WWF - For a living planet

The political issues

How could a Government that had frequently talked about its environmental credentials, both nationally and internationally, still allow one of its departments to act in a way that seemed to have little or no regard to the environmental impacts of its decisions?

The Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD) was set up under the provisions of the 1991 Export and Investment Guarantees Act, although something like it had existed since 1919. The UK in 1991 was a very different place. When the Act governing ECGD became law, environmental, human rights and sustainable development issues were not seen as a priority. But that has changed, for example, a new duty was put upon all public bodies to have regard to biodiversity in their actions. And Parliament is currently discussing how the British economy is going to achieve significant cuts in its carbon emissions by 2050 in order to decrease the risk of catastrophic climate change.

Recently, parliamentarians from all parties have themselves begun to show considerable concern about the operations of the department. Scores of parliamentary questions have been asked in recent years, and the Environmental Audit Committee published a critical report in 2003, suggesting that ECGD should have much tighter environmental impact guidelines and that it should be more open in its dealings. ECGD has never, before or since that report, turned down a project on environmental grounds. Yet ECGD continues to argue that a voluntary code is quite sufficient.

In October of 2007 Nick Hurd MP held a parliamentary debate to discuss this very issue. The Minister, Malcolm Wicks MP responded by saying; "We take account of environmental considerations and social impacts, and we work internationally with other export credit agencies to ensure that purpose. If he is asking whether we might be doing more to ensure that we can align our sustainability and climate change objectives with our export credit objectives, perhaps we can, and I shall certainly consider that."

What WWF is asking for

• Improved transparency and accountability of ECGD.
• ECGD policies and procedures on climate and sustainable development to be consistent with those of wider government. 
• Mandatory and binding environmental, social and human rights standards to be applied to all ECGD supported projects.

Current political activity

The UK Climate Change Bill is currently being debated in parliament. An amendment that would require ECGD to report on the emissions associated with the high and medium impact projects that it supports was tabled and supported by three cross party MPs: Nick Hurd (Con); Elliot Morley (Lab); Malcolm Bruce (Lib Dem). ECGD already collects this data but does not put this information in the public domain. Furthermore other export credit agencies, for example Ex-Im Bank in the USA, already report on the emissions of its high-polluting projects. We are pleased to report that in response to the amendment the Government agreed that ECGD should report on the emissions of its high and medium impact projects and will begin to do so voluntarily from next year.

Alongside this we have secured an Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) inquiry into ECGD. We are pleased that the EAC decided to act on this, particularly as many of the recommendations of its 2003 inquiry, which WWF support, have not been implemented by ECGD.

At all times we have offered to engage constructively with the Government on this issue. This may be a long haul, but we need to be clear that WWF is not going away.