Boosting climate action can tackle Farage threat
Highlighting and undoing the ruinous 14-year Tory legacy will run and run – it is the gift that keeps on giving for Labour, even if it is already a bit irksome. But journalists are picky about which bits of the legacy they want to see undone – and very few seem to have recognised Foreign Secretary David Lammy’s recent speech at Kew Gardens as a total demolition job of the Conservatives’ record on both climate change and international aid.
Lammy’s speech was deeply personal, hard-hitting and as visionary as any member of Starmer’s government gets to be. Importantly, it's geared as much to domestic audiences as to the international community – indeed, it might as well have gone straight to Nigel Farage’s email inbox.
Both Lammy and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband are working overtime to persuade middle-of-the-road voters that getting to grips with the climate emergency is as good for them today as it is for the rest of the world, and indeed for future generations. The poisonously short-term, nativist agenda of the UK’s right-wing media demands nothing less.
Interestingly, Lammy was bold enough to seek to demonstrate that “confluence of interest” through the most controversial lens of all – migration. He noted that past policy failures already “pour fuel onto existing conflicts and regional rivalries, driving extremism, displacing communities and increasing humanitarian need” and cites that climate change is uprooting communities across the globe – with up to 200 million people forced to flee their homes by 2050.
We should seriously welcome this approach. Leave it to Home Secretary Yvette Cooper to get on top of the small boats dilemma over the next couple of years, whilst getting as many as possible to focus on the migration apocalypse awaiting us if we fail to urgently take account of the climate emergency.
Yet the World Bank’s worst-case Lammy quotes is seen by increasing numbers of climate scientists as a serious underestimate, as noted in new research Exodus Equator: 1 Billion On The Move, I co-authored alongside environmentalists Robin Maynard and Colin Hines.
Drawing extensively on the latest climate science, the study shows that as many as one billion people could be forcibly displaced as average temperatures rise across equatorial areas over the next 25 years. The world is entirely unprepared for this, financially and politically, raising the very real possibility that this will become the worst humanitarian disaster in the history of humankind.
But with geopolitical order and countries collapsing around us, in the Middle East, Ukraine, Sudan and across The Sahel, how can we possibly expect today's leaders to look beyond the flames with which they're surrounded? We have to. David Lammy and Keir Starmer have to. The prospect of one billion forcibly displaced people within the next 25 years demands nothing less.
All of which tells us that Lammy is going to have to go so much further than his eloquent demolition of the Conservatives’ 14-year record. He went out of his way to commend the work being done by Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley, the driving force behind the Bridgetown Initiative. The proposals see the unlocking of up to USD $1 trillion to enhance climate resilience in developing and vulnerable countries. The scale of this takes us way beyond the USD $100 billion per annum of climate finance agreed nine years ago and still not being delivered, as Oxfam’s analysis so devastatingly points out.
The UK itself is not in a particularly strong position to deliver on any heightened climate finance ambition. The Johnson administration’s decision to scrap the Department for International Development back in June 2020 has had catastrophic consequences – not least in the context of migration. As cabinet minister Lisa Nandy put it: “If you're worried about people fleeing persecution, war and climate change, why did you abolish DFiD and trash one of the best things that this country has ever given the world?”
Starmer himself in 2022 pledged to bring back DFiD if Labour got back into Government.
One of the key recommendations in our report is to create a new Department of International Development and Global Stability, to work alongside the Foreign Office, and Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, to provide exactly the kind of leadership that Lammy was calling for.
People are understandably suspicious of spurious ‘machinery of government’ reforms – but ‘cometh the moment, cometh the machine.’ And there has never been a moment as telling as this in terms of what needs to be done on both the climate emergency and migration.
Jonathon Porritt CBE is a leading environmental campaigner and writer, co-founder of the Forum for the Future, and President of The Conservation Volunteers and Population Matters. He is co-author of Equator Exodus: One Billion On The Move By 2050.
