Mr. Conor O'Neill:

Those types of measures, principles such as the right to a safe healthy environment and a legal obligation on ecocide are important. They are tools to help us achieve what we want to do. Christian Aid supports them and many of our partners do also. The key point is that any legal measures must be used as a driver of action.

In response to the Deputy's first question, it is important. One of the things we have seen as a development organisation following the question of finance and the global justice angle for many years, is that there was a commitment of US$100 billion on climate finance I spoke about and a large amount of that money went either on loans or to try to mobilise private actors. We see this tendency to hope that a market-based approach - if we can just leverage enough investors - will hit our target. That is the wrong perspective to take on this. We have worked with communities and partners in South Sudan to build dykes to assist communities after devastating flooding. It is difficult to convince private investors to invest in that because there is no return. If a market-based approach is taken, the poorest communities are left behind.

The same principle applies to loss and damage. There is a tendency to think insurance will fix it but our experience with insurance in the countries we work in is that it is often inadequate, is very lengthy and rarely pays out what it ought to. Individuals here can think of the experiences they might have had trying to ring insurance companies about a lost suitcase. Imagine trying to do that while a third of the country is under water. The public provision of climate finance and loss and damage funding is the most accountable, direct and important source we have. The temptation is to hope private investment or insurance companies will make up the gap, but while it is important that money flows in the right direction, it will not get us out of the responsibility governments in this part of the world have.