2005 UK Presidency

28 February 2008

What was achieved during the UK Presidency of the G8 in 2005?

The G8 summit was held at Gleneagles in Scotland from 6-8 July 2005. The two themes of the UK G8 Presidency in 2005 were Africa and Climate Change. The full text of the summit documents can be found on the 2005 Gleneagles G8 website.

Africa

On Africa a number of commitments were made on more and better aid, debt relief, trade, conflict, humanitarian aid, education, health, HIV/AIDS. water and sanitation, corruption and governance, and growth and promoting jobs. They included the following:

A doubling of aid by 2010 - an extra $50 billion worldwide and $25 billion for Africa;
Writing off immediately the debts of 43 of the world’s poorest countries, most of which are in Africa;
Writing off $18 billion of Nigeria’s debt, in the biggest single debt deal ever;
A commitment to end all export subsidies and to reduce domestic subsidies, which distort trade;
As close as possible to universal access to HIV treatment by 2010
By 2015 all children to have access to good quality, free and compulsory education and to basic health care, free where a country chooses to provide it;
Up to an extra 25,000 trained peacekeeping troops, helping the Africa Union to better respond to security challenges like Darfur.

Climate Change

The G8 leaders agreed that:

Climate change is happening now, that human activity is contributing to it, and that it could affect every part of the world;
Global emissions must slow, peak and then decline, moving us towards a low-carbon economy;
Unless global emissions of greenhouse gases are reduced development gains are put at risk.

The G8 agreed to support the following measures:

To develop a framework for accelerating public and private investments in clean energy in developing countries with the World Bank and other multilateral development banks;
To strengthen international co-operation to help developing countries obtain full benefits from the Global Climate Observation System (GCOS);
To invite the World Bank to develop and implement ‘best practice’ guidelines for screening its investments in climate sensitive sectors.

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