Liam Byrne (Labour)

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the Secretary of State to publish proposals for increasing the on-lending of UK Special Drawing Rights via the IMF, for transferring the capital returned to the UK by the European Investment Bank to the World Bank, and for increasing the UK’s support for the African Development Bank, for the purpose of reducing debt burdens and the cost of capital and contributing to the implementation of the Paris Agreement on climate change.

If anything, this Bill is overdue. Eight years ago, the world came together to agree an ambitious plan to spread freedom, security and justice to every corner of the planet. The sustainable development goals agreed in New York in September 2015 offered hope, progress and a better life to billions of people. Months later, we came together again, not in New York but in Paris, to agree the climate change agreement that would help us guarantee that there would be a planet left on which to make those goals a reality.

However, the truth is that such ambitions are in deep trouble. There are just 10,000 days to go before the Paris climate agreement deadline. A perfect storm is now threatening the world’s potential to deliver on the goals that we agreed just eight years ago. In fact, seven giants now stand in the way of progress: want, hunger, disease, lost learning, conflict, debt and climate change. They are a cascading, connected set of challenges with lethal force.

Looming deadly over all of that are the changes in our climate and the chaos of extreme weather. Across half the world and most of Africa, the seasons are simply no longer predictable. The sun which once brought life now brings death because it burns so ferociously. The rains, when they fall, fall with such force that life-giving water floods and destroys the land it once nourished. Against that murderous maelstrom, low and middle-income countries need to mobilise some $6 trillion between now and 2030 to hit their Paris climate targets.

Poor countries did not cause climate change, but the world’s poorest are somehow expected to pick up the pieces. We cannot go on like this and, as President Macron said in Paris last week, we must not go on like this. If the world fails to act—if we fail to act—all of us may fall prey to those who preach that the rules-based order is not fit for purpose. New institutions outside the World Bank, the IMF, and perhaps even the United Nations, will come forward beyond our influence, so we must change.

[Source]