Leading article: Foreign aid and the urgent need to move beyond fossil-fuel thinking

When Gordon Brown delivered his Budget this week, he made a point of stressing the Government's commitment to the environment and to development aid and assistance. On green issues, he can feel the new Conservative leader, David Cameron, snapping at his heels. On development, he has his own personal commitment to Africa and to the goals he and the Prime Minister set for Britain's presidency of the G8.

Now, only a matter of days after that Budget speech, Mr Brown's words are already starting to ring hollow. Two new disclosures illustrate just how far short of its pledges this Government is falling. First, advance reports of its Climate Change Programme review suggest that it is still temporising about how to meet its target of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 20 per cent by 2010. Already postponed by a year, the review is to be published finally next week. But it is now expected only to set out a range of options, pushing the hard decisions about real cuts still further into the future.

This failure to set firm targets and timetables signifies that the Department of Trade and Industry's concerns about the competitiveness of British business have trumped the concerns about climate change presented by the Department for the Environment - as though the two claims were mutually exclusive. It also means that the Government will fail to meet the 30 June deadline for agreeing emissions cuts for businesses under the European Union's trading scheme. It will thus forfeit the chance to lead Europe in cutting carbon emissions this year.

All this would be disappointing enough by itself for a government that has supposedly made combating climate change a priority. When combined with the other disclosure - a paper from the Department for International Development that describes in brutal detail the damage climate change will do to the poorest countries - however, it is downright shameful. On the one hand, it is clear that ministers know full well the environmental harm that the industrialised world's policies are inflicting on the poorest countries. On the other, they are selfishly postponing the day when Britain will get down to doing anything serious about it.

The DfID paper implies that Britain's failure to tackle its own carbon emissions effectively negates the good that is done by its foreign aid. It argues that the real cost of rising CO₂ emissions will most affect those who are least equipped to deal with it. And the projections are stark. Almost three-quarters of disasters, it says, are climate related, and occur disproportionately in developing countries, where the economic damage is also greatest.

In Africa, where so many people live close to the coast, global warming could put as many as 70 million at risk from flooding, compared with one million now. A relatively modest increase in temperature in India could reduce annual farm incomes by 25 per cent. Disasters affect not just the economy, but also health (through post-disaster epidemics), education (through damage to schools) and nutrition (through disruption of food supplies).

That the Government appears to have given in yet again to fears about the ability of British business to compete calls into question the quality of its commitment to tackle climate change. But it also shows a regrettable lack of imagination. Other European countries are encouraging work on new technologies that would make businesses at once greener and more competitive. Is our Government and our business sector so stuck in the past - are we, to borrow David Cameron's charge against the Chancellor, such "fossil-fuel thinkers" - that we cannot do the same?

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