooding and desertification come to mind. Access to sustainable and affordable energy is a big issue. There is still a big question mark about how climate mitigation and adaptation is to be financed; it is still far from settled following negotiations in Copenhagen and Cancun.

To emphasise the importance of climate change and flooding, I should say that I was in the Philippines earlier this year. Floods occurred in an area that had not been flooded for 50 or 60 years. The total number of deaths was between 25,000 and 30,000, among the poorest people of that area. That demonstrates the importance of doing something about climate change.

Absolutely. We are seeing that kind of example in many other countries in the world. While we must always be careful of trying to ascribe every natural disaster to climate change, the evidence is building about the effect on countries such as the one referred to by my hon. Friend.

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14:44 Martin Horwood (Cheltenham) (LD)

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right to say that it is worth while having such high-level objectives. Certainly, the objectives that we have set ourselves as a country on climate change have helped to trigger domestic action, and with this Government, we have the acceptance of the targets in the Climate Change Act 2008 and the carbon budgets recommended by the Energy and Climate Change Committee, which have helped to incentivise the Government to deliver on energy reform, the green deal, the green investment bank, smart meter roll-out and emissions performance standards for power generating stations. They have also encouraged us to look at other issues that have been addressed in the sustainable development debate, such as the valuing of natural capital, which the Deputy Prime Minister, when he reported back from the Rio+20 summit, emphasised alongside the sustainable development goals. He said that in valuing natural capital, we were setting an important goal for ourselves as a developed economy in our use of resources and our approach to waste and growth and so on, which is important.

The Deputy Prime Minister suggested in reporting back from Rio that there should be three important focuses for the sustainable development goals—food, energy and water—and the hon. Gentleman has referred to some of them. Many people also suggest other things that the goals should focus on. Climate change has rightly been referred to. It is crucial; the environment in which we all live and exist as a planet is the one that determines whether development is really possible. Other people have mentioned, for example, disability. Sightsavers has made the specific point to me that disability and poverty are interrelated, both in this country and in developing countries, so disability needs to be considered.

Many NGOs have made the point that human rights and social justice need to be reflected in the successors to the millennium development goals, because it is the poor who are not only most vulnerable to climate change and problems such as rising food prices and the lack of availability of food but who are most vulnerable to economic exploitation, injustice and oppression.

The idea of planetary boundaries is that in looking at development—this relates to economic growth as well—we have to be aware that not only with climate change but with, for example, biodiversity, water resource and other material and mineral resources, we have to work within the planet’s available resources and that, as we start to move over certain thresholds in all these areas, we enter, as she called them, “zones of stress” in which it is possible to advance development but it becomes more stressful and more difficult, and there is more tension and more conflict.

That idea of working within the planet’s resources—of observing planetary boundaries—is a very important concept for what could be an overarching sustainable development goal. However, it is very important that underneath that overarching goal we do not lose the detail and fail to address some of the issues that I have mentioned, such as food, energy, water, climate change, disability, human rights and so on.

Secondly, the goals should be steering the world to look at development within “planetary boundaries”—we might use that term. How can I put this idea in terms that might appeal to my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Conservative side of the coalition? If we look at it as a business, we are talking about operating the world as a business within a safe operating environment that does not take us into high-risk areas. So this is about observing the limits of climate change, biodiversity and resource use.

Fourthly, the goals could follow a formula that has been used in the climate change process of the United Nations framework convention on climate change: the idea of common but differentiated responsibilities, whereby because countries will respond in wildly different ways to the challenge of new development goals, different goals may apply with different degrees of rigour to different countries. For instance, for a country such as the UK, the goals may not be so much about involving women in education or achieving greater access for disabled people, because we would fancy that we would meet such goals already, but they might be about addressing waste, consumption, having too great a focus on relentless economic growth, inefficiency in using our resources and in overstepping planetary boundaries in the way that we handle our economy.

In that respect, I commend to Ministers a policy that unfortunately did not make it into the coalition agreement but that the Liberal Democrats adopted in opposition. Alongside a climate change Act, we wanted to have a waste and resource efficiency Act that took the same kind of target-setting and framework approach to the use of natural resources and natural capital. That would fit very neatly with the framework set out by the White Paper on the natural environment in 2011, and I still commend the policy to Ministers. I think we are talking about “coalition 2.0” or something, so perhaps it is a policy that we could still adopt in the remaining years of the coalition Government before the next election.

The final point I will make about the future sustainable development goals is that sustainability must be mainstreamed within them. One of the failings of the original millennium development goals, which I think the hon. Member for Edinburgh North and Leith referred to, is that environmental issues were slightly pocketed in the last of the development goals and the inter-relationship between environmental sustainability, poverty, justice and development was not really fully developed in the millennium development goals. We need to see that corrected. That was the message not only of the Rio+20 summit but of the original earth summit in Rio 20 years ago. As I say, it is very important that sustainability is mainstreamed within the agenda that we are discussing.

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14:59 Rushanara Ali (Labour)

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) for securing this important debate and commend his work in the previous Government as special envoy to the Prime Minister on climate change issues. Both he and the hon. Member for Cheltenham (Martin Horwood) have stated that, as we speak about the millennium development goals and what comes next, climate change issues should feature significantly.

I could not agree more, and I hope that the Minister takes the opportunity, as the last man standing in his Department, to answer that question. The hon. Member for Cheltenham, who highlighted his interest in and commitment to tackling climate change, will also want to hear the Minister’s answer.

I certainly did not intend to do so. I did mention middle-income countries, and I will come on to our own work and what we should be doing. As the hon. Gentleman pointed out, the Climate Change Act 2008, which Labour introduced, is a key part of the argument that we have a responsibility on those issues, as much as on what happens in developing countries, so I completely agree with his points.

My final point concerns climate change. The Government and the Prime Minister have said that they want to be the greenest Government ever. We need action, not just rhetoric. I hope that the Minister can shed more light on what will be done, both domestically — [ Interruption. ] If he will stop heckling, I hope he can shed more light on what will be done both domestically and internationally on the issue.

We introduced the 2008 Act. We hope that the Minister will work with his coalition partners to step up the effort on climate change. If we do not do more to support developing countries in the face of what is likely to be catastrophic for many sections of the population in some of the poorest countries, our efforts in development will be undermined. I hope that he can take this issue seriously and answer the questions seriously.

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15:25 The Minister of State, Department for International Development (Mr Alan Duncan)

Agreeing a development framework to replace the MDGs will be challenging. There are a number of intellectual challenges and debates around them that are both technically and politically complex. First, there are clear questions around what should be included in a post-2015 framework for development and how each issue should be measured. Given that some of the MDGs under the current framework are unlikely to be reached by 2015, some argue that the goals should simply be rolled forward post-2015. However, that would collide with the fact that a number of important issues such as conflict, corruption, poor governance and climate change were not included in the MDGs in the first place. Simply rolling forward the current goals would ignore the importance of quality as well as quantity in the development process.

Alongside the panel’s London meeting next week will be a series of discussions with civil society, business and young people. It is a critical part of the panel’s work and is vital if its conclusions are to be taken seriously by the international community when the panel reports at the end of May next year. I reassure the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Mr Harris) that the process to support the Prime Minister in Whitehall involves a cross-ministerial team, with DFID, the Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs all working together to enable coherence with the Rio+20 follow-up and the climate change agenda.

To reply to some of the comments made earlier, the hon. Members for Edinburgh North and Leith and for Workington (Sir Tony Cunningham) both mentioned climate change. The Rio+20 meetings have established an open working group specifically to propose sustainable development goals, as that is another strand of the activity in play at the moment. On inequality, we must focus on the poorest and not just measure average success, which can disguise a lot of facts beneath a simple headline figure.

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