Climate change: is the coalition up to the challenge of the next five years? Watch our debate in full

As if the most stringent cuts in a generation, mounting debt, a precarious global economy and an uneasy political alliance wasn’t enough for the Lib-Con coalition to deal with, the government is also tasked with finding answers to the most pressing problem of all: the environment.

Whereas David Cameron was once photographed with huskies inspecting shrinking glaciers to hit home his conservationist credentials — remember the “vote blue, go green” slogan? — that message was hard to spot during the election campaign and there has been little said on it since.

We thought this was a good time to get a panel of experts together to examine the challenges ahead for Clegg and Cameron, so last night Mark Maslin, director of the Environment Institute at UCL; Matthew Spencer, director of Green Alliance and Fiona Harvey, The Financial Times’s environment correspondent debated where green policy needs to go from here, with ITV News’s Lawrence McGinty in the chair