Brown: West must not give up on aid and climate change

Gordon Brown today warned Britain’s G8 partners against a retreat into isolationism, and insisted that the looming threat to the global economy instead required a speeding up of the fight to tackle climate change and poverty.

Amid fears the credit crunch will cause the G8 to backpedal on pledges to cut carbon emissions and increase aid to poor countries by $50bn a year, the prime minister used an interview with the Guardian ahead of the G8 summit to stress the need for united action in the west to reduce dependency on fossil fuels and boost food production in developing countries.

“The world is suffering a triple challenge: of higher fuel prices, higher food prices and a credit crunch. My message to the G8 will be that instead of sidelining climate change and the development agenda, the present economic crisis means that instead of relaxing our efforts we have got to accelerate them.

“This agenda is not just the key to the environment and reducing poverty, but the key to our economic future as well,” Brown said.On the eve of his first G8 summit as prime minister, he said he would consider it to be a success if the G8 showed unity, gave strong backing to a new global free-trade deal, and pushed ahead on climate change and development. The prime minister said that the state of the global economy meant the summit would have echoes of those in the 1970s. “But in the 70s, many of the problems we faced were national, not global. The problems we have today are global and they require global solutions.” On climate change, the prime minister said he was hoping the G8 would make progress towards a new climate change deal in Copenhagen next year, agree to “turn the World Bank into an energy bank as well as a development bank”, and show a “clear understanding of the importance of renewables to our energy and environmental future”.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/jul/05/gordonbrown.internationalaidanddevelopment