I beg to move,
That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the Secretary of State to publish proposals for increasing the on-lending of UK Special Drawing Rights via the IMF, for transferring the capital returned to the UK by the European Investment Bank to the World Bank, and for increasing the UK’s support for the African Development Bank, for the purpose of reducing debt burdens and the cost of capital and contributing to the implementation of the Paris Agreement on climate change.
I start by declaring an interest as chair of the international Parliamentary Network on the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which brings together 2,000 parliamentarians from 140 countries to argue for the changes that I will put before the Government today.
If anything, this Bill is overdue. Eight years ago, the world came together to agree an ambitious plan to spread freedom, security and justice to every corner of the planet. The sustainable development goals agreed in New York in September 2015 offered hope, progress and a better life to billions of people. Months later, we came together again, not in New York but in Paris, to agree the climate change agreement that would help us guarantee that there would be a planet left on which to make those goals a reality.
However, the truth is that such ambitions are in deep trouble. There are just 10,000 days to go before the Paris climate agreement deadline. A perfect storm is now threatening the world’s potential to deliver on the goals that we agreed just eight years ago. In fact, seven giants now stand in the way of progress: want, hunger, disease, lost learning, conflict, debt and climate change. They are a cascading, connected set of challenges with lethal force.
Extreme poverty has risen for the first time this century, with 600 million people now forecast to be living on less than $2.15 a day by 2030. Globally, 200 million people now wake up without enough to eat, and 300 million children will need humanitarian assistance this year. On current trends, we will not meet our goal of ending hunger by 2030. That scarcity is fuelling violence. About half of the world’s extreme poor are expected to live in conflict-affected areas by 2030. In turn, those conditions are threatening our ability to make good children’s lost learning during covid, which could cost $21 trillion over the course of their lives. Poorer nations have now exhausted their reserves. In fact, debt in developing countries is now the highest it has been for 50 years, and levels are rising.
Looming deadly over all of that are the changes in our climate and the chaos of extreme weather. Across half the world and most of Africa, the seasons are simply no longer predictable. The sun which once brought life now brings death because it burns so ferociously. The rains, when they fall, fall with such force that life-giving water floods and destroys the land it once nourished. Against that murderous maelstrom, low and middle-income countries need to mobilise some $6 trillion between now and 2030 to hit their Paris climate targets.