Towards a morally sustainable future

In this edited extract from a speech given in Rome this week at a seminar on climate change organised by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Britain's Environment Secretary argues that there is an ethical and moral dimension to combating the effects of global warming

Climate change is not just an environmental or economic issue, it is a moral and ethical one. It is not just an issue for politicians or businesses, it is also an issue for the world's faith communities. The common thread that underpins my speech today is a belief that it is our moral duty to protect future generations, particularly those in the poorest countries who will experience the most acute suffering, from the effects of environmental degradation.

Across the world, we are now beginning to see a shift in attitudes to climate change. But well before climate change gained the profile it currently holds, the Catholic Church was warning of its consequences. In 1990, Pope John Paul II in his address to celebrate the World Day of Peace warned us of the dangers of irreversible damage caused by the greenhouse effect.

"In our day, there is a growing awareness that world peace is threatened not only by the arms race, regional conflicts and continued injustices among peoples and nations, but also by a lack of due respect for nature, by the plundering of natural resources ... Today the ecological crisis has assumed such proportions as to be the responsibility of everyone ... its various aspects demonstrate the need for concerted efforts aimed at establishing the duties and obligations that belong to individuals, states and the international community."

Seventeen years on, the warnings are reaching a crescendo. A chorus of scientists and economists, entrepreneurs and politicians are voicing their concerns. Our challenge now is to translate the growing awareness of global warming into a sustained movement that changes the way we live, work and travel.

We need to mobilise governments, businesses and citizens across the world to act - what Pope John Paul II described as an "ecological conversion". Our call to action can be guided in part by scientific evidence, by economic analysis, by illustrating that it is in our self-interest to act. But the foundations of

a new climate change coalition must be deeper. They must be grounded in morality and ethics, in a sense of solidarity with the developing world and future generations, in a belief that humankind has a duty of stewardship towards nature, and, perhaps most critical of all, in the securing of a socially just balance of responsibility between rich and poor. The Catholic Church and the world's faith communities have an opportunity to help nurture these shared values.

While we have underestimated the scale, urgency and impact of climate change, so too have we underestimated our capacity to address it. The technologies, policies and institutions exist or are emerging. The public support to sustain political change is also rising. Global warming can be addressed.

We must ensure that global emissions peak and then decline within the next 10 to 15 years, if we are to avoid warming of above 2 degrees centigrade. Above this threshold, the impact on people and nature is dangerous. Rising temperatures will see entire regions experience major declines in crop yields, up to one third in Africa, with rising numbers of people at risk from hunger. Rising temperatures will mean significant changes in water availability, with some areas seeing major water shortages, and sea-level rises threatening major world cities. Whole eco-systems from coral reefs to the rainforests face collapse and many species will face extinction. Storms, droughts, forest fires and flooding will have a major impact on human life. The poorest countries will suffer the most from the effects of climate change. The costs will fall on the countries who have done least to cause climate change, and are least able to adapt to its effects.

The wealth of evidence on the scale and impact of climate change has produced a major shift over the last 12 months. Paradoxically, the most urgent environmental challenge facing the planet has stopped being primarily an environmental issue. Climate change is not just, as Al Gore puts it, "a planetary emergency" but a humanitarian one. Climate change has also become an economic issue, a national security and foreign policy issue (triggering the possibility of unprecedented migration), and an international development issue.

But we must also recognise that climate change is an issue that raises profound moral and ethical questions. Economic or scientific analysis cannot tell us what value to place on the lives of future generations, or how far the developing world should help the poorest nations to adapt to the effects of climate change, and develop low-carbon energy. These are questions that must be guided by values, or principles, as well as facts.

The first principle is sustainability. As the Bruntland Report, Our Common Future, set out two decades ago, our goal must be "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs".

The second principle is social justice. As the Kyoto Protocol recognises, we need "common but differentiated" responsibilities - common because we are all affected by climate change and all bear a responsibility, but differentiated because richer nations who have contributed the most greenhouse gas emissions have a duty to help poorer nations through the transition to a low-carbon economy and to adapt to the effects of climate change.

The third principle is stewardship. My concern is born primarily out of a concern to avoid human suffering but we must recognise that we have a duty to protect our common resources - to act as stewards of the natural environment.

This must be the year when the international community injects new momentum into the development of an international framework that can follow the end of the first Kyoto commitment period in 2012. The truth is that without global confidence in the commitment of governments to put a price on carbon, to agree a set of long-term commitments for long-term emissions reduction, and to live up to the commitments in the 1992 Rio Convention to prevent dangerous climate change, initiatives by individual governments, businesses or citizens will not have the drive and the critical mass to arrest the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

That framework must promote sustainable economic development, develop the technologies of the future, and help countries cope with climate change that is here today. Such a framework must be based on five key elements - reduction of greenhouse gases, setting up of carbon markets, technology investment and transfer, arresting deforestation, and help for the most vulnerable countries. We will not conclude an agreement in these five areas this year. But we must develop the international political consensus that can form the basis of a new set of commitments for the post 2012 period.

Alongside work to forge an international framework, every country needs domestic action. The UK has successfully broken the link between economic growth and pollution growth. Our economy as a whole has grown by over 25 per cent since 1997, but our greenhouse gas emissions have been cut by 8 per cent. We are introducing a Climate Change Bill to ensure that the UK becomes the first country in the world with a legislative framework designed to manage the transition to a low-carbon economy - it will put into law our commitment to reduce CO2 emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, and by 26 to 32 per cent by 2020.

Our aim is to demonstrate to other countries, particularly the developing world, that we, as the world's first industrial nation, are prepared to make our contribution to reducing global emissions. The bill also aims to minimise the costs of moving to a low-carbon economy through early, but gradual, action with long-term clarity for business, rather than later, more abrupt changes. The majority of greenhouse gases produced in the UK come from three main sources: electricity, heat and transport. In each area, it is possible to see how light, warmth and mobility can be provided in a low-carbon way. In each we are adopting policies that will drive the transition.

Governments and business must show leadership. But ultimately, the world's fate will rest on the actions of citizens around the world - whether they are prepared to buy products from companies with high environmental standards, reduce the amount of energy they waste, and support governments that are prepared to put a price on pollution.

The task ahead is to forge what one could call an "environmental contract" - a shared understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizens and business in relation to the natural environment. In the same way that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was argued for a need to forge a social contract that limited some of our freedoms in return for social order, so too in the twenty-first century we need to forge an environmental contract to safeguard the environmental order. None of us has a right to pollute and compromise the welfare of future generations, particularly those in the poorest countries.

The world's political leaders have a unique responsibility in helping to forge an environmental contract. But leadership must come from all parts of society. Civil society and especially faith communities have a huge opportunity and responsibility, particularly in addressing the moral and ethical questions posed by climate change. You have a global reach and influence that governments do not. And far from being an add-on to the values and work you do, climate change is integral, particularly to the work you do on development.

In his message for World Day of Peace from 1 January 2007, the Pope said: "Humanity, if it truly desires peace, must be increasingly conscious of the links between natural ecology, and human ecology. Experience shows that disregard for the environment always harms human co-existence, and vice versa ... if development were limited to the technical-economic aspect, obscuring the moral-religious dimension, it would not be an integral human development, but a one-sided distortion which would end up by unleashing man's destructive capacities."

Let me finish with an observation by the [environmental pressure group] WWF. It has calculated that if everyone in the world were to consume natural resources and generate carbon dioxide at the rate we do in the UK, we would need three planets to support us. We are depleting our natural resources at a far faster rate than we are replenishing them. The challenge is to move towards a one-planet economy and one-planet living - where there is a balance between what we give and what we take. I am optimistic that we can meet that challenge, but we can do so only by appealing to a combination of moral duty and self-interest, by engaging a coalition of the world's faith communities, by developing an ethic of environmental stewardship. It is an endeavour around which I hope the world can unite, an endeavour that I believe we must work on together.