Earlier this month, the European Commissioner for the environment, Stavros Dimas, gave a speech on the global challenges of climate change and the role of the UK and her European partners in setting the agenda for addressing the challenge of climate change.

Thank you for this invitation to talk to you about the global challenge of climate change - a topic close to my heart and a challenge which the UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, has described as the 'defining challenge of our age'. I see that you have already had an impressive number of presentations today exploring the different angles of this topic. I would now like to look, in particular, at the role of the UK and her European partners in setting the agenda for addressing the challenge of climate change.

The UK has played and continues to play a leading role in the call for action to address climate change. From the introduction of the UK Emissions Trading Scheme to the current Climate Change Bill, the UK has been leading by example. You are showing how action on climate change must not remain a simple aspiration but must be translated into legally defined objectives and concrete and operational measures.

The experience from the UK has also been a vital input into the discussions on climate change policy in the EU. And EU leadership is, in turn, a key driver in efforts to reach an international agreement on climate change at the UN Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. Reaching an international agreement will be crucial to taking effective action to tackling climate change and putting the world on a path which would limit the increase in global temperatures to no more than 2 degrees celcius above pre-industrial levels.

The climate and energy package, proposed by the Commission in January, is easily the most far-reaching legislative package on fighting climate change anywhere in the world. Known as the 20/20/20 package, the proposed measures aim to deliver on the commitments of European leaders to reduce Europe's emissions by at least 20% compared to 1990 levels by 2020 and to increase the share of energy from renewable sources to 20% by 2020.

The measures in the package are mutually supportive with cost-efficiency and fairness at their heart.

The EU's emissions trading scheme is the flag-ship of EU climate policy. Since the start of the scheme in 2005, the EU has shown that emissions trading is an effective tool for harnessing the power of the market to provide industry with incentives to reduce emissions and to drive forward low carbon technologies. This is an area where the EU has set the environmental agenda: many other States are now introducing trading schemes and just last week the US President elect stated that he will introduce a federal cap and trade scheme. The proposal to review the EU ETS will further improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the ETS and enable industries covered by the scheme to deliver the additional emissions cuts that will be needed by 2020.

The proposals on effort-sharing include legally binding targets for each Member State to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the sectors that are not covered by the EU Emissions Trading System and the proposed renewables Directive will set targets to increase the share of renewable energy in the energy mix.

These measures are further supported by additional Community measures which will in particular assist Member States in meeting their targets under the effort-sharing Decision. These include the proposal on CO2 emissions from cars and the package of measures on energy adopted by the Commission earlier this month which included, among other things, a reinforcing of energy efficiency legislation on buildings.