David Lammy vows to put climate action at centre of UK foreign policy

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

UK foreign secretary David Lammy has vowed to place climate action and nature at the heart of Britain’s foreign policy, and will 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 worse problem than terrorism.

“The threat may not feel 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 all the Foreign Office does. This is critical given the scale of the threat, but also the scale of the opportunity.”

Tackling climate change was essential to securing the UK’s security and prosperity, he said.

He also announced he was “firing the starting gun” on Labour’s pledge to build a global clean power alliance, in which the UK will facilitate the sharing of knowledge and technologies to help more countries decarbonise and to bolster innovation.

Labour’s focus on the green transition, including the creation of GB Energy, a new state-owned company set up to channel investment into clean energy, comes in marked contrast to the last Tory administration, which rowed back on key environmental targets.

While scepticism about the cost and timeframe 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 his government will become the first major economy to decarbonise its energy electricity system by 2030.

The move will require a rapid build-out of new wind and solar farms as well as pylons and electricity cables to move electricity around, risking tensions with communities that oppose pylons near their homes.

But Ed Miliband, energy secretary, told an audience of energy executives in London on Tuesday that the government would “take on the blockers, the delayers, 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 fight of our time.”

Fossil fuels “simply cannot provide us with the security, or indeed the affordability, we need — quite the opposite”, he added.

Lammy said the UK “will leverage 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 across the world.

The alliance will aim to help other nations “leapfrog fossil fuels and transition to power systems with renewables at their core”, by expediting the supply of critical minerals and injecting impetus into expanding energy grids and storage, according to the Foreign Office.

It added that the UK would push for ambitious pledges on climate finance and reduced emissions at the UN COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan in November.

Lammy said he would reinstate the UK 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 come as Anneliese Dodds, development minister, was in Indonesia to discuss strengthening ties with the country on 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 genuine partnership with countries like Indonesia’,” she added.