In answer to that, I say to the right hon. Gentleman that perhaps he should look at the generality of election results around the country. He need cast his mind back no further than the county elections of last May, or the elections of 18 months ago, perhaps.

I can understand why Labour Members are clutching at straws. I did a lot of whistling in the dark when I sat on the Government Benches in 1997. It did not work then, and I say to Labour Members that it will not work now-and it certainly will not work by passing legislation to enable the Government to halve the deficit in order to prevent themselves from undertaking more financial profligacy. The public will see through that.

It was a privilege to hear the speech of my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard). I would hope that in a new Parliament that may not be tarnished with the same brush as this Parliament-unfair though that tarnishing is-Members will, with restored public integrity, have the ability and courage to begin to wrest back to this House powers that currently lie elsewhere. Some of my hon. Friends may think that some of those powers lie in Europe-I also subscribe to that point of view-but over the years I have observed the increasing amount of judicial review, which takes powers away from this House. That is one of the greatest threats that this Parliament faces.

I, too, however, will not waste more time on the legislative programme. Instead, I want to talk about climate change, which was referred to in the Gracious Speech-and also, briefly, by both Front-Bench spokesmen-since what this Government do on that in international negotiations during the last few months of their life will be infinitely more important than their legislative programme.

There is still some argument about the extent, nature and pace of climate change. I accept that climate change is happening, but no one knows the exact rate of that change. However, there is a massive change taking place in the world that is the prime contributor to climate change, and we can measure that to the hectare: day by day and week by week of the year, we burn 32,000 hectares of rain forest-9 million hectares every year, which is the size of England.

Why should that matter? If climate change matters-and it does-the only way to stop it is by stopping deforestation. Saving the rain forest, and other forests, is the key. Forests are critical to regulating climate. Any real solution to climate change requires not only a reduction in fossil-fuel use, but protection of ecosystems like forests, which are critical to regulating carbon. The Amazon rain forest has been described as the "lungs" of our planet, because it provides the essential world service of continuously recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen. More than 20 per cent. of the world's oxygen is produced in the Amazon rain forest, which also releases 20 billion tonnes of moisture every day, much of it watering crops tens of thousands of miles away.

Let us look at this another way round. I understand that the main thing we have to do to tackle climate change is to reduce carbon emissions, but the burning of the rain forest accounts for almost 20 per cent. of all such emissions in the world-that is far more than is accounted for by all the cars, lorries, buses, planes and ships in the world put together. Of course we in the western world have to do our bit to reduce transport carbon emissions, but if we do not halt the total destruction of our rain forests, we could close down all the transport in the world and we would still, eventually, die. Some say that the rain forests are very large and can easily take the loss of an area the size of England every year, but at the present rate of destruction, they will be totally destroyed in 40 years' time. In just 20 years' time, there will be only half of them left and they may then be too small to act as the lungs of the world to give us the oxygen we need.

There is an infinitely greater reason for saving the rain forest than merely reducing carbon emissions, important though that is-the reason being that the rain forests are the "medicine cabinet" of the world, to steal another phrase from the Prince's Rainforests Project. As rain forest species disappear, so, too, do many possible cures for life-threatening diseases. Currently, 121 prescription drugs sold worldwide are derived from plant sources and 25 per cent. of western pharmaceuticals are derived from rain forest ingredients, but less than 1 per cent. of tropical trees and plants have been tested by scientists. So we have tested 1 per cent. and we are burning the other 99 per cent., yet we are getting 25 per cent. of our drugs from that 1 per cent.-that is a dangerous pyramid.

Why have scientists spent millions tracing every star back to the beginning of time but have not got a clue as to how many species we have on this earth or what unique life-saving properties they may have? Let us briefly consider the following facts: a single pond in Brazil can sustain a greater variety of fish than is found in all the rivers of Europe put together; a 25-acre area of rain forest in Borneo may contain more than 700 species of trees-that figure is equal to the total tree diversity of north America; a single rain forest reserve in Peru is home to more species of birds than are found in the entire United States; and the number of species of fish in the Amazon exceeds the number found in the entire Atlantic Ocean. I repeat my question: how can we in the west be so stupid as to destroy a habitat permanently when we have not looked at 99 per cent. of the species in it?

Some scientists estimate that we are losing more than 130 different species of plants and animals every single day because of rain forest deforestation-we just do not know, yet we are carrying on. Estimates of the total number of world species vary from 2 million to 100 million-the best estimate being that there are about 10 million different species of living things, which range from nematode worms, slugs, molluscs, plant life and fungi to trees, birds and the cuddly animals about which we worry. Only 1.4 million of the species in the world are named, and we do know the terrifying rate of loss of those species. The latest update by the International Union for Conservation of Nature was published on 3 November, just as we were about to prorogue. Its red list of threatened species showed that 17,291 species out of the 47,677 that it has assessed are threatened with extinction; some of those species are close to complete and permanent extinction. Its results reveal that 21 per cent. of all known mammals, 30 per cent. of all known amphibians, 12 per cent. of all known birds, 28 per cent. of reptiles, 37 per cent. of fresh water fishes, 70 per cent. of plants and 35 per cent. of invertebrates assessed so far are under threat. Hundreds have become extinct already. With enormous effort and tremendous will on the part of all Governments in the world, we can eventually reverse climate change, but we can never bring back to life a species that has been wiped out.

Biodiversity is not just about saving the red squirrels, polar bears, orang-utans, lemurs and tigers, as vital and close to my heart as some of those are. Of far greater importance to the planet are the plants and bugs that we never see and which are not cuddly. Most Members have recently become very concerned about the plight of the bee population, not just in Britain, but in Europe and north America. That tiny insect, which we have taken for granted for millennia, holds the key to huge quantities of our food production. That is just one insect that we know about and which we have studied. We kind of know its place in the jigsaw of the survival of humankind, but why, therefore, do we carry on destroying without checking hundreds of other species whose role we have not studied and do not understand, but which might be equally crucial?

The United States National Cancer Institute has identified 3,000 plants that are active against cancer cells, 70 per cent. of which are found in the rain forests, and as I said, 25 per cent. of the active ingredients in today's cancer-fighting drugs come from organisms found only in the rain forests. We are destroying the only source of those drugs.

On a less important level, at least 80 per cent. of the developed world's diet originated in the tropical rain forests. Their bountiful gifts to the world include: fruits such as avocados, coconuts, figs, oranges, lemons, grapefruits, bananas, guavas, pineapples, mangoes and tomatoes; vegetables, including corn, potatoes, rice, squash and yams; and spices on which we depend, such as black pepper, cayenne, chocolate, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, sugar cane-I shall not read out a lexicon-coffee, vanilla and Brazil nuts. At least 3,000 different fruits are found in the rain forests, of which we, in the west, eat about 200 at the most. The Indians of the rain forest use more than 2,000.

The magnitude of the loss to the world was most poignantly described by Harvard's two-times Pulitzer prize-winning biologist, Edward O. Wilson. In 1993, he said:

"The worst thing that can happen during the 1980s is not energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war, or conquest by a totalitarian government. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly that our descendents are least likely to forgive us."

He said that about 15 years ago, when rain forest destruction was in its infancy-it is 10-times worse today. However, like other scientists, and his Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, he has a solution: to make the forests more alive than dead. We can harness the power of markets and global capitalism to save the world's forests. The Darwin initiative shows that 41,000 hectares of rain forest have been protected in Indonesia using market forces.

The point of my speech is to say to the Government that the one deal that they must do in Copenhagen next month is on concerted action to save the world's rain forests. I believe that a rain forest plan is on the agenda. We need not conventional overseas aid, but a new, verifiable and rapid system of carbon credits, properly and legitimately traded on the world market. Those countries with rain forests have a natural resource that the world needs-we need them, so we should pay for them and save them. Those of us who produce carbon should therefore pay those who have carbon sinks. That is not rocket science: we know that it can work-there have already been experiments-and we can easily police it with modern technology. What we now need is international action, led by the Prime Minister in Copenhagen, to make it work.

The cost of halving deforestation is estimated at £25 billion over the next five years, but the Government's Eliasch review estimated that the benefits of saving our forests could be as much as £2.5 trillion. When my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe gave me the incredible privilege of negotiating at the Earth summit in Rio in 1992, with him and the then Prime Minister joining us for the concluding week of the conference, forests were also on the agenda.

In 1992, the concern was that India was burning huge amounts of local timber for domestic fuel consumption and contributing to carbon emissions. I am therefore concerned to read that we are building large wood-fired power stations in the UK and importing the timber to fuel them. If the wood being burned is waste wood, then okay. If thinnings and willow coppice are being burned for power, probably with garbage added too, then I am happy with that. However, if we are stripping our northern hemisphere forests, which are also carbon sinks, I will be concerned, because we could be doing the wrong thing and being hypocritical.

If in the next few months the Government want to show that they are doing things to be on the side of the angels, they should come back from Copenhagen with a deal on saving the rain forests. We should forget about the rest of the measures in the Queen's Speech and concentrate on the climate change agenda and the world's rain forests. Later today or tomorrow, I shall put down an early-day motion on the Prince's Rainforests Project, which I urge colleagues to sign. He says at the end of his booklet:

"If we lose the battle against tropical deforestation, we lose the battle against climate change. Please join me in trying to save the rainforests-for the sake of our children and grandchildren."

As John Sawhill of The Nature Conservancy said:

"In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create, but by what we refuse to destroy."

— from debate entitled “Debate on the Address — [1st Day]”

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