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Climate Change

My Lords, the noble Baroness has raised a practical solution that has very seductive undertones. There is clearly an issue. Sometimes people have destroyed their heritage—that is, the forest—because of money. There is no other crop, as it were. They have to be prevented from doing so, and shown the wisdom of preserving it. But they have to have alternatives. If we can sell this to our people on the basis that we can make all these changes and still grow our economy, the same must apply to everyone else. They will want to grow their economies, because they are far behind us in that respect. This issue has to be dealt with. I regret that I did not comment on the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Taverne, relating to public perception. He is right: if the public are not on side, nothing will happen. Ministers talking, business acting or taxes changing to change people’s behaviour will not work. It will build in resentment. People have to be made to understand that there is a major problem. We have an outreach programme focusing on the private sector, legislators and broader civil society. I shall briefly give some examples of what was done. In December last year, a new campaign was launched, called ““Tomorrow’s Climate, Today’s Challenge””, which included free resources; short films; a website; a communications guide; a £6 million climate challenge fund to support local level communication projects, and we expect to announce winners on 5 June; a European environment day; large-scale national activities allowing local level activities to feel part of a wider government-backed initiative to commencein 2006-07; and a youth competition to help communicate climate change in their region, in which nine regional climate change champions were announced on 11 May 2006. Work has to go on over a whole range of activities. It is not just about the media but about understanding the footprints of normal people’s lives.