Foreign Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Climate diplomacy, HC 738
Tuesday 27 October 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 27 October 2026.
Members present: Emily Thornberry (Chair); Dr Zubir Ahmed; Fleur Anderson; Alex Ballinger; Aphra Brandreth; Abtisam Mohamed; Edward Morello; Jessica Toale; Sir John Whittingdale.
Questions 43-58
Witnesses
I: Dr Beatrice Mosello, Senior Research Fellow, Environment and Society Centre, Chatham House, Dr Timothy Clack, Chingiz Gutseriev Associate Professor and Director of the Climate Change & (In)Security Programme, University of Oxford, Laurie Laybourn, Executive Director, Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, and Janani Vivekananda, Director of Climate Diplomacy and Security Programme, Adelphi Global.
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Dr Beatrice Mosello, Dr Timothy Clack, Laurie Laybourn and Janani Vivekananda.
Chair: Welcome to the Foreign Affairs Committee oral evidence session on climate diplomacy. Today, in the run-up to COP31, we are hearing from experts about climate and nature loss as a national security risk. Will the witnesses introduce themselves?
Dr Mosello: Good morning, everyone. I am Beatrice Mosello. I am a senior research fellow at Chatham House, a think-tank based in London, here in the UK.
Dr Clack: I am Tim Clack. I am associate professor and director of the climate change and security programme at the University of Oxford, and a multidisciplinary researcher.
Laurie Laybourn: My name is Laurie Laybourn. I am executive director of a think-tank called the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, and I am a fellow at the University of Exeter, at the Institute for Public Policy Research and at Chatham House.
Janani Vivekananda: Good morning. My name is Janani Vivekananda. I am the director of climate diplomacy and security at Adelphi, a think-tank based in Berlin.
Q43 Chair: Thank you very much for coming. We are going to have about an hour for this evidence session, if that is all right. I will start off by asking the first question, but other Members may have questions as well. We may not ask everyone to answer every question, because we may not have time; we want to use our time as efficiently as possible and get as much evidence from you and from your huge expertise. We are proud and pleased to have you before us. Thank you very much for coming.
The first question is a general one. The Foreign Secretary has argued that climate change and nature loss should be viewed as national security threats, and there are campaigns on that issue. Do you agree with that framing? I will start with Beatrice Mosello.
Dr Mosello: Thank you for the question. It is an important framing and an important recognition that climate change and nature loss are not just environmental issues. The framing of them as national security issues is important to move them beyond siloisation in how they are treated and therefore responded to. It helps to elevate them on the political and decision-making agenda. It highlights their systemic nature and how the impacts of climate change and nature biodiversity loss have consequences for everything that underpins our economies and societal functions—our security, essentially.
From food production to health and water security, such as our drinking water, we have seen the impacts of climate change very vividly on our doorstep this summer, and we will see them even more going forward. This framing is an important recognition of the systemic nature of the threats and impacts and therefore of the need for systemic responses across Government.
I also think that the framing helps highlight the fact that it is a security issue not just at home, but in the impacts of climate change on us abroad as well. That is how it becomes a foreign policy question. It will have repercussions for the UK at home in terms of the cascading risks and impacts of, for example, a drought in a key food-producing region, which will cause food prices to spike, with repercussions for the cost of living here in the UK.
It will also potentially have repercussions in terms of climate impacts—actually, we have evidence of that in many contexts—driving the social, economic and political factors that cause conflict and violence in specific regions and contributing to more regional and global instability. That obviously has implications for the UK in terms of its development, in its humanitarian, stabilisation, peacebuilding and conflict prevention engagements.
Q44 Chair: Laurie Laybourn, I understand about climate change, but the arguments are not so front and centre when it comes to nature loss being a national security threat. In answering the more general question, could you also focus on that, please?
Laurie Laybourn: Of course. I agree with you that nature has been, as it were, the poor sibling to climate when it comes to our understanding of the security consequences. That has been unfortunate, because, at the end of the day, we are facing an Earth system crisis. The planet has a number of different systems like a human body does—the heart, the respiratory system and so on—and they all have to work in harmony for us to have stable and secure societies. All those systems—the climate system, and water, as Beatrice was saying—are being knocked out of that stability, so really what we need to be talking about here is an Earth system security threat.
Nature is, of course, a huge part of that Earth system and has been relatively under-focused on in the past. That is, of course, changing, and the latest, greatest example of that was the seminal report from the UK Government on the security implications of changes in biodiversity and potential ecosystem collapse. That really is a world-leading document that has clearly shown the vectors by which we would have national security threats here in the UK. The food system is a very good example of that because, where we rely on importing food from places that from are facing ecosystem changes—changes to their nature and biodiversity—that could fundamentally threaten our food security here at home.
For me, the overall national security threat framing is increasingly appropriate just because climate change and the loss of nature have now reached such a severe extent that they are beginning to press up against our areas of national security concern. Food is the latest and greatest example of that, with our domestic harvests so far this decade—in the 2020s—being some of the worst on record, and there are these growing threats abroad that could echo back to us through supply chains.
Of course, as I am sure we will get into, the question is: as those national security threats begin to play out, what type of securitisation will we end up developing here in the UK, and what implications will that have around the world? To throw one thing in before we go into that in more detail, that has to understand that security is a shared construct when you are facing Earth system threats; we cannot pull up the walls to the loss of biodiversity and the breakdown of the climate system. Our securitisation is inevitably going to happen as climate change and nature loss graduate to national security threats, so the type of securitisation—what it is and how we define that in Britain—is crucial for what comes next.
Q45 Chair: The problem might be that if we talk about it in terms of a security threat, you end up with it being framed as that, and it could end up being just about short-term crisis management and not about looking about the issue in more depth. Does anybody want to address that issue?
Janani Vivekananda: Yes, I agree with the framing, but I also agree that there is this perception risk from the terminology of security. That perception risk is separate from, but also very related to, the resourcing risk. Framing climate and nature loss as a security risk does not necessarily mean that it will lead to militarised responses, but there is a perception and a strong lobby that that could be the case. There is a risk that perceptions and the reductivity that come with that framing could lead to these kinds of responses, because perceptions can then shape policy. Unless the Government are explicit in what responses look like, it is likely that we could fall into this path of securitisation, leading to very short-term risk response and perhaps risk management, but certainly not prevention.
The security label, if we leave it unqualified, does invite a harder security reading with things like increased defence spending and militarised contingency planning. But if we ensure that this framing is paired consistently and very visibly in the public space with investment in what is essentially soft security responses—mitigation and adaptation investing, continued investing in loss and damage, and finance—this can be the corrective to the risk of militarised responses.
I would very much underscore what Laurie said about ensuring that this is a systemic response, but also making sure that the security framing is very much people-centred and certainly ecosystem and biodiversity-facing. It is about including these systemic risks, but in order to ensure that we do not fall into the trap of a harder security pathway and path dependency, also ensuring that human security and people-centred approaches—alongside nature, nature loss and biodiversity—can be a corrective to the potential securitisation of climate responses.
Chair: I think Aphra has a follow-up on this.
Q46 Aphra Brandreth: It is actually a follow-up to something that Dr Mosello said about our food security and the national security threat to our food resilience that has been identified. I wanted to get your perspective on whether we should be treating our ability to produce food here in the UK as more of a food security priority and have a proper national strategy on that.
Chair: Do you mind if I ask Dr Clack to answer that? We have not heard from him yet, and it is also within his area of expertise.
Dr Clack: If I may, I would like to answer two questions. First, on the securitisation question, it is important to recognise that security apparatus is already engaged in this space to a degree, if we think about environmental crimes such as illegal logging, illegal fishing and wildlife trafficking. There is a security dimension there already. Yes, we would want to avoid an over-securitised response—think of the example of the war on drugs and the problematic outcomes on the counter-narcotics side—but there are hard security dimensions to a lot of this and those need to be analysed, assessed and, if appropriate, mitigated.
With the drive towards conflict and the rise of violence, we need to recognise that militaries have a significant carbon boot print. Stabilisation, conflict prevention and negotiation are all crucial responses, and obviously diplomacy has a key role in delivering those things. Think about the dual-use opportunities that exist in this space as well in terms of defence engagement, defence diplomacy and security diplomacy. Things like rotary-winged aircraft—helicopters, effectively—are useful from a national security perspective because you can move equipment and forces around, but they are also very useful in accessing areas that have been hit by a natural disaster: they can move aid around and help with communications and logistics.
An even better example than that is what is becoming known as defensive rewilding, which is effectively where you take areas of critical natural infrastructure and restore them—you re-wet marshlands, peatlands and so on. The Baltic defence line from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania is a good example. Poland’s Green Shield is another really good example of where man-made fortifications are being enhanced through the re-wetting of these landscapes, which obviously act as an obstacle to the movement of armour and logistical vehicles. The reason that is happening in those areas is clear, but the dual use is that these areas trap carbon and create biodiversity corridors, so they are a good thing. Investment in those kinds of areas are outsized because they are dual use.
On the question of food security, this is a massive problem at home and abroad. Ultimately, people are fed largely through their own soil or through trade, so supply chains and soil need to be preserved. There are all kind of issues, currently—
Q47 Chair: Just for the record, what percentage of our food do we grow ourselves and what percentage do we import?
Dr Clack: That is a good question; I do not have those figures, but certainly it is more on the supply side.
Chair: The Committee thinks 60%.
Dr Clack: On food security more generally, what we are seeing around the world—partly because of water security, but also because of soil degradation, biodiversity loss, the loss of pollinators and pest predators and so on—is a reduction in viable agricultural land. That is both horticulture land and grassland for livestock.
Because of that, populations are already starting to respond. You either die, move or secure access to those resources. We are already seeing the colonisation of new territories, the annexation of agricultural land, the creation of militias to protect resources, and over-extraction as communities try to create a surplus, which is obviously problematic because you have over-extracted.
Another point that is often missed is buying food production infrastructure in other countries. Lots of countries have been very good at this quietly. China in particular, over the last three decades, has been buying up a huge amount of food production infrastructure all over the world—in Africa and Asia, but also in North America—to the extent that Smithfield Foods, for example, was bought out by a Chinese company a few years ago and effectively bought out by the Chinese state. That gives China control of one in four pigs in America, so quite remarkable things are happening, largely unrecognised.
Countries are quietly securing access to food. One of the things we need to be conscious of is that we need to do a lot of friendshoring around our own supply chains—making those supply chains more robust—because when stress and crises hit we will need to be able to ensure our access to food.
My final point is that that is not without issues, including diplomatic issues—as we saw with the covid crisis over PPE, for example. When you start extracting from an area and then there is a change to supply and demand, and the host community does not have access to those things any more because they cannot afford the inflated price, that causes problems.
I will give you some examples. Ethiopians have not forgotten that, during the famine in the 1980s, Europe was still importing huge amounts of sugar snap peas, for example. That has not been forgotten; it still shapes diplomatic relationships. If we want to think intergenerationally, we can think about the Holodomor in eastern Europe, in which the Soviets were extracting food and creating famine, and the Indian famine during world war two. These things are diplomatic realities that we still live with to this day.
Chair: I will call Jessica and then Edward, and then we will move on to the next official question.
Q48 Jessica Toale: I want to go back to what Laurie and Janani were saying about national security as a framing. I can see how that can create a sense of urgency in terms of international co-operation or national action to respond to a challenge, but can any of the experts reflect on what impact that framing would have on public support for the actions that Government need to take to address the big issues?
Chair: Who do you want to ask that to?
Jessica Toale: Let’s go back to Laurie on that one. Laurie, you were talking about how the potential to draw up the walls could be a negative consequence of this type of framing. There is obviously a risk when you talk to the public about a securitised approach to climate change and nature loss, because it is something so big and quite disempowering most of the time that the instinct is to retract inwards.
Laurie Laybourn: I think that question gets to the heart of the matter. It will be a delicate tightrope that we have to walk along, because on the one hand there is that potential knee-jerk, emergency, hard security, tactical response, where you see threats to food security and seek to score supplies in a zero-sum way from others, as Tim was implying. But on the other side we anticipate a near future in which climate change and nature loss have become so severe that they are automatically national security issues because, simply, they are adversely impacting the fundamentals of our national security. We will have to get a balance that toes the line between responding to the symptoms of that world and ensuring that we stay focused on what is causing all of it.
Our concern, and the concern from others, is about a potentially militarised or authoritarian securitisation. Fundamentally, we are worried about that because, alongside the harm and de-democratisation that it could cause, it would mean that we were overly focused on the symptoms of the climate-changed world that we are in, at the cost of dealing with its causes. That would lead us into a potentially catastrophic situation globally, because it would mean that as things got worse we would increasingly fail to focus on what was causing that and therefore on the need to reduce emissions and so on.
We face a situation in which securitisation is in some ways inevitable because climate change has been allowed to get this bad. The question is whether we can fashion some kind of progressive or networked idea of what that securitisation could be. For the public that would mean that you are in a situation where you say, “Okay, the story that you have heard for decades—that if left suitably unchecked this could become so bad—has unfortunately now come true and our food security is stressed, and the systems that give us the ability to ensure that there is geopolitical co-operation globally have been stressed, not just by decisions of various leaders but by climate change. That means that it is now going to have to be the priority that a number of campaigners have always said it has to be.”
I think there is a way of telling that story that ensures you mitigate the potential for a more hard security response, but that is coming down the line at us, unfortunately, because as we go over 1.5°C key elements of our security and economy—such as food and water—will experience such severe impacts that they will automatically become national security concerns.
Q49 Edward Morello: I will direct this at Dr Clack, but I am also interested in other takes. Climate change is obviously driving political instability, conflict and food security issues but it is also driving irregular migration, especially towards rich countries such as the UK. We then also have the whole food security issue that we are talking about. I wonder whether the cuts to the UK international aid budget—large amounts of that budget were spent on stability and climate resilience in developing countries with the aim of giving people a place to stay, rather than them feeling they need to move—are causing more irregular migration and greater issues in-country. Does it impact our ability to carry out climate diplomacy when our contribution to combating climate change is now so constrained?
Dr Clack: Yes is the answer, clearly. Prevention is better than cure. If ecosystems, landscapes and terrain become uninhabitable or if the carrying capacity of that land is compromised in some way, people have to move. Studies demonstrate that lots of people first move internally—which is internal displacement—but there are motivations for moving more widely. That is politically problematic in lots of countries.
When it comes to migration there is also the issue that migrants usually have a sense that they will return home at some point. In a kind of scorched-earth environment that has been desecrated by climate change that is not possible. There is no prospect of going home and that creates a kind of intergenerational obligation. We have seen lots of issues in the past from the infrastructure in urban areas becoming overwhelmed. There were lots of complicated drivers of the Syrian civil war but it is no coincidence that before it happened there was a multi-year drought that saw lots of people removed from their rural communities and moving into cities, with grievances and so on. Food inflation reached something like 26% in Egypt before Mubarak was overthrown, so there are lots of examples that we can speak to.
In terms of ODA funding and infrastructure, there have been serious cuts to UK programming and reach. I have an example I can speak to in terms of climate security. From January 2024 to the middle of this year, I was directing a project in Jordan building the world’s first climate security intelligence capability, which was really highly regarded and highly sought. It had lots of really good impact and lots of access. It was developed in engagement with the highest levels of the Jordanian state, including the Hashemite court, municipalities, Ministries and so on. After the strategic review settlement, climate security was taken out of play, so effectively the programme had to end, despite this thing having been built and there having been huge amounts of buy-in locally and huge amounts of value, both for the British embassy in Amman and elsewhere. There was regional interest in building a network of these things in Syria, Lebanon and Iraq—all the kinds of places where this kind of insight would be really viable.
The tap for the project was effectively turned off, and the project had to end. We were able to keep a level of support going through some funding that we are able to find through the University of Oxford, but that is a sub-optimal situation to be in. The implication of taps going on and off is that you lose access, diplomatic trust, engagement and access to different parts of the state that could be useful from a security perspective but also from a development perspective as well.
Migration in Jordan was one of the biggest issues that they were dealing with. One of the grievances that was repeated often through many of the individuals me and my team were working with—I will not name names—was that the UK had committed to support the influx relating to Syrian refugees over a sustained period of time, and again the taps were turned off, so there was a frustration there and there was a diplomatic fallout from that.
Chair: I am going to go to John, but I also just want to remind the Committee that we are still on the first question and we have half an hour left, so if we could possibly have shorter questions and perhaps shorter answers. The quality of the answers is extremely high, and I am very grateful for that. I think this has been a very useful part of the session, but I ask that we pick up a bit.
Q50 Sir John Whittingdale: I am not quite sure how you will answer this question briefly, but I’m sure you can have a go. The consequences of climate change are made more complicated by all the phenomena that will be affected; I am thinking of AMOC, El Niño and so on. If we look ahead and get to the worst-case scenario, which is now becoming more of a possibility, where in the world will be worst affected? In which regions is it going to become so acute that we are looking, for instance, at really mass migration as a consequence?
Dr Clack: There is a brilliant map in one of the IPCC reports, which basically forecasts areas that will effectively become uninhabitable because of water scarcity at the point of 2070. As you would expect, that map has a lot of red around the equator, sub-Saharan Africa, central Asia and so on. Those are really densely populated areas that have high population growth currently. Those areas are effectively going to see large-scale movement. There are lots of estimates of what those numbers might look like—António Guterres at the UN said a billion people by 2050. I think that is probably oversizing the kind of risk, but we are talking about a really high level of unprecedented human mobility that we have not seen previously, and those individuals will effectively need to go somewhere.
Laurie Laybourn: Alongside that, if we are talking about worst cases, there are now a number of wildcards that we cannot rule out, unfortunately. One was just mentioned: the AMOC—the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation—which is why we have vineyards in England at roughly the latitude at which Canada has polar bears. We now cannot rule out that it could stop moving heat northwards, which would be disastrous for the UK. The climate refugees would then be people from Britain, Ireland and north-western Europe.
If we are talking about the range of possibilities now on the table because climate change has got this bad, and about migration, there are a number of dimensions. One is the story of the tropics that we heard there from Tim, which is, of course, an area of significant institutional concern all around the world. But we must also remember that migration within Britain, and potentially out of it, is something that we increasingly need to have on our minds.
Q51 Sir John Whittingdale: My constituency is now full of vineyards, which I regard as a very small silver lining in all of this. Dr Mosello, did you want to come in?
Dr Mosello: Yes, I have just a quick addition to what Dr Clack and Laurie have been saying. On the hotspots that we should be concerned about, the recent situation with the Iran conflict and the closure of the strait of Hormuz has made it very clear that it is not just about the climate change impacts, which would be bad enough; it is about how those climate change impacts interact with geopolitical conflict and fragility dynamics. A lot of research has gone into understanding where the different drivers of vulnerability overlap, and essentially all the fragile and conflict-affected contexts are also the ones that are most climate-vulnerable. You have compound risks that need to be taken into account, which shine the spotlight on regions such as the horn of Africa, the Sahel, Lake Chad and others that are deeply in conflict, where the humanitarian situation is already extremely dramatic and where, on top of that, you have the impacts of climate change.
Janani Vivekananda: Could I quickly add that, along with those stresses, we are also already facing lethal heat and humidity? It is not just El Niño and the potential AMOC implications. This is affecting South Asia, parts of the middle east, north Africa, the Amazon basin and sub-Saharan Africa, and it is only projected to increase. That is making outdoor temperatures—wet-bulb temperatures—unliveable from a human health perspective, and those areas also cover so much of the world’s food production. It is not just about thinking about what this means for the people living there in terms of migration and mobility.
To underscore the point, most of the research that we have now shows that people are not moving as a result of climate change regionally. It is predominantly from rural areas to urban areas, or within the same country or just over domestic borders, but not in terms of what UK-based constituents might be concerned about; that is not so much what the research on drivers of mobility is pointing to. It is not sub-Saharan Africa into Asia or from central America and Latin America into the US, for example. We are not seeing that. I think we need to look at some of these compound risks in terms of what they might mean for regional fragility in the contexts that I just mentioned, and also for food production and access to fertiliser, things like this. Those compound and cascading risk pathways are definitely something that we need to better understand.
Q52 Alex Ballinger: I am interested in the ranking of the risks, because you have all given very good examples of terrible things that will happen around the world, from water scarcity, to the UK changing its temperature, to food insecurity all along the equator. Has any work been done on ranking those risks, and on which ones we should be most concerned about and most focused on as the UK? I know Laurie has done some work on this, but perhaps I will go to Dr Clack first.
Dr Clack: Partly, it is a question of prioritisation, isn’t it? Effectively, it is to do with perspective. So, what would be a priority for a state in sub-Saharan Africa might be different from what would be a priority for a climate migrant in the middle east, and for the UK.
I would suggest, with a sense of the kind of political landscape that there is, that the economic security consequences of this are right up there for the UK. Studies have shown that we are looking at costs of approximately 20% of GDP per year within the next three decades. That is a huge amount of money that has to be found by the state in order to—
Q53 Alex Ballinger: And that is due to climate change, or these nature loss things—
Dr Clack: That is to do with system restoration; it is to do with adaptations that need to be put in place, with hardening of infrastructure that suddenly becomes unviable at certain temperature levels, and so on.
Climate-induced shifts to the cost of capital are already occurring. The insurance market is becoming very concerned about what these realities will look like, both in the short term and in the longer term. Appetite for investment is shifting. There is also the issue of capital flight, which is particularly problematic in parts of the global south that are very vulnerable to these changes. Ultimately, commercial enterprises need to recognise that they are not vulnerable and that they are going to be able to make money. But actually, if they are going into areas that are particularly fragile, that is not going to be possible, with huge diplomatic consequences, because who will these countries start to blame in those situations? So, there will be economic impacts.
Obviously, conflict is the primary national security issue. Climate change is a driver, but not a singular driver. When you mix in sectarian, economic, identity-type situations, and you mix in food security, water security, energy security and migration, you’ve got a real constellation of problems there, which are going to amplify the amount of conflict that we are going to see around the world.
We can point to a longitudinal study that demonstrates that. A few years ago, the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford conducted a study looking at incidents of civil war in sub-Saharan Africa; I think that it was over a 30-year time-slice. For every increase in temperature of 1°C, incidents of civil war went up by 4.5%, which is a huge problem. And that is just sub-Saharan Africa.
We can talk about pressures over fresh water and agricultural land in those contexts; I will not do so, just for reasons of time. However, there are lots of studies that could be pointed to in that regard.
I think you have the economic situation at the top. You have then got the conflict situation—the stabilisation situation. Then, you have also got what you might call grey zone threats, which is things like the theft of green intellectual property, the weaponisation of ESG reporting, and lawfare creating problems linked to legal liabilities and risks. There is the disinformation dimension, as well, and the FIMI—foreign information manipulation and interference. States are already very active in this space, suggesting that climate change is a form of colonialism or neo-colonialism, that the west is responsible, that the west has poisoned wells, that it has stolen water, that it is growing cash crops and degrading irrigation systems.
Q54 Alex Ballinger: We saw some of that as part of our disinformation research—
Dr Clack: Oh, right. Okay.
Fleur Anderson: Read our report.
Dr Clack: I will do, for sure. But that is there and it is shaping diplomatic realities and international relations.
Chair: We have had a fairly comprehensive and alarming picture very well painted by our four witnesses. Given the time constraints, I wonder, with Alex’s permission, whether we can move on. We also really need to talk about COP and about what the international response to all of this ought to be. Otherwise, I fear that we could spend the whole session comprehensively looking at what climate change is doing to us now and will do in the near future. Can I move on to Fleur, who has some questions on those other issues?
Q55 Fleur Anderson: I would just like to declare that I am the chair of the all-party parliamentary group on the environment and I travelled to Kenya earlier this year to look at the impacts of the climate. Also, I used to work for WaterAid, so I looked a lot at water insecurity in northern Kenya, but also at what the British Government are doing and how they are supporting some environmental projects, especially in Nairobi.
I want to ask all of you a question about what our priorities should be for COP31 and for chairing the G20. I will come to each of you in turn, so it is like a quickfire round. What would success look like for the UK both at COP31 and in chairing the G20? There are all these competing priorities, as we have just highlighted in the question from Alex.
Should they be focused on weather systems, as we have talked about with AMOC and El Niño? Should they be concentrating on regions, including sub-Saharan Africa, which we have talked about, as well as the Bay of Bengal and the rainforests? Should it be other issues such as air pollution, which is one of the biggest killers in the world and causes 7 million premature deaths a year, or access to clean water, which is a big driver of conflict and presents sanitation and health issues? Should it be carbon emissions, on which our diplomacy has really focused up to now? Or should it be food or something else?
That is a taster of what we would like to briefly hear from each of you on those issues and how it focuses down. Janani, I would love to hear about your membership of the UK taskforce on the national security and resilience risks of a changing climate and nature loss. It is not the snappiest taskforce name I have ever heard, but I was really excited to see it made recently, and to see that you are on it as well. Can we get your thoughts on whether the UK has a joined-up policy? There is that taskforce, but are we joined up internationally?
Dr Clack: Not joined up. On the big-ticket items, I would suggest that we get the messaging right, build a consensus, communicate the risks, which I think is important, show leadership, drive implementation, and demonstrate commitment and urgency about the response.
I would also say it is important not to underestimate just how much public support there actually is for protecting nature biodiversity and responding to climate. Polls consistently show 60% or 70%, even in the US, so there is a sense that this is important and should be prioritised. If we think of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, people want to be cool, to be fed, to be watered and to have shelter—all those things come into play. Businesses want a stable investment environment, a productive workforce and resilience.
Q56 Chair: But Fleur’s question is about British agency. It is about what a successful COP looks like, and what role we should be playing. It is also about the G20 and what should be on the agenda. Is it not much more specific?
Dr Clack: I would then say preservation of critical natural infrastructure, so it is about actually making the case to protect soils and biodiversity, and ensuring the wins that fall out from that. We are in a slightly tricky situation with the messaging. I do not want to mention party political issues, but we have just given concessions at Jackdaw, which has not been missed around the world, and that will no doubt be part of the discussion at COP.
Fleur Anderson: I will go to Janani next.
Dr Clack: If I can say one more thing on Jackdaw, from a security perspective, extracting your strategic reserve at this moment in time is not a good idea either.
Janani Vivekananda: I think the UK should use COP for coalition-building, as so much of this needs to be done through partnerships and alliances. I think that the UK now being outside the EU—well, there is a lot of scope to build coalitions.
This is a really important geopolitical moment. The UK is one of the very few countries that is sending a Head of State, so it is leading by example and showing that this is a priority for the UK. I think it should build on what is already there, including building out from what was set up at UNGA with Kenya and the EU. It can then potentially look at priority partners such as the EU and its group of friends for an ambitious climate diplomacy, and build out with Kenya through the African Union. It is about using the climate diplomacy tool to really strengthen those.
That could be through thematic channels, but we should definitely use this COP as a chance to show that this is not just a national security-led agenda, with the UK looking inwards and making climate a UK domestic issue. We touched on this earlier: the most affected countries, outside the annex 1 group, could be really concerned about the framing of the taskforce and of climate and nature loss as a national security issue by the Foreign Secretary. It could give out the message that this is about nationalism, doubling down, borders up, export bans and so on. This is a real opportunity to show that this is about building new alliances and walking the talk with the climate finance pledges.
On G20, the UK should focus on where it has a good track record in global leadership. I think finance—disaster risk finance—and anticipatory action for climate and climate-vulnerable states would be a really interesting thing. I think the insurance industry is looking at this already. There is a lot of opportunity to scale things like this up and explore some of the initiatives such as the UN’s Early Warnings for All initiative, which exists in the B20. That could sit within the G20, formalising it. It makes so much sense, because it is about reducing climate conflict, cascading risks through prevention and providing social safeguards both domestically and internationally.
The G20 could also, through the UK finance sector’s convening power, look at debt treatment tied to climate resilience and push reform of something like the G20 common framework, so that debt restructuring for fragile and climate-exposed states sits within how we understand climate security risk and build resilience globally.
The third priority for the G20 would be climate-resilient food system investment. We could work through the G20 agriculture working group and look at the UK’s own food import exposure, but also look at the grouping of the G20 to invest in climate resilience in specific exporting regions for the UK, looking at how the G20’s economic security is tied to this. I have one final thing—
Chair: Sorry, but we are really short on time.
Janani Vivekananda: Sorry, I will just finish the sentence. We could use the G20 to explore how to institutionalise climate security planning, risk assessment and foresight methodology through a joint G20 risk assessment, because this is not just a national endeavour. It can be strengthened through joint planning.
Q57 Dr Ahmed: I was just reflecting on COP26, which was in my home city of Glasgow; it seems like a whole different geopolitical era ago. For the next COP, we have spoken about where we have leverage and advantage. Where do you think the highest areas of priority are in terms of countries for diplomatic engagement? Given the new era that we live in, how is success defined for COP31 for the United Kingdom?
Dr Mosello: If I might comment on COP31, I second everything that my colleagues have mentioned about the messaging, leadership and coalition-building—thank you for your question on what coalitions should be prioritised.
To me, a key area of engagement for the UK at COP31, beyond the ones that have already mentioned, is adaptation and climate finance more generally. The Foreign Secretary’s statement in Bangkok, when he attended the meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, concerned the focus on prioritising climate finance, ensuring that finance can reach conflicts and fragile contexts, and the question of accessibility of finance. Those are really important areas. They are also areas that have been plagued by mistrust and that have played a divisive role at previous COPs. So this is an area where there is a lot of need for engagement and coalition-building.
That is also because the UK is where a lot of the private finance sits. We have the City of London and a lot of engagement from the private sector and private finance, which will have to play an important role in adaptation finance. Clearly, the numbers that we are talking about are not numbers that can be matched only by public spending. Those areas of engagement are essential.
In June, we had London Climate Action Week. It was a surprisingly big engagement, with tens of thousands of people and organisations present. We should transmit the energy that was at London Climate Action Week—again, the private sector, the insurance sector and the risk sector were present, along with local communities and civil society organisations, reflecting the local work and action happening in a lot of your constituencies—to COP and use it to leverage coalitions with not just other countries, but civil society and the private sector on issues around adaptation, resilience, food systems and water security.
I say “water security” not just because I have spent a good part of the last 20 years working on it, but because it is a super-important area where we are seeing a lot of the climate risks materialising. It is also where we are seeing a lot of entry points for co-operation and collaboration. Historically, the data tell us that it is more common that people co-operate than enter into dispute or conflict over shared water resources.
Using that energy and shared interest to build coalitions and foster action would be important. This year is an important year for water, with the water conference in Abu Dhabi in December, and the whole water governance process under way at the moment towards 2028. There is a big momentum for the UK, which has been a very active player in the water security space, to join those agendas as well.
I have just one quick last point. Water security is also a big priority for the G20, in addition to what Janani was saying on food security and the disaster risk finance priorities.
Q58 Jessica Toale: I would like to come back to the UK’s infrastructure for responding to the security risks around climate change and nature loss. A lot of our responses have to be joined up across several Government Departments. The ICF facility and the UK taskforce will require inputs from lots of different Government Departments.
Janani, given that you a part of the taskforce, could you reflect on whether we are able to sufficiently join up those various pieces across Government? Also, given that Zubir asked about alliances, who should we be looking to for best practice in this context?
Janani Vivekananda: It is wonderful to have this taskforce, and a lot of countries are looking to the UK for best practice as a result; I am sitting in Germany, where there is certainly a lot of interest, and a lot of other countries, including Finland and the Netherlands, have also reached out on how this cross-ministerial conversation can happen. We can be quite proud that there is some leadership already there.
We can have a great joined-up strategy, but there is also a challenge that is worth naming. If we get something that is cross-departmental and that makes climate security cross-cutting, it can actually lose ownership; it kind of becomes everything, and then it becomes nothing. If every Department is told to prioritise climate security, there is no accountability and no Department holds the ownership. You then get diffusion rather than co-ordination; it sounds like mainstreaming, but it does not actually have substance.
The thing I would prioritise would be that you can have a cross-Government strategy, but within that there need to be clearly defined climate security mandates. That means not having generic risks and the term just thrown in, as you often see in mandates, but translating this into specific terms within the mandates of the specific Ministries and agencies, so that it is very tangible. So you look at critical mineral supply chain resilience and clean power investment for DESNZ. You look at basing resilience for the MOD. You look at border and displacement operational readiness, and how to ease those pressures within the Home Office. It needs to be very, very tangible. That means really unpacking these compound and cascading risks and then placing some of that ownership in specific named Ministries; otherwise, the challenge is that climate security is mainstreamed, but there is no one institutional home and there is no accountability.
In terms of good practices that exist, I have to say that I would come back to the UK, because this sitting with Cabinet Office leadership and then the relevant Ministries coming in is quite an unusual model outside the UK. There is real value in having that kind of leadership. You saw that with the Glasgow COP as well, with climate and co-ordination sitting under the Cabinet Office. So I think that—
Chair: That is nice to hear. I am so sorry to cut you short like this, but we are really up against it, and I want to bring Abtisam in.
Q59 Abtisam Mohamed: I think that my question on multilateralism has been addressed, but I have a different question, in relation to investor-state dispute settlement. Dr Clack, I think you mentioned Jackdaw earlier. At the moment, $80 billion globally goes through ISDS, and it diverts public money away towards polluters. My question is, how do we address this through the national security lens, including where British companies are perhaps suing other countries? Shell, I think, has launched a claim against the Netherlands, and a company is now suing the UK for £300 million over a proposed coalmine that was never established in Cumbria. How do we address this through the national security lens?
Chair: Who are you addressing that to?
Abtisam Mohamed: Dr Clack, if possible, because he referenced Jackdaw.
Dr Clack: That is a huge question; I would have preferred the other one! But, yes, we are seeing that area ever further toxifying. This whole notion of lawfare is happening, and states are competing through the courts as much as they are through public opinion and diplomacy.
Ultimately, we need to work out as a country where our red lines are, both publicly and privately, in order to get a sense of what our position is. At the moment, the communication that we are putting out there diplomatically is incoherent, which is problematic. What are we doing about energy security? We need to work out what that looks like, and then have a strategic calculus around that. That will then allow us to respond appropriately.
We also need to have a policy on the US position and work out what we are doing there. The US is ruining a lot of NATO’s work in the climate security space, and has been for a number of years. We need to work out what we are going to do with allies about that and what that means.
If I may, very quickly, just on the point about understanding, I think that there is a lot of understanding across HMG currently. There have been multiple inquiries—HCDC and EAC. An APPG for climate, nature and security has been in existence since 2022 and has been pushing out really good reports. There have been lots of workshops, policy papers and so on.
In terms of coherence, the UK position is actually quite good. As part of the Agile Initiative, the University of Oxford did a nine-month sprint recently involving—
Chair: Dr Clack, I have given you a minute to answer a question you have not been asked. Can I perhaps move on to somebody else? I am sorry to be mean.
Dr Clack: No, that is fine.
Chair: We have four minutes, and I think Laurie wanted to answer it too.
Laurie Laybourn: I think what we have been circling around here is that there is an opportunity for UK leadership to really define what it now means by climate security. We have heard lots of different ways in to defining it here. It is about peacebuilding in climate-vulnerable places, particularly in the tropics. It is about what the MOD does in the face of climate change. The list goes on.
The leadership that the Foreign Secretary has shown recently has been a really positive development. What could come for the COP, and then in the context of the G20 presidency, is to now define what we might mean by climate security. On the one hand, we have understood that British national security is now increasingly under threat, directly and indirectly. We also have our obligations to the wider world, and those two things have to exist together.
There is an opportunity to say, “Okay, now that we have pointed to this as a bigger issue on our agenda, this is what we mean by a definition of climate security that recognises the threat to our domestic situation but is compatible with the need for collective action to get us out of this situation.” Stemming from that would be more assessments to better understand the surprises that are coming down the line. We have the nature bit of that through the world-leading UK Government assessment, but that is just one part of an overall Earth system puzzle, as I was talking about.
A second area is then, through COP or the G20, to take some of the risks that were identified in that and other reports and say, “Well, here are some alliances and co-operative mechanisms that model how we are going to protect our national security in a way that is genuinely globally collaborative, recognising that resilience starts abroad as well as at home.”
A third area is beginning to use, or evolve, existing UK leadership on some of the really surprising things that could come down the line. We have talked a number of times about AMOC in this conversation. The UK Government, through its Advanced Research and Invention Agency, have invested over £100 million now in an early-warning system for changes in the AMOC and other climate tipping points. The Nordics are very—
Fleur Anderson: That was the boat we went on.
Chair: We went to Greenland and visited the boat.
Laurie Laybourn: And a great boat it is. There is an opportunity to expand that leadership further by working with the Nordic countries, which now consider this a national security issue. That is an area where we need new alliances to focus not just on the threats that we absolutely know are guaranteed, like food security threats, and how we do that collaboratively within Britain and then with people who connect to our supply chains, but then these bigger, surprising things down the line. The potential for multilateral stuff on AMOC is really big.
Chair: Thank you very much. I would normally ask whether you would like to make any final remarks, but given the amount of time we have left, I am so sorry that I am unable to give you that opportunity. But I thank you all very much, and if you think there is anything that you should have said—or that we should have asked—and you would like to give us further evidence, please write to us. We would be very interested. This is a subject that obviously ought to exercise us all, and as you can see, we on this Committee are very interested in it. That concludes our session on climate diplomacy. Thank you to all the witnesses for giving evidence today.