Led by Publish What You Pay UK, International Lawyers Projects and a number of NGOs from the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition have co-signed a letter to the UK government urging prioritisation of global natural resource governance by strengthening the UK’s international leadership in extractive industry transparency.
The civil society letter urges the Rt Hon Dominic Raab MP (Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs) and Lord Callanan (Minister for Climate Change and Corporate Responsibility), to take action to tackle the current challenges facing natural resource governance and the extractive sectors in the UK and abroad by championing the following measures:
1. Maintaining and enhancing the UK’s strong international commitment to extractive sector transparency and accountability, including driving the creation of climate-risk-related disclosures via the EITI and other international mechanisms and fora.
2. Helping ensure that the UK is seen to deliver substantial progress towards its 2050 net zero emissions target ahead of the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow. This means prioritising an ambitious UK Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), setting out in detail the domestic policies that will underpin how the UK will meet its international
commitments under Paris to limit average global temperatures rises to 1.5°C.
3. Enabling civil society members to meet online in the near future with UK government Department officials to discuss further progress on points 1 and 2 above.
ILP hopes that the government will respond constructively to the suggestions put forward by Publish What You Pay UK and the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition, and that they will continue to engage with these issues at a governmental and civil society level in order to achieve the ambitious targets agreed to in The Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.