Tory leadership hopeful wants to put climate change at the centre of DfID's work, and says the UK should massively expand its tree planting programme
International Development Secretary Rory Stewart has said he wants to double the amount of UK foreign aid spent on tackling climate change to over £2bn, once again warning society is "facing an environment cataclysm".
Stewart, who took over at the helm of the Department for International Development (DfID) four weeks ago and is now also running to be the UK's next Prime Minister, told Sky News yesterday his goal was to increase the proportion of DfID's total budget spent on climate change aid to £2.2bn in five years' time, up from £1.1bn next year.
The Tory leadership candidate reiterated his goal to "make DfID centred on climate change and the environment", and said the money could be spent on protecting rainforests, supporting endangered species and university research into new forms of renewable energy.
While not an official DfID announcement, Stewart wants to ensure his plans are set in motion even if he is only in the job until the current Tory leadership contest ends in July, according to Sky News.
"We are facing an environment cataclysm," he said. "Quite literally the ice shelf is going 10 times more quickly than people expected, we are about to lose maybe a million species on Earth and that is even before you count the fact that 100 million more people will be in poverty unless we tackle this. We have to tackle this."
Separately, Stewart - a former environment minister who worked on flood resilience and recycling at Defra - has also called for a major expansion of tree planting in the UK. Writing for the influential Conservative Home website earlier this month, he said the UK "could easily plant not 15 million trees, but a hundred million more trees in the next five years alone".
Yet today the Evening Standard reports that Stewart's first policy as Prime Minister would be to go even further, by planting 120 million native trees in just four months.
BusinessGreen has contacted Stewart's office for confirmation on the pledge, but such a move would dwarf the government's current target set in 2015 to plant 11 million trees by 2020.
Stewart, the MP for Penrith and The Border in Cumbria since 2010, is among an increasingly crowded field of Tory leadership candidates to have emerged since Theresa May's decision to quit as PM last week.
With Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab and Jeremy Hunt seen as the frontrunners in the contest, Stewart is thought to only have an outside chance of victory. However, his campaign has stood out in recent days for his more unorthodox use of social media and his refusal to countenance a 'no-deal' Brexit or serve in a Johnson-led government.