confidentially speaking
The Africa Confidential Blog
Can climate action survive year of elections?
Blue Lines
Ahead of Britain’s general election on 4 July, climate activists were lobbying the Labour Party, the probable winners, to step up action on policy and finance. In early July, with his official residence being battered by Hurricane Beryl, Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves called the UN COP Climate summits ‘largely a talking shop’.
The next summit, COP29 will be hosted this November in Baku. If elected, Labour’s candidates for Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, and Energy Security and Net Zero Minister, Ed Miliband, will attend. Both have been talking up Labour’s climate ambitions.
Britain needs to change course on climate, Miliband said, after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak dropped London’s earlier Net Zero carbon emissions targets. Lammy would work closely on climate policy, arguing: ’We need climate action and international law to stop the darkness getting so much worse.’ He said in June that he would broadly support Kenya’s William Ruto and Mia Mottley of Barbados in their campaign to overhaul the global financial architecture.
Jonathan Reynolds, a candidate for the Business and Trade portfolio, said he wanted to overhaul Britain’s infrastructure, drawing heavily from the US Inflation Reduction Act with its attempt to integrate trade and industrial policy into foreign policy. This means that Africa’s mineral wealth may be linked to restructuring debt deals with Britain.