While SustainAbility is a completely non-partisan organisation, we accepted the Commission’s invitation to submit our thoughts on the respective roles of government and business for the following reasons:

• We observe the business community acknowledging and responding to climate change (and calling for appropriate policy support);

• We see unilateral leadership action by the UK (and its business community) offering the potential to build global competitive advantage.

• We believe that the UK’s response to the climate challenge should be rooted in a visionary rather than a precautionary approach to de-carbonising our economy; and that it should embrace the courageous goal of a ‘no carbon’ rather than simply a ‘low carbon’ economy.

Our paper also recommends a radical re-organisation of climate responsibility by government including a dedicated Carbon Treasury and a De-carbonisation Committee with significantly greater powers than the independent climate committee proposed in the draft Climate Change bill.