‘We have to move at pace but we must ensure that our systems don’t fall over, because that doesn’t benefit anybody.’
Champion of adaptation and resilience? Interview with Anne-Marie Trevelyan by Rosemary Hartill
‘I’m a great believer in the ability of human ingenuity to tackle really hard problems.’
Boris Johnson said this week that ‘Green is good; green is right; green works’. How crucial are the next ten years in ending our addiction to fossil fuels and adapting to the devastating effects of climate change?
We refer to the years through to 2030 as the decisive decade because unless we can bring down – at pace – carbon dioxide and other gases, we will find ourselves in temperature rises beyond two, three, four degrees, which will have catastrophic consequences. So the challenge we all have been set, which was set in motion and agreed to by the whole world at COP21, was to try and work out how as nations, and as a family of nations, we could find those solutions to drive down at the level of emissions.
You’re the UK champion to COP26 for ‘adaptation and resilience’. What does that role mean and what are your three top hopes for the conference?
The COP unit here in Whitehall is driving and organising the conference on behalf of the UN. Last year it became clear to the team that the whole world has been looking very much at one pillar of the Paris Agreement: the mitigation challenge. Quite rightly we have to change the way we produce our energy, and indeed reduce resources like coal which have huge greenhouse gas emissions. But that’s only one pillar of the Paris Agreement – there are three. Mitigation is one, financing is another (the raising of a $100 billion a year to be used through 2025 to help developing countries to make the changes they need to), but the third pillar, really importantly, was all about adaptation and resilience. As we took on the chair it was our view that that had been ignored for too long. So the prime minister asked that I would take on that pillar and be the advocate, raising awareness but also giving confidence and energising developing countries. They are not the ones who are putting out greenhouse gas emissions but they are under the most pressures from the impacts of these climate change issues – from fires to floods to small island states who are at risk of disappearing underwater. So I have spent the last year, with an absolute focus, talking to those developing countries, championing their needs within the UN, reminding countries with larger economies why they’ve got to change and why they’ve got to do it at pace. I hope they would say that I have been a good champion and really brought to the fore the real and urgent reasons why we’re doing this.
The UK is now one of the world leaders in offshore wind power. The new ‘net zero’ strategy promises to quadruple offshore wind energy, and I know there are plans for more solar and nuclear energy. Tell us a little bit more…
We have been leading the way in building the renewables sector. Twenty-eight per cent of all offshore wind is around UK shores – an extraordinary statistic really, considering our size. We were very early in thinking about this. Back in 2008, when the Climate Change Act was brought in, came the creation of the Climate Change Committee, who are, if you like, our independent auditors, having a look at how we’re doing as a country, pushing us along and helping us to challenge ourselves. We created something which I have discovered many other countries are very jealous of, the ‘contract for difference’, which was a way to encourage businesses to create and build renewable energy supplies by providing long-term secure financing. In doing that we have driven a huge new industry and it continues apace. So we have created a system which is really empowering and giving businesses the opportunity to change. One of the other really important parts is making sure that we have a base load which is secure. At the moment our base load is built on both nuclear and gas. Clearly we want to move away from unabated gas so one of the areas to look at as we do that is the carbon capture and storage challenge. A number of countries have tried this over the years. It’s very expensive but we’re still doing it. We have just announced two areas in the UK that are going to take that to a commercialised level, which is very exciting.
The International Energy Agency has told governments not to develop any more oil or gas reserves. So I take on board all the things you’re describing yet it took ages for the government to finally reject the deeply-contested application to open a new open-cast coal mine in Northumberland. In July 2020 the government agreed to use £900 million of taxpayers’ money for a gas pipeline in Mozambique. The government is still opening the door to new fossil fuel licences – the proposal for a new Cumbrian coal mine has still not been rejected and the government is also considering an oil field in Shetland. How is that consistent and how can it help the UK’s reputation or influence around the world?
One of the really interesting challenges – and the really difficult challenges – is that this is a marathon not a sprint, albeit that this decisive decade means we have to really drive bringing down those figures quickly. In order to do that we have to maintain security of supply. We have to move at pace but we must ensure that our systems don’t fall over, because that doesn’t benefit anybody.
So let me ask you about the Cambo oil field in Shetland. The first phase of development aims to extract oil which will produce over seventy million tons of carbon dioxide. That’s the equivalent of the annual emissions of eighteen new coal-fired power stations. Why do we need this? Doesn’t it feel a bit like the right hand not knowing what the left hand’s doing?
The point is we need security in supply. We need to be able to continue that, which is why we must work in the abatement areas like carbon capture (CC). We are on a journey and we have to make sure that we can do this in a way that doesn’t cause crippling problems for our industries – for jobs, for livelihoods. This is the challenge that governments always have to balance. So the North Sea transition deal, which I negotiated with the North Sea oil and gas industries earlier this year, is world-class. It challenges those companies to think about how they make extraction much, much cleaner, and what they need to do to mitigate. So BP for instance is part of the CC project, investing hugely, because, until we have enough clean energy solutions, no government can allow economies to crash completely.
The International Energy Agency has told governments not to develop any more oil or gas reserves and you’ve decided – as indeed China has, and other countries – not to follow that advice…
These are not new reserves.
Cambo is a new reserve, isn’t it?
Cambo is part of an existing field, and when approvals are given they factor-in Climate Change Committee analysis and the very, very challenging peaks that we’ve set ourselves. So we know that that oil and gas will still be in our system over the next ten to fifteen years. I brought in the sixth carbon budget in July of this year and we’ve upped our game to seventy-eight per cent reductions by 2035, but that is supported by the Climate Change Committee assessment of the various sorts of energy that we will still need to be using (mitigated, as I say, by things like CC).
It’s still the equivalent of numerous coal-fired power stations, however.
Around eighty-five per cent of UK homes are currently heated with natural gas. I know you’re keen on heat pumps, and you want to develop private investment to support their installation. But people might think ‘Why should I go for a heat pump, which may still cost me £5,000 even with the grant – also a lot of inconvenience?’ Gas prices have shot up but electricity is still likely to be far more expensive, partly because it’s priced so high in the UK due to environmental levies. Will you be changing that?
Yes there will be a shift in those levies but in the medium term there’s a lot of work going on within the development of hydrogen to think about how that might be used in our gas networks. I’m trying to make a net-zero home, which is quite challenging in an ancient Northumbrian house, and I’ve just installed a hydrogen-ready boiler. The village is on gas at the moment but I’m working on the basis that in due course, with hydrogen coming through, I’ll have a boiler that will adapt. One of the really important things is that we try and make our homes as fuel efficient as possible, but for the very many homes that are old we need to find a number of ways to help over the next fifteen to twenty years.
I can see in your plan that from 2025 new homes will have heat pumps as standard, and I hope you’ll be bringing in higher insulation standards. Some years ago the Committee on Climate Change advised the government to improve the building regulations but I heard its chair tell a parliamentary committee that, since then, a million new houses have been built that will have to be retrofitted because you didn’t bring in the regulations earlier. New housing estates have been built with homes that are just not low carbon, and not ready for proper insulation. Why didn’t the government tighten up building regulations years ago?
I can’t speak for previous members of government but we are seeing a huge shift in that. One of the challenges that Michael Gove has taken on as minister for housing is to push that through. Of course house builders are shifting and much more willing to do that because we as consumers are much more demanding now.
The Greenhouse Grant was a £1.5-billion scheme designed to help homeowners afford energy-efficient home improvements. It was scrapped after six months, having reached a fraction of the 600,000 homes that the chancellor promised would be improved. An influential committee of MPs said this flagship was ‘botched, disastrous in administration, devastating in some of its impacts, and stands in urgent need of rescue.’ What did you learn from that experience?
I wasn’t involved in the scheme – it wasn’t part of my portfolio. But the chancellor wanted to use it as an opportunity to stimulate this market. Part of it was, as you described, for private homes, but a very large chunk of the whole program was for local authority funding – and that is continuing. So far, £3.4 billion has been put out to support those in social housing, so councils can access this funding to improve insulation, change heating systems and support those who are most vulnerable.
The scheme has been reduced to £320 million to local authorities…
That was one way you or I could apply for funds to do a particular project, but there is separately a big local authority scheme piece which continues at pace.
Let’s move to transport, which I think is the highest sector for emissions. We need to drive or fly less, thanks to better public transport, walking and cycling infrastructure, and new incentives. You said that after 2030 we won’t be able to buy a new petrol and diesel car, and you’re now funding a further £620 million for zero-emission vehicle grants and electric charging infrastructure. What about help to people to directly afford new electric cars? In Norway battery electric vehicles are more than seventy-five per cent of new car sales; they’re about ten per cent here. We seem to be a bit behind …
We’re moving at pace and interestingly our car manufacturers have made some big decisions over the last eighteen months to really commit to shifting completely. One of the reasons for setting a twelve-year window to help drive that change is that it’s part of the purchase cycle – a lot of this is about our normal choices and what government has tried to do is to provide the right tools so that we can make those choices easily. Regulations have helped shift the dial in the way those products are made so we’re seeing some really, really big commitments not only in cars but also vans – and a big chunk of the emissions we need to reduce within transport is fleet transport, delivery systems, so as businesses change their fleets over every three or five years they also will be able to buy clean energy vehicles. So this is a continuous change and as we all make our choices in our daily lives it will be very easy for us to make the right one.
You recently struck a trade deal with New Zealand. Some people might think, given the costs of freight and the emissions involved in bringing stuff from across the world, wouldn’t it be much easier to trade with France?
Well we trade with France as well, we trade with everybody. The thing about trade is that it’s about sharing goods we produce with those who want to buy them and vice versa. In the carbon budget, all international air and shipping emissions will be included in our numbers and that is driving incredible research and development, and innovation investment, into clean energy for transportation. So it’s not that you will never be able to get on a plane and go on holiday again, you will be getting on a plane that will have clean jet fuel. In terms of shipping there’s lots of work in hydrogen and ammonia and thinking about those clean sources of power, because trade is one of the most powerful drivers of reducing poverty and increasing people’s quality of life.
I think the [aim for] clean fuel in aviation is just about ten per cent at the moment…
It is at the moment but that’s why we’re working so hard to build it so that it becomes the norm.
In Britain, fifteen per cent of people take seventy per cent of flights. The UK Citizens Assembly on Climate Change called on the government to make those who fly more pay more. Why not?
There are levies and we want to continue to ensure that the aviation industry is moving at pace to have clean fuels, and that is working. I was talking to a team from the Royal Air Force just yesterday who were working very closely with some of our big airlines to work out how we solve this really important challenge. Stopping flying isn’t the solution, finding clean energy sources is the solution.
Let’s move to food and farming. Independent advisors say emissions need to be cut by thirty per cent between 2019 and 2035. What’s the government’s plan to help farming businesses to adapt? We’re having indications that, ideally, the population should eat twenty per cent less meat and dairy on average by 2030. More land shifting from agricultural use to trees and restored peatlands, and less food waste.
You’ve covered some other key areas. The government published the England peat strategy (Scotland published theirs last year) on how to maintain and restore peat, because peat can hold up to ten times as much carbon as a tree. So it’s an incredibly valuable resource as a carbon capture and storage tool – a natural one.
You’re going to be restoring forty per cent of peat by 2050 but the Climate Change Committee says 100 per cent is needed by 2045.
But as I say this is a marathon not a sprint. We can only do so much, and our focus is on making sure that we give the right signals and the right drivers to encourage those who are responsible for the peat bogs to maintain them. That’s moving at pace now, and with tree planting – and anyone who listens to Zac Goldsmith discovers that he’s even more passionate about trees than I am – the number of trees we want and need to plant is enormous, and that’s also part of that sustainability piece. In food and agriculture, subsidies are used across the world in ways that don’t necessarily drive the right decisions, so as we’ve come away from the EU and the Common Agriculture Policy we are designing a new system which will be a way to support farmers while challenging them to do things that will improve their farms and make sure that they are going in the right direction. Soil management, changing their vehicles… all those impacts that they have like any other business. As DEFRA brings through this new framework it will encourage and support our farmers to make the right decisions. My role as the champion for COP26 is to challenge some countries where they are using subsidies which drive poor decisions and leave worse outcomes from a climate change perspective. That’s one of the big challenges we have through the UN system but also through the WTO, where we have mechanisms to try and drive improved use of subsidy for good outcomes.
One of the issues that concerns people is recycling. Only about half of our household waste actually gets recycled, and household waste is only twelve per cent our overall waste. The North of Tyne Citizens Assembly on Waste and Recycling said recycling is still confusing: local authorities are inconsistent in the materials they recycle and there’s no feedback as to what happens with waste. So it must be made easier to recycle, providing clear information, including published figures of what is saved from landfill. There are high recycling rates in Belgium and Germany based on rewarding good behaviour. Shouldn’t there be more government incentives for repair and reuse, and much greater clarity about what is happening to our waste?
We are covering many of those. We just brought in some new legislation on repair and reuse: we changed the law so it will be a requirement that manufacturers provide various component parts. I don’t know about you but when I was younger this was normal. You changed the fuse. If something broke you got a new part, you didn’t throw it away and just buy a new one. There’s probably a big piece of education work because those of my children’s age have not had that cultural norm. I keep trying to encourage us all to make sure we do reduce our waste – I’m a great fan of the compost heap – but there’s a huge amount to be done on glass recycling and those areas where we know that there’s high energy use in the materials. There’s a great deal in the Environment Bill which will help really push us all along and help the businesses we rely on to do our waste management better.
I think you’ve been honest that about ten years ago you had rather different views about climate change – you were sceptical until the floods of 2008 and 2012.
Certainly the floods in 2008 were very very shocking, and I was down there helping people deal with some of the challenges. I think before that, honestly I wasn’t paying much attention. It was a faraway thing, scientists talking in complicated terms. I was busy running a business, two small children, not paying attention to those wider challenges. But yes I think the realities of seeing for ourselves … you know I talked to many people who would have said they just hadn’t got their heads around it. It didn’t seem relevant. But seeing constant and rapidly-increasing levels of really shocking climate impacts – this year it’s been extraordinary, in places that you would never never expect to see it – I think many people just like me have gone from just not thinking about it to really starting to pay attention. But even now we have a great deal of work to do. This government is genuinely forging forwards as one. There’s a coherence of purpose and determination, a sense that every part of government needs to be thinking about how to help meet this net zero challenge. But we have to filter that out to everybody because government can do a certain amount, it can change regulations, but it’s you and me as citizens making our decisions day to day. It’s businesses small and large changing those day-to-day ways of doing business. We have many more people to persuade but that’s why the regulatory changes are important, because they can help people make easy choices, where possible.
I think it was only five or six years ago you were voting against a number of environmental issues, so it’s very interesting how radically you’ve changed. The Environment Agency has just warned, in a hard-hitting report, that hundreds of people could die in floods in the UK, and that the country is not ready for the impact of climate change. In June the government’s official climate advisors warned that the government is failing to protect people from the fast-rising risks of the climate crisis, from deadly heat waves to power blackouts. What are you doing to address this?
I work very closely with Emma Howard Boyd, the chair of the Environment Agency, as she and her teams have really thought about this. In London for instance is the work that they’re doing on the Thames Barrier. I went to visit just a few months ago and it’s extraordinary. Talking about adaptation and resilience, you know, you don’t think of London having to do that. I was ten when we built the Thames Barrier, with the idea that maybe once a year it would have to be closed because there would be a big storm surge. It’s used on a daily and weekly basis now. Whole patterns of weather are completely different and it is not enough, so they either are going to have to build 100-foot walls all the way up the Thames or they have to make another barrier. So another barrier further out near the sea is being built. That sort of enormous adaptation choice is one that is making London resilient because the cost of flooding of London would be so exponential that it needs to be made at pace, and they are of course looking across the whole country and that’s their challenge, to assess where else the impacts of these changing weather patterns are likely to come. They are an independent organisation but they are working closely with DEFRA to build that plan.
On to COP26: Some developing countries are arguing that they have a right to do what western countries have done for over a century, releasing carbon dioxide in the process of developing their economy and reducing poverty. That’s a very difficult question to answer isn’t it? Shouldn’t we be slashing our emissions even further, given that it’s the richer countries that have been responsible for the devastation that poorer countries are already suffering?
I hear those messages regularly, that what they need is energy to grow their economies. They want to be able to grow their economies as we did two and three hundred years ago on the back of carbon. So the challenge we have, and what we are trying to do in the challenge of raising $100 billion a year, is to help those countries build clean energy. Wind and solar is now as cheap if not cheaper than running coal and gas, so rather than investing in those technologies we want to ensure that they can build and invest in renewable energies. Absolutely they shouldn’t be stopped from growing their economies but they can do that on the back of clean energy. One of our responsibilities as developed countries is to be making sure that innovations and new technologies are available at a good price.
I did hear someone who was very sceptical saying it was a bit like rich people giving people spiked drinks and then selling them the antidote – that’s perhaps rather unfair.
That’s a slightly odd one. I’ve spent the last year trying to provide guidance and technical support from organisations like the Foreign Commonwealth Development Office to make sure that these countries can have the benefits of new technologies and grow their economies without increasing pollution. The COP president Alok Sharma has been focusing on really driving those mitigation challenges. The UN climate change system is all about each country putting forward their journey, how they see they can make those mitigation choices, and we’ve seen a huge increase in commitment – not enough yet but a huge increase from where we were even a year ago, which is a good start but there is much more to do.
You mentioned the target of $100 billion a year in climate finance to poorer countries. I know you’re very keen that that target is met at COP26. But this year the government slashed overseas aid by nearly a third, a cut of some £4 billion, and it’s been reported that governments around the world are still about £10 billion short, is that correct?
I’m not very close to the detail but the UK’s commitment is £11 billion over five years and we doubled that last year – the prime minister doubled and ringfenced it to make sure that it was absolutely certain. The US have just doubled and then doubled again their commitment, which is great news. I haven’t spoken to Alok Sharma this week but I think he feels that we should be able to get there, and the idea is that this is then going to be ongoing. Even if we fix the CO2 emissions today we’ve got a hundred years of overheated planet for which we will have to continue to adapt. Some adaptations can be relatively simple and indeed relatively cheap. In Costa Rica I visited a farm where they used a clay basin to build a small lake; they went from being a subsistence farm to having cattle and pigs to provide higher-value foods like cheese and butter. It was a £5,000 project, very very good value for money. So adaptation isn’t necessarily expensive but it can revolutionise the ability of those communities to grow their economies.
So why slash overseas aid by nearly a third, some £4bn?
As I’ve said our climate finance has been ringfenced and doubled, so our commitment in climate finance continues to be absolute, because the prime minister is 100 per cent committed to this. It’s genuinely his number one priority.
One of the consequences of a hotter world is a mass movement of people. So when there’s drought or flooding, or people just can’t live any longer where they’re living, how does the government plan to offer compassion and resilience?
The challenges of climate migration are very real, and should concern us all. The challenge in having a just transition is to ensure that those least able to make a difference are protected. That is one of our key focuses. I’ve driven very hard for a discussion on gender and the impacts on the most vulnerable, many of whom are women and girls. This is something we have brought right to the centre of COP26. It will be an integral part of the conversation. We need to make sure that we are working with governments and municipal communities so that they can be thinking about the adaptation that’s required – changes in management of water, in the power sources that they can access, in the soil management – so that those farming communities can stay where they have been for years. In some of the big cities that have grown up, particularly in Africa, we need to make sure that those cities are built in a resilient way. A lot of that work is coming from great British architects and some of our fantastic technical people, so that those young people, some of the huge numbers of under-twenty-fives across Africa, have a fantastic opportunity to stay in their countries in their towns and be part of the economic future and not battered by the weather challenges. There is a lot to do and the UK is leaning in with all our skills and our moral leadership, pushing this agenda really hard and ourselves shifting, at a pace that very few other countries are, to renewable energy. But it can’t be done by government alone. Every single one of us has to think about which part of this big puzzle we are able to help with, and in working together I genuinely believe we can achieve. I’m a great believer in the ability of human ingenuity to tackle really hard problems. This is a really hard problem but I think we can do it together.
Rosemary is from Central Edinburgh Meeting and is a member of the Parliamentary Engagement Working Group for Quakers in Scotland. The Climate Action Day was organised by the What a Wonderful World charity, of which she is a trustee (see www.whataww.org for full reports). This interview has been transcribed and edited from a Zoom conversation viewable at https://youtu.be/j0M9DHLXrpk.
Responses to this interview, from alternative viewpoints, will be published in the coming weeks.
