By Tom Ellison

Last year, the Center for Climate and Security (CCS) conducted a research and education project aimed at exploring the implications of climate change for the UK Home Office and making recommendations to better address them. CCS’s final report, A Climate Security Plan for the Home Office, is now being publicly shared here (publication of this report does not necessarily imply Home Office endorsement of particular content or policy recommendations). Drawing on research, in-person interviews in the United Kingdom, and virtual roundtables on key issues, the report outlines the direct and indirect climate-related risks affecting the Home Office’s responsibilities for issues like emergency services, homeland security, immigration, public safety, gender-based violence, and organized crime and fraud. The report highlights the following risks:

• “#1: Harm to UK Citizens’ Health and Safety: Heat, wildfires, flooding, and disease spread pose increasing risks to UK citizens and to the Home Office’s ability to sustain key services for the public.
• #2: Strain on Services, Infrastructure, and Supply Chains: Climate change poses direct risks to the UK’s power, water, and food sectors and is likely to increasingly strain interconnected global supply chains.
• #3: Polarization, Domestic Extremism, and Gender–Based Violence: Climate hazards and heated policy debates give bad actors openings to spread misinformation, polarize society, and target women and girls. 
• #4: Inability to Accommodate Increased Climate-Driven Migration: Climate change is increasingly driving and shaping migration and displacement. Migrants are at risk of criminal exploitation, political weaponization, and xenophobic extremism, which can contribute to political instability. Inflexible migration systems and the lack of overseas investments in climate adaptation and resilience amplify the risk. 
• #5: Evolving Organized Crime and Fraud: Climate change is likely to make populations more vulnerable to scams and trafficking and shift illicit drug cultivation and markets, while some climate policies will increase fraud risks in underregulated climate finance flows and carbon markets and introduce novel customs and tariffs to enforce.
• #6: New Foreign Insecurity and Threats: Climate change will likely contribute to overseas instability, conflict, or geopolitical tensions in ways that can create new threats to the UK or reverberate throughout UK society.” 

The report offered a series of recommendations for the UK Home Office to address climate risks “comprehensively, proactively, and humanely.” Recommendations were wide-ranging, including leading an internal climate resilience process, enhancing climate data and foresight capabilities, strengthening collaboration with peer ministries and civil society, and bolstering emergency services and legal migration avenues. 

CCS also ran a climate security education series for Home Office civil servants. Participants working on migration, wildfire response, gender-based violence, and homeland security engaged in a tailored curriculum of readings, outside speakers, and seminar discussions on climate risks and policy solutions. The program culminated in a daylong foresight exercise in London, where participants noted that the program “changed my whole mindset” and provided “a place to start.” 

Drawing on CCS recommendations, the Home Office has since taken new steps to understand and address climate risks to its responsibilities. For the first time, the latest yearly Home Office report to Parliament added climate security to its official risk register. It acknowledged that “climate change represents a serious threat to Home Office operations and policy interests.” The report notes CCS input drove new plans to appoint climate security champions across Home Office policy areas, improve data and evidence, and build internal climate literacy, saying:

The recommendations from [CCS’s] work formed further initiatives. In particular, we conducted more detailed analysis to improve our understanding of climate change risks, including under different scenarios, and we have started the process of embedding these risks in our departmental risk processes to improve climate security action. In 2024, the Home Office commissioned Climate Change Risk Assessments for its own property assets, identifying the key risks to its estate and operations.

At the same time, these are nascent steps in the scheme of UK and global climate risks. According to the UK Met Office’s State of the Climate report, extreme heat and flooding are becoming the norm, with three of the five warmest years on record coming since 2020. Work by CCS and others notes that the scale of climate threats to UK populations, energy, food, and economic security dwarfs policy action to address them, and the Home Office itself reports it lacks a “clear understanding of the nature, scale and proximity of climate security risks.” Moreover, much more work remains to align broader UK policy and resource prioritization with some of CCS’s recommendations, which face political headwinds. For example, since 2023, the Home Office has touted plans to cut both irregular and legal migration and strengthen border security, amid anti-immigration criticism from rightwing politicians, and the United Kingdom is cutting its overseas aid budget by 40%. September’s far-right “Unite the Kingdom” rally drew more than 100,000 anti-immigrant protesters, which resulted in dozens of arrests and injuries to police, and was featured in Russian official media as “a harbinger of a Western European cataclysm.”

The CCS report noted that as climate change drives and reshapes migration, “the risk is not migration or migrants, which are not security problems” but rather extremism, humanitarian suffering, and geopolitical meddling stemming from a “failure to adapt to and accommodate such migration,” with solutions lying in legal migration options and investments in sending and receiving communities.