Let’s not choose between growing or greening

When Caroline Flint stood next to a giant ice cube and launched Labour’s ‘Cut that Bill’ campaign at last year’s Party Conference, the place of the environment within the Labour Party changed forever.  No longer a fringe issue for those who particularly care about bears and rainforests, the environment (and our addiction to oil in particular) is at the heart of Labour’s campaigning.

The Socialist Environment and Resources Association (SERA), Labour’s environment campaign, has known that the environment is about more than caring for our planet for a long time.  For more than 40 years we have been arguing that environmental justice goes hand in hand with social justice.  Whether it is climate change, air pollution or water shortages, when our environment is damaged, it is the poorest countries, communities or citizens who are affected first – and hardest.  What can be more of a Labour issue?

And the environment is also changing the nature of the problems we traditionally worry about.

On the economy,we are no longer faced with a choice between growing or greening.  The biggest growth area during the economic downturn was in low carbon businesses.  The CBI estimates that the green economy is expected to roughly half the UK’s trade deficit in 2014/15 and that by 2020 the number of green jobs will increase to 1.4million.

Looking forward, the Green Alliance has recently estimated that an increase in spending on low carbon infrastructure projects should increase GDP by at least 0.7 per cent by 2015. Conversely, if the government abandoned its low carbon investment programme, the overall impact on GDP could be a reduction of as much as 2.2 per cent, and such a drop could push the UK back into recession.

For so many, housing is no longer just an issue of being able to pay for a roof over your head, but its now also a question of how you can heat and light it too. In 2011, 7 million households were classed as being in fuel poverty, yet more than half of the homes in the UK are not sufficiently insulated.  Just as social housing helped generations of low income families find a place to call home, green technologies will give families today a whole new quality of life, as they spend less of their income on energy.  As well as improving on the Coalition’s abysmal Green Deal, to insulate millions not hundreds of homes, the next Labour government must make sure that all the new homes built are as sustainable – or low bill – as possible.  We can tackle climate change and release ordinary people from the tyranny of ever-rising energy bills.

On the world scene, we are realising that the challenges for international development, defence and the environment have the potential to converge in a catastrophic way.  The poorest citizens on our planet – those most in need of international aid – are also those who will be most harshly affected by a changing climate. And being poor, they will be less able to adapt so will be forced to compete for increasingly limited resources, in turn putting them at greater risk of violent conflict. Of course, there is nothing new about conflicts around resources, but adding climate change to the powder keg has the potential to create increasingly dangerous flashpoints.  Aid and military operations are not and should not be the same thing.  But without serious measures to tackle climate change here and abroad, they soon might become indivisible.

So for the next Labour Government, the environment – and the issues that SERA members care so passionately about – will need be at the heart of everything we do. Because a better tomorrow is a greener tomorrow.

Melanie Smallman is the Director of SERA.