Lord Smith calls on business to back new fund to meet climate change challenges

Speaking at the agency’s annual conference today, he said that such a fund could help assist business with the identification of new innovative products and make a real contribution to the solutions to climate change.

“How about establishing a ‘Climate Change Fund’ to support, co-ordinate and prioritise research work on combating climate change across a group of leading academic institutions?” he asked in the opening speech of the two-day conference.

He suggested that such a fund could be financed through match funding from business and Government, where Government and universities jointly matched every pound contributed by business.

He said such a fund could help with the development of vital scientists and engineers who were required to develop the technology for a low carbon economy and that the UK was perfectly placed to lead the world.

“If we’re serious about the need for a low carbon economy, then we will need more scientists and more engineers than we have at the moment,” he said.

Lord Smith was addressing delegates on day one of the Environment Agency’s annual conference, which kicked off by looking at the international progress on climate change in the run up to achieving a global agreement at Copenhagen next month.

Lord Smith echoed Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband’s comments in Parliament last week, when he said that we shouldn’t now expect the Copenhagen Summit to deliver on a legally binding agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012. Instead, we should see it as “the crucial start to a process, not the end” and that it must achieve political agreement on cap and trade schemes across the world.

Irrespective of agreements on world emission targets, he said countries should commit themselves to a range of different tools – including Government action and regulation, economic and fiscal incentives, business responsibility and education – to bring about change. Among these he raised the possibility of personal carbon allowances for individuals to “enable them to make decisions about how they want to develop their own quality of life in a sustainable way”.

He also called for carbon-free energy production; all cars, buses and lorries to run on electricity; high-speed rail links across the UK and into Europe; minimal waste going to landfill, and energy-efficiency buildings everywhere, among other measures.

“These are some of the things we need to aim for. And we should judge Copenhagen against the test of whether it encourages, enables and persuades the countries of world to move in this direction,” he said.