Climate promises dropped from UK-Australia deal

The UK has bowed to pressure from Australia to drop binding climate change commitments from their trade deal.

Trade Minister Dan Tehan with a teapot he was given by the UK Trade Minister Elizabeth Truss. Picture: Gary Ramage

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 two degrees under the Paris climate change agreement.

Trade lawyers warned last night 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 Scott Morrison, the Australian prime minister, refused to commit to targeting net-zero emissions by 2050, a key aim of the Cop26 climate change in November.

Britain is leading attempts to corral large industrialised countries into further commitments at the summit in Glasgow.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Picture: Getty Images

Yesterday 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 to 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.

The Times