By Valerie Volcovici
Sept 23 (Reuters) – Britain said on Wednesday it would provide £331 million ($438.24 million) to help tackle climate change and biodiversity loss-driven instability, warning that environmental shocks are increasingly becoming a national security threat.
The government said the funding would go to the Global Environment Facility to support food and water security and protect ecosystems, including forests in the Amazon and Congo Basin.
The announcement came after UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband called on world leaders at New York Climate Week — on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly — to factor in climate change as they assess their national security risks, saying that climate change and ecological collapse should be integrated into defense strategies, intelligence networks, and strategic military planning.
“Countries need to pool information because a shock beginning in one country can rapidly travel through supply chains, financial markets, and migration patterns to other countries,” Miliband said.
The focus on climate security comes as the Iran war has caused oil and gas prices to surge, pushing some countries to use more coal power, a major source of carbon emissions, and other countries to adopt more solar power and electric vehicles.
Katie White, the UK’s minister for climate transition, told Reuters on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly that the UK is “leading the way” on turning countries’ focus to climate security ahead of the upcoming COP31 climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, which begins on November 9.
“The military has been at the forefront of a lot of this [climate risk] planning for a long time because they’ve always seen that climate change is a threat multiplier,” she said. “The politics is a bit behind the security community on this.”
($1 = £0.7553)
(Reporting by Valerie Volcovici and Bipasha Dey in Bengaluru; Editing by Chris Reese and Christian Schmollinger)
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