Green duty ditched in UK-Aussie trade deal

LONDON: British ministers have bowed to pressure from Australia to drop binding climate change commitments from a UK-Australian trade deal, a leaked government memo suggests.

In a concession condemned by environmental groups, the Department for International Trade is understood to have agreed to Australian demands not to include commitments to limit global warming to 2C under the Paris climate change agreement.

Trade lawyers warned on Wednesday night (UK time) that the omission would leave

the UK with “no remedies” if future Australian governments failed to act to reduce carbon emissions in line with those of the UK.

Last month Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison

refused to commit to targeting net-zero emissions by 2050, a key aim of the Cop26 climate change conference in November. Britain is leading attempts to corral large industrialised countries into further commitments at the summit in Glasgow.

On Wednesday Alok Sharma, the UK’s climate envoy, returned from China as government sources expressed optimism that Beijing would unveil substantive commitments on emissions.

An internal Whitehall memo, passed to Sky News, suggests that other ministers are keen to avoid trade deals being scuppered by climate commitments.

It suggests that the business secretary Kwasi Kwarteng, trade secretary Liz Truss and Brexit minister Lord Frost agreed to drop UK demands that multilateral environmental agreements should take precedence over the Australian trade agreement.

The note, written by a senior official in the Cabinet office, also makes clear that the deal would also not “reference Paris Agreement temperature goals”. This was a key part of the UK’s trade deal with the EU.

A government source did not dispute the substance of the decision but claimed that the references to temperature were “implicit” within the agreement. “The final text of the agreement will contain a commitment to address all the Paris climate goals – so therefore implicitly includes temperature,” they said.

Markus Gehring, an international trade law specialist at Cambridge University, said that he was “very concerned” that the UK risked being undercut if its trading partners did not share its climate objectives.