A Labour peer has called on the government to adjust its climate policies based on input by the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries on climate scenarios and tipping points, during a debate in the House of Lords on Thursday about the impact of the government's climate policies on jobs, growth and prosperity. 
 

“There are reports by practitioners who understand the nature of risks and how to adapt policy to those risks. I hope the government will accept the information they are being provided with and adapt their policies to reflect these new dangers,” Lord Davies of Brixton, a member of the IFoA, told peers this week. 

 

Lord Davies highlighted two reports about climate scenarios by the institute that were written together with the University of Exeter, ‘Climate scorpion— the sting is in the tail’ from March this year and last year’s report, ‘The emperor’s new climate scenarios’. 

 

“We need to give greater weight to worst-case scenarios. These need to be taken into account when making policy on climate change,” he argued.  

 

"Too often the long-term impacts of climate change are described in central estimates, when rule number one of risk assessment is to focus on the worst case,” Lord Davies said,  

 

He added that the Paris Agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius is now more likely than in the past, and that the rate of warming has accelerated, not reduced: "We’re going faster towards these tipping point risks... What we must take more seriously is that when we pass one of these tipping points, the result is catastrophe.” 

 

Lord Davies raised concerns about a written answer by Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, a minister in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, on a question about the potential collapse of the Gulf Stream, in which the minister pointed to “a range of views on the likelihood, extent and timing of potential changes” in the Gulf Stream, saying the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found an abrupt collapse was possible but “unlikely”. 

 

The debate on the impact of climate policies was called by Conservative peer Lord Lilley, who was worried that “costs were never discussed during the passage of the Climate Change Act in 2008, nor during the 90-minute debate committing us to net zero in 2019”. 

He called it “extraordinary” that five years after committing to net zero, “we still have no official cost-benefit analysis” and accused the Climate Change Committee of trying to block public disclosures and debate. 

 

His argument was not dismissed by Conservative Lord Willetts, who said: “We need to move to honest prices that fully reflect the costs of carbon emissions as part of a belief in a functioning market economy. If we go through this process, we will end up with a system with enormous benefits: with greater security of supply, with much less exposure to the risks of volatile gas prices and indeed, in many cases, with lower operational costs, particularly for people driving motor vehicles.” 

 

However, Willetts, who is president of the Resolution Foundation, added that the costs of adjustment are high.  

 

“We absolutely need rigorous economic analysis of what those costs are and who bears them,” he said. 

 

Baroness May – who was prime minister when the UK passed the legislation in 2019 that commits the UK to net zero – gave her maiden speech in the House during the debate.  

 

She said: “Without action, we will see the frequency and severity of extreme weather events accelerating. The Amazon rainforest will become a carbon source, not a carbon sink. Some of those countries currently sitting around the Commonwealth Heads of Government table will simply cease to exist.” 

 

However, she argued that there is good news as well: “The net zero review of 2023 indicated that dealing with the transition from fossil fuels to sustainability was the growth opportunity of the 21st century, estimating that we could see nearly half a million new green jobs here in the UK by 2030. McKinsey has estimated that dealing with providing goods and services for the global net-zero transition could bring £1tn to the UK economy by 2030.” 

 

Baroness May, who chairs an environmental charity and another on modern slavery, said there was a cost to inaction, pointing to estimates by the Green Finance Institute that the degradation of the environment linked to climate could lead to a 12% reduction in GDP.