THERESA: WE WILL USE FOREIGN AID CASH TO FIGHT THE WAR ON PLASTIC
THERESA May has pledged to use cash from the £13 billion foreign aid budget to tackle the scourge of plastic polluting our seas.
At a climate change summit in Paris yesterday, she said she was ‘very concerned’ by the impact of waste on marine life. She pointed to Government action on carrier bags and banning microbeads – campaigns championed by the Mail – but said there was more to be done. ‘We are looking to see what more we can do… to use overseas aid money to ensure that we are doing what I think everybody wants, which is reducing this terrible pollution that is taking place and effecting marine life so devastatingly,’ she said.
Her pledge came as it emerged that environment secretary Michael Gove has written to international development secretary Penny Mordaunt to urge that aid is spent on protecting the oceans. Their departments are discussing increasing the small portion of the budget currently spent on protecting marine life from plastic.
Mr Gove’s request follows a study which found that 90 per cent of the plastic waste in our seas came from ten rivers in Asia and Africa.
Environmental campaigner Lewis Pugh said he had asked Mr Gove to raise the issue with the Department for International Development (DfID).
‘I told him that plastic is now endemic in our oceans, from the Antarctic to the Arctic and from the surface to down below,’ he told the Mail, which has launched the Turn The Tide On Plastic initiative to further reduce the damage being done to oceans.
‘I asked him if he could speak to DfID to see if they could use the aid fund to help address this problem and he promised to do that.
‘Plastic has a huge effect on fishing, tourism, the local economy and people’s health in places like India and Africa. ‘Surely these places are where we should be concentrating our efforts. We’ve got to prevent it getting in to the waterways first. Britain must lead the world on this.’
Mr Pugh, the United Nations Environment Programme’s patron of the oceans, told Mr Gove that the money should be spent on engineering, waste management strategies and developing technology.
Some of the £13 billion foreign aid budget, which can be accessed by several departments, already goes towards helping marine life.
DfID said it already contributed to the Global Environment Facility, which has a £1.5 million programme to address plastic in the oceans.
It also provides £7.6 million to the World Bank’s pollution management programme, part of which funds work to reduce pollution of the sea from various sources.
The environment has been put at the heart of a rebranding of the Conservatives, who want to be known as the ‘caring party’.
Mr Gove has seized on the strategy and has announced a series of environmental policies, including increasing jail terms for animal cruelty.
Tackling plastic waste in our oceans has become the centrepiece of his plans and he has described being affected by scenes in the BBC documentary, Blue Planet II.
It came as the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany found that 90 per cent of plastic waste comes from ten rivers in Asia and Africa. Two – the Nile and the Niger – are in Africa, and the other eight are in Asia: the Yangtze, Yellow, Haihe, Pearl, Mekong, Amur, Ganges and Indus. A DfID spokesman said ministers were ‘ working closely to discuss ideas and new solutions to tackle the plastic waste that is polluting the world’s rivers and oceans’.
A spokesman for the Prime Minister said: ‘The environment secretary and the international development secretary are working together to see what more we can do. The departments have a strong record working on the environment and development.’
In Paris yesterday, Mrs May announced a £140 million boost to funding for poorer communities affected by climate change through deforestation or vulnerability to natural disasters and extreme weather.
She also pledged £15 million of additional support for the hurricane-hit island of Dominica in the Caribbean.
Some £5.8 billion of the aid budget from 2016 to 2021 has been committed to tackle climate change through projects in poor countries.