Platform for Redesign 2020: closing address
Closing address by Kwasi Kwarteng, Minister of State, Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, at the Online Platform on Sustainable and Resilient Recovery from COVID-19, hosted by the Japanese Government.
I want to start by thanking Minister Koizumi for organising this really remarkable discussion, and I’d also like to thank all the other participants as well.
This event has demonstrated the passion that we all share for meeting our Paris goals, and the benefits of coming together, sharing our experiences, and working towards a common purpose.
This all gives me and the UK great confidence for COP26 next year.
We can all see that, as we recover from the coronavirus pandemic, we have a huge opportunity to build back better – to build our recovery on a fairer, greener, cleaner, and more resilient economy.
And that is the agenda that we will be putting at the heart of our COP26 Presidency next year.
The COP President Designate outlined our progress to date on clean growth in his remarks, so I would like to focus on what comes next.
In the UK, there are almost half a million jobs in low carbon businesses and their supply chains, and there is a real potential to use our recovery to create more jobs in this area.
So in the Summer Economic Statement, our Chancellor announced £3 billion to support measures to reduce greenhouse emissions from buildings, supporting as many as 140,000 green jobs.
We’re committed to spending more than £2 billion to the industrial sector over eight years to help them reduce their emissions and energy bills.
And we are committing hundreds of millions of pounds to developing new technologies to help to decarbonise older processes:
We’re interested in developing Direct Air Capture, which takes CO2 emissions immediately out of the air around us.
We’re committed also to Carbon Capture, Usage and Storage, which we aim to start deploying by the middle of this decade, and we want to be able to share our findings and collaborate with other partners and friends across the world.
Projects like these allow us to rapidly move towards a decarbonised economy, as is vital to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, and I think also all of this work can pave the way for ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) in the fight against climate change.
That is our priority for our COVID recovery, and the vision behind our economic policies and the COP Presidency which we very much look forward to next year.
So I am delighted to have heard similar examples from so many countries today.
It is vitally important that all our nation’s build on the ideas we are sharing today, and we challenge ourselves to submit more ambitious Nationally Determined Contributions and Long Term Strategies that set the path to net zero, ahead of COP26.
The UK has committed in law to being net zero by 2050, and I hope other nations can join us on this journey and make a similar commitment.
Thank you once again Minister Koizumi for this excellent forum, for bringing all of this together, and I look forward to supporting all of your efforts as participants ahead of COP26 next year. I hope we can all work together as we are doing for an ambitious and clean recovery. Thank you very much.