Daffodils are already in flower. The male blackbird in my garden started singing weeks ago and the grass, having carried on growing all winter, is as green as if it’s already the height of spring. The world around us is changing fast, and it’s not just the view from the kitchen window which confirms that fact.

The world’s climatologists have modelled the impact of changes in the composition of the atmosphere on the behaviour of our climate. Their projections have proved accurate, with forecasts made some years ago now unfolding in the world around us. What is more worrying, however, is what climatologists expect will occur in the future. As a result of carbon dioxide concentrations increasing in the atmosphere, the world is fast warming up. Global average temperatures are already 0.8 degrees higher than they were at the start of the 20th century and are set to rise rapidly as more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases accumulate at ever greater concentrations.

The consequences of this will be costly. The World Health Organisation estimates that some 150,000 deaths are already caused each year by climate change, for example because of extreme weather conditions, while in 2004 the world’s insurers paid out for more than 100 billion dollars worth of insured losses, mainly due to extreme weather events. Species are already becoming extinct as a result of climate change and even on the basis of a conservative estimate, more than a million terrestrial species could be lost by about 2050. Arctic sea ice has been rapidly disappearing in recent years and could be gone by 2060. At the about the same time, climate models show the Amazon rainforests transforming to savanna and grasslands.

This sadly is not science fiction, it is based on data, observation and rational scenarios modelled on some of the world’s most powerful and sophisticated computer systems. If we don’t take adequate action urgently, profound and very unpleasant climate change impacts will become unavoidable. This not only poses technical questions. It raises challenges of a deeply moral nature which our political leaders must grapple with immediately.

Here in the UK politicians have engaged with the issue. John Major’s government recognised the threat posed by climate change and acknowledged the need for action, while New Labour swept to power in 1997 with a manifesto that included a promise to reduce British carbon dioxide emissions by 20 per cent by 2010, compared with 1990 levels. That remains a world-leading target and was followed by the goal set out in the 2003 Energy White Paper to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 60 per cent by 2050.

This is all positive, as is the role that Britain has played internationally. For example, in Kyoto, British Ministers helped to get a deal out of knife-edge talks that could easily have finished up agreeing absolutely nothing. Since then, the UK has helped persuade countries to ratify the treaty so that it would enter into force – which it did on February 16th 2005. The UK has continued to champion international climate change action, including in high level interventions from the Prime Minister himself. In September 2004, Tony Blair gave a speech that defined a new level of engagement with the issue from a world leader. He said:

“What is now plain is that the emission of greenhouse gases… is causing global warming at a rate that began as significant, has become alarming and is simply unsustainable in the long-term. And by long-term I do not mean centuries ahead. I mean within the lifetime of my children certainly; and possibly within my own. And by unsustainable, I do not mean a phenomenon causing problems of adjustment. I mean a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence”.

The speech was welcomed by Friends of the Earth, confirming as it did the need for urgent and decisive action. But policy making and official decisions have been more disappointing. And that is where my organisation and the British Government part company.

When New Labour came to power, carbon dioxide emissions were falling. This was because of a policy to shift towards gas (and away from coal) for electricity generation. Although this move was driven by the political aftermath of the miners’ strike, rather than a decision to protect the global atmosphere, it did give Tony Blair the means to strut the world stage as a leader with credibility.

Things now look very different. Although the speeches have been good and the international leadership vital, delivery at home has been weak. Across a range of vital sectors there has been a mixture of missed opportunity, denial, cowardice and mistakes. The UK is left today unlikely (on the basis of present trends) to meet its world-leading unilateral 20 per cent reduction target, and that will in turn undoubtedly undermine this country’s ability to lead others.

In 1997 an integrated transport policy was born. Road building was scaled back and policy tools, including fuel taxes, deployed to make vehicles more efficient and to encourage other transport modes. But these and other policies have both been compromised and proved insufficient to stem the rise in traffic. The rise in low cost airlines has helped unleash an explosion in air transport. The 2003 Aviation White Paper, instead of identifying ways to manage demand for flights, sets out the means to meet a predicted tripling in of air passenger trips by 2030. The impact of this policy on achieving climate change targets in the long term will be catastrophic. There is no way that greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets can be made compatible with this.

There have been some respectable targets and even some helpful policies on renewable energy. But even here it seems that the ambition of generating 10 per cent of our electricity from renewables by 2010 is unlikely to be achieved. Policy signals to the renewable power industry have been mixed, and sometimes confusing. The overblown media backlash against wind turbines was not effectively countered by ministers, while the embryonic British sustainable energy sector has been neglected in favour of established industries .

The Confederation of British Industry has become a familiar scaremonger on the supposed impacts of environmental policies. Almost any green move proposed by government is instantly decried as a sure way to lose jobs, render the economy uncompetitive and send British companies scuttling overseas to find cheaper places to operate. No matter that the CBI cannot present a shred of evidence to substantiate its scare stories, the Government seems to take heed. Companies that need effective environmental regulation to grow their markets remain, by contrast, unheard. The most recent example was in relation to the British implementation of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme – exactly the kind of market-based flexible tool that industry has argued for as an alternative to regulation, and which it now seems intent on wrecking. Rather than stand up to industry interests and introduce the measures needed, Ministers have amended the National Allocation Plan for industry emissions – although questions have been raised about the legality of this move..

And while the CBI remains resistant to the opportunities presented by climate change, evidence is building up that could leave polluting companies liable for the damage caused by climate change. A recent paper in Nature by Richard Lord of Brick Court Chambers and Oxford physicist Myles R. Allen argued that human influence on climate could be held “to blame” for the southern European heatwave of 2003 and that in future legal cases may result (Nature, vol 432, December 2004).

There has been a dismal effort on the domestic energy efficiency front too (including a 2004 demand by Ministers that energy efficiency standards be removed as a legal requirement in new building regulations), while the opportunity to show how ending fuel poverty (and thus combat a social scandal) can at the same time help climate protection has been watered down. Fewer households are now included in the Government’s programme to end fuel poverty, because the Government’s definition of fuel poverty has been changed.

Time is short and the need for leadership more pressing than ever. The International Climate Change Taskforce presented findings in January 2005 suggesting that the critical climate threshold that will unleash devastating global warming is as close as a decade from now. If we do not manage to find the means to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from a global peak within the remaining 10 year window, then we may be committed to very damaging consequences indeed. If the speeches are anything to go by, then Tony Blair is our man, the person who will lead the world in taking action.

And 2005 is the time for him to do it. Later this year the UK will host the leaders of the other G8 nations, among them the arch climate change laggard: President George W. Bush. Blair takes over the EU Presidency later in the year, when the next international climate change negotiations are held. He can make a real difference in these two arenas - especially if people can see that he is serious about doing things at home.

Soon after the UK General Election (expected in May), and before the UK hosts the G8 (assuming Labour wins its third term), a new official Climate Change Programme is likely to be published. That programme, if it sets out a credible path toward meeting our targets, could put the UK back in its leadership role and provide the impetus so desperately needed at the global level.

If that happens, then Friends of the Earth will be very happy to congratulate the British Government for putting its policies where its speeches have been.

Tony Juniper is the Executive Director of Friends of the Earth and the Vice Chair of Friends of the Earth International.