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UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy has promised to put climate action and nature at the heart of British foreign policy, and create new special representatives in each area.
In a speech on Tuesday, Lammy framed climate change and the nature crisis as the defining geopolitical challenge of the era, warning that it is a problem worse than terrorism.
“The threat may not be as urgent as a terrorist or an imperialist autocrat, but it is more fundamental. It is systemic, pervasive and accelerating towards us,” he said.
Lammy added: “While I am Foreign Secretary, action on the climate and nature crisis will be central to everything the Foreign Office does. This is critical given the scale of the threat, but even the scale of opportunity.”
Tackling climate change was essential to ensure the UK’s security and prosperity, he said.
He also announced that he had “fired the starting gun” on Labour’s commitment to build a global clean energy alliance, in which the UK will facilitate the sharing of knowledge and technology to help more countries decarbonise and boost the innovation.
Labour’s focus on the green transition, including the creation of GB Energy, a new state-owned company set up to channel investment in clean energy, comes in stark contrast to the last Tory administration, which replaced on targets key environmental.
While skepticism about the cost and timing of achieving net zero carbon emissions has grown on the right of British politics in recent years, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has insisted that his government will become the first major economy to decarbonize its electricity system by 2030.
The move will require the rapid construction of new wind and solar farms, as well as pylons and power cables to transport the electricity, risking tensions with communities who oppose the pylons near their homes.
But Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, told an audience of energy executives in London on Tuesday that the government would “take on the blockers, the delays, the obstructionists”.
Speaking at the Energy UK trade group conference, he said: “The clean energy sprint is the economic justice, energy security and national security struggle of our time.”
Fossil fuels “simply cannot provide the security, or even the affordability, we need — quite the opposite,” he added.
Lammy said the UK would “harness that ambition to build an alliance committed to accelerating the clean energy transition”, as he argued for the importance of accelerating the rollout of renewable energy around the world.
The alliance aims to help other nations “jump off fossil fuels and transition to energy systems with renewables at their core,” accelerating the supply of critical minerals and injecting momentum into the expansion of energy networks and storage, according to the Foreign Office.
He added that the UK will push for ambitious commitments on climate finance and reduced emissions at the UN COP29 summit in Azerbaijan in November.
Lammy said he would take over the UK’s special representative for climate change, a role scrapped by former prime minister Rishi Sunak last year, and create a new special representative for nature.
His comments came as development minister Anneliese Dodds was in Indonesia to discuss strengthening ties with the country in areas including critical minerals and green investment.
“The new UK government is saying: ‘let’s go for green growth and let’s do it with a real partnership with countries like Indonesia,'” he added.