The Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary asked me to take a personal message to the huge annual Arctic Circle Conference in Reykjavík over last weekend.

Environmentalists, politicians and business people were gathered to discuss the consequences of the retreating polar ice cap, how to mitigate its effects, and how we could also make use of it for the benefit of humanity.

I was the leader of the 60-strong British delegation, which included five MPs, a peer from the Lords committee on the Arctic and his clerk; IPCC Nobel prize-winner Professor Terry Callaghan, director of the British Antarctic Survey, Professor Jane Francis; representatives from Shell, BP, Lloyd’s Register of Shipping, and a group of the brightest and best PhD students studying Arctic-related matters. It was a stimulating event and our message was that, in line with the slightly alarmist and simultaneous IPCC report on climate change, we must all do what we can to control carbon emissions.

I subscribe to the ‘precautionary principle’ that if climate change did not exist, as some ‘deniers’ would argue, there can still be benefits from limiting carbon pollution. But if it does exist, we would be mad not to have done something about it!

We in Britain can be proud that we are in the lead in doing so. Here in Wiltshire, for example, I was glad to be able to write to council leader Jane Scott to congratulate her on achieving the county’s targets for solar energy through to 2020, and to prevent any further desecration of the countryside by the massive and largely US-funded vanity mirrors which are solar farms.

Yet the retreating ice also gives us great opportunities. The production of oil and gas under the strictest possible environmental controls will reduce our dependence on Russia and the Middle East, and help to push down domestic energy bills. There are opportunities for mineral production, especially in Greenland, for sharp reductions in shipping costs by using the Northern Sea Route instead of the Suez/Panama canals; for tourism, for fishing on a massive scale without damaging stocks. All of these things could be of great benefit to future generations, to a degree counterbalancing the damage caused by climate change.

So our message was that we must do what we can to slow or halt climate change and the melting of the polar ice cap; but that there are business and food and energy production opportunities alongside it.