E3G

The impact of climate change on business

By Tom Burke

Over recent years, the Australian labour party has been critical of the climate change stance of the governments led by Prime Minister John Howard. In attempt to develop an alternative approach, they convened a National Climate Change Summit in Canberra on 31st March 2007.

E3G Founding Director Tom Burke gave a Keynote speech on the impact of climate change on business.

A video of Tom’s speech can be viewed online on the conference website (23mins).

The full text of Tom’s speech follows bellow and is attached in PDF format for download.

The impact of climate change on business

The National Climate Change Summit, The Parliament House, Canberra

Speech by Tom Burke CBE, March 31st 2007

Thank you very much for inviting me to join you this morning. It is always a great pleasure for me to return to Australia and this is a particularly interesting moment to be here. Even as a visitor, you can’t have watched the long dry, the growing intensity of fires and cyclones here, the changing climate of the South West of Australia, the bleaching of the barrier reef without becoming concerned about the particular vulnerability of Australia to climate change.

In these circumstances it is not a surprise to me that Australia has produced, in Tim Flannery, one of the world’s most able and respected communicators about climate change. Nor is it a surprise that, in the wake of the recent publication of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change and the Stern report, that the whole debate on climate change here has taken on a great new urgency.

It is particularly interesting for me to be in this gathering this morning because I speak at hundreds of these sorts of meeting on climate energy policy around the world and the people who you mostly don’t find in the room are the politicians. So, it is wonderful to see gathering so full of political figures because at the end of the day this a problem that is quintessentially a core political problem. Political will is the centre of this problem and if the politicians aren’t in the debate everybody else has got less to contribute less to offer than they might have.

So, I am particularly pleased to be at this meeting this morning.