16:30 Luke Hall (Thornbury and Yate) (Con)

As my hon. Friend knows, I am a fellow member of the Petitions Committee and welcome the opportunity to debate this subject. We spend an awful lot of time discussing as an international community how we can deal with the challenge of climate change, which seems somewhat intractable. Does he agree that this is a much simpler problem, and that we could get on and save great species such as the elephant and the tiger?

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18:28 Patrick Grady (Glasgow North) (SNP)

I want to pick up on one thing first. The hon. Member for Hertsmere (Oliver Dowden), who is no longer in his place, made a rather obtuse intervention about climate change. I am not entirely sure what he was getting at. To try to pretend that these issues are not interrelated is to misunderstand the situation. Climate change was described by Lord Stern as the “biggest market failure” of modern history, and it affects elephant populations just as much as human populations—in fact, perhaps doubly so, because people may well be driven to poach elephants if they cannot find sustainable livelihoods for themselves. If, because of climate change, people are displaced from their land or cannot grow crops to feed themselves and their families, they will look for other means of generating an income. To pretend that the debate about tackling climate change and the debate about protecting biodiversity and elephant populations are mutually exclusive is to misunderstand the nature of the debate as a whole.

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