http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/news/2332216/petition-launched-for-uk-climate-change-impacts-fund

 

Environmentalists across the UK are today being asked to support a new e-petition designed to highlight the need for a dedicated Climate Change Impacts Fund to help the country cope with escalating climate threats, such as the recent floods that devastated much of the south of the country.

 

Launched, in a personal capacity, by Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, the e-petition is seeking the 100,000 signatures needed to trigger a debate in parliament.

The petition highlights how the UK is increasingly experiencing the impacts of climate change with four of the five wettest years and the seven warmest years on record having occurred since 2000.

"In order to help make the UK more resilient to climate change impacts, and to pay for damage that cannot now be avoided, the government should create a Climate Change Impacts Fund," it states. "This should be funded not by reducing overseas development assistance to help extremely poor people overseas, but instead from the revenue generated by revising tax laws and regulations such that wealthy companies that operate in the UK, and wealthy individuals who reside and work mainly in the UK, cannot evade or avoid paying their fair share of taxes. HM Treasury estimated that tax evasion and avoidance reduced revenue by £9 billion in 2010-11."

The petition follows a series of funding commitments from the government in recent weeks to help compensate domestic and business victims of the floods and help ensure damaged flood defences are repaired.

However, ministers have faced a flurry of criticism over its response to the floods and their decision to cut annual government spending on flood defences during this parliament.

Writing on BusinessGreen today, Ward said that while the latest floods are expected to cost the UK economy £600m, climate change impacts are expected to escalate in the coming years and as such there was a compelling case for a dedicated fund to help ensure the UK can respond to the disruption that results from floods, droughts and extreme weather.

"While insurance will continue to play an important role in covering the costs of flood damage in the future, a new scheme for the highest risk properties has bizarrely been based on the assumption that climate change will have no effect," he wrote. "Insurance will also help to manage the financial losses from other impacts, but will not be sufficient on its own, nor will it pay for significant preventative action. So what the country needs is a new Climate Change Impacts Fund to support the National Adaptation Programme and to help pay for the damage that cannot be prevented."

He added that rather than raiding international aid budgets to help flood victims, as suggested recently by the Daily Mail, the government should instead tighten tax rules to combat tax evasion and avoidance.