THERE was news this week of deadly flooding in Eastern and Central Europe, Myanmar, Nigeria, and North Carolina — and possibly areas that have not attracted international attention. Sadly, though, the Foreign Secretary could have chosen any week to announce the UK’s recommitment to fighting climate change with the confidence that fresh examples could be found of the degradation of the planet. One would think by now that no further impetus were needed by the world’s politicians. The cost of repairing damage to infrastructure, not to mention the personal property of many thousands of individuals, cannot have been lost on them. The industrial and commercial world has certainly done the sums, and has identified climate change as the most serious economic threat that the world faces. And yet key industrial countries, the heaviest polluters, have allowed their political leaders to renege on earlier promises.

It was good, then, to hear David Lammy’s observation on Tuesday: “The threat may not feel as urgent as a terrorist or an imperialist autocrat. But it is more fundamental. It is systemic, pervasive, and accelerating towards us.” And his list of the causes: “These are not random events delivered from the heavens. They are failures of politics, of regulation, and of international co-operation.” And from his colleague, the Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband: “This is about the security of the British people. There can be no climate security for future generations unless we take international climate leadership now.”

There is some catching up to do. Various bodies, including the National Audit Office, have judged that the pledge that all of the UK’s electricity would come from low-carbon sources by 2035 is likely to be unfulfilled. The last government added five years to the time-limit for the sale of new petrol and diesel cars. The Climate Change Committee reckons that plans to reduce emissions from flights and shipping rely too heavily on technologies that are unlikely to be at the required scale in the time available. And the Confederation of Forest Industries has said that there is “zero chance” that the Government will hit its target of 30,000 hectares of new trees by the end of this year.

Mr Lammy announced that, in an effort to restore the UK’s international credibility, the Government was “ending our diplomacy of ‘Do as I say, not as I do’”. The proof, then, will be in what the Government does rather than what it says; but at least it does not have the string of policy reversals that undermined the last government’s rhetoric. Nevertheless, the race is on — a phrase that has, sadly, been employed many times in recent years. Every pound not spent on reversing climate change will have to be spent on stop-gap repairs to the damage that it is causing. Every pound spent on those repairs is a pound no longer available to spend on the climate fight.