Clark outlines benchmarks for success at Copenhagen

Greg Clark, the Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change has commented on the upcoming conference at Copenhagen.

Speaking in the House of Commons, Clark said that with 31 days to go, "it is vital that a clear message goes out from the UK that there is complete unity of purpose between the British Government and the Conservative Party in securing a deal that is fair, ambitious and binding”.

He said we should be under "no illusion" as to the significance of the conference: "It is as pivotal as Bretton Woods was in the last century. The Copenhagen agreement must be no less ambitious in its scope, no less influential to our future, if we are to see the global shift to a low carbon economy that is required over the next forty years”.

Clark also outlined three key tests that any agreement would have to pass if it was to be considered "fair, ambitious and binding":

1. It must be sufficiently rigorous to bind the world in a common commitment to keep the rise in global temperatures to below two degrees centigrade.
2. The deal must establish a new international mechanism that provides our brothers and sisters in the world’s poorest countries with the means to protect themselves against future floods, famine and drought using funds that are additional to, not instead of, the resources currently deployed to fight poverty.
3. With 15 million hectares of tropical forest lost every year to deforestation – an area greater than the size of England – we must secure an agreement at Copenhagen for the protection of our global rainforests, without which it will be impossible to keep warming under a dangerous threshold.