This week at Prime Minister’s Questions, Mark asked Gordon Brown about plans to discuss climate change at the G8 summit in July at L'Aquila in Italy which will be vital to prepare the ground for an agreement at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen this December.

He cited new reports that global warming will be even more severe than previously thought and stressed the urgency of reaching an agreement to prevent environmental catastrophe. The seriousness is underlined by the summit's location - L'Aquila was the site of a recent earthquake. Whilst earthquakes are not new, recent independent studies have underlined the increasingly severe consequences that climate change is having, particuarly in developing countries.

The Prime Minister pointed to two priorities:

• the need to get China, India, the United States and Japan to commit to targets for emissions reductions
• international agreement on finance for developing countries to invest in reducing emissions

You can read the exchange in full by clicking here.