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CCS Recommendations Shape Initial Steps on Climate Security in the UK Home Office, Amid Political Barriers
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.
The UK Can Lead Again on Climate Security
By Siena Cicarelli and Erin Sikorsky
In his first speech as Foreign Secretary on 17 September, David Lammy provided a comprehensive and compelling case for the importance of climate change as a national security issue for the United Kingdom. Not only did he identify continued fossil fuel use as an existential risk, but he also argued forcefully that investment in climate finance in the Global South is in the UK’s best interests. He said:
“Demands for action from the world’s most vulnerable and the requirements for delivering security for British citizens are fundamentally aligned. And this is because this crisis is not some discrete policy area divorced from geopolitics and insecurity. The threat may not feel as urgent as a terrorist or an imperialist autocrat. But it is more fundamental. It is systemic. It’s pervasive. And accelerating towards us at pace.”
Such a viewpoint represents a critical inflection point in the UK’s climate security trajectory—and a potential return to its early leadership on the issue. The past decade-plus of Conservative government yielded limited progress on the UK’s initially bold climate ambitions, with London’s High Court ruling in May 2024 that the government’s climate action plan was unlawful, and widespread public criticism of plans for additional oil field drilling, and delayed regulations limiting the sale of petrol and diesel cars.
Luckily, the UK’s security and defense actors have quietly established themselves as global leaders in climate security strategic assessments, including the 2021 Ministry of Defense (MoD) Climate Change and Sustainability Strategic Approach. Over the last decade, these actors have recognized that climate change is a core risk to the UK’s energy security, food security, foreign policy interests, and economic growth. Furthermore, like Secretary Lammy, they acknowledge this issue cannot be addressed in silos or solely within national borders, making investments in climate security at home and abroad more important than ever.
With the Foreign Secretary’s comments as a foundation, the new Labour government has an opportunity to elevate and reinvigorate the UK’s existing climate security approach—starting with the Strategic Defence Review (SDR) this fall. While climate security has featured in previous overarching policy documents like the Integrated Defence Review and in internal assessments, this comprehensive review marks a key opportunity to publicly redefine climate security in the United Kingdom.
Over the next few months, the SDR will take stock of the top challenges for the country, examining the overall readiness of MoD’s infrastructure and personnel. Mainstreaming climate considerations throughout this review—from assessing whether energy supply chains are future-fit to assessing gaps in military training and education—would be an essential first step in institutionalizing climate security throughout the government.
Beyond the SDR, as CCS Director Erin Sikorsky argued in testimony before the UK Parliament in May 2024, the nation must expand its current approach to build a climate-strong national security workforce. This will require both a recognition that climate change is a cross-cutting priority that affects equities outside of the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO), Home Office and MoD, as well as a willingness to invest in the skillsets needed to translate climate science and data into sound policy. This mainstreaming must also be underpinned by a cross-government architecture that is capable of bridging interagency silos and more effectively integrating the perspectives of climate scientists.
The government will undoubtedly face significant challenges in implementing its agenda at home and abroad. Beyond domestic pushback on green transition measures like wind farms and fossil fuel tariffs, Labour faces a 20+ billion pound budget deficit and an increasingly complex geopolitical environment. But this resource-constrained environment only further underscores the need for mainstreaming, silo-busting, and more effective climate finance.
Leveraging co-benefits wherever possible—such as investments in climate-smart agriculture that also build local resilience or efforts to transition away from fossil fuels that also reinvigorate struggling economies—are key. Furthermore, building climate considerations into existing FCDO and MOD programming will help maximize the government’s impact.
As Secretary Lammy said, “ultimately there will be no global stability, without climate stability.” As climate impacts accelerate, the UK government must now adjust its posture and resources accordingly.
Leadership in the Polycrisis: How UK Defense Training Can Help Us Navigate a Future of Unprecedented Environmental Disruption
By Laurie Laybourn and Matt Ince
Edited by Erin Sikorsky and Francesco Femia
Introduction
The global scale, systemic interconnection, and severity of today’s climate and ecological crises has led researchers to conclude that the world has entered a new era—or overall state—of complex, cascading, and compounding risk.1 Some have labelled this the ‘polycrisis.’2 Approaches to leadership development in a defense context—which commonly focus on the ability to operate effectively under intense conditions—might have increasing relevance for civilian leaders wanting to enhance their capacity to respond to this emergent polycrisis era. We undertook research exploring these approaches, utilizing structured workshops and interviews with around thirty senior officers and personnel across the United Kingdom (UK) Defense enterprise. We found that the strong emphasis placed on physical and mental resilience, situational rehearsal, and an initiative mindset grounded in organizational structure and team ethos will increasingly have a broader leadership applicability as the destabilizing consequences of the climate and ecological crisis grow. This briefer explores our findings.
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Pivoting Toward Climate Security: An Interview with Lt. Gen. Richard Nugee (ret.)
By Elsa Barron
Lieutenant General Richard Nugee (ret.) recently joined the International Military Council on Climate and Security (IMCCS) as a senior advisor. He is the Non-Executive Director for Climate Change and Sustainability for the UK Government.
Previously, he spent a year leading the Climate Change and Sustainability Strategic Approach at the Ministry of Defence at the end of his 36-year military career. The following conversation reflects on his pivot toward climate security and his priorities and hopes for future action. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Elsa Barron: What led you to prioritize climate change toward the end of your military career?
Lt. Gen. Richard Nugee (ret.): I sat for four years on the executive committee of defense, and climate change wasn’t mentioned, sustainability wasn’t mentioned. I realized that actually, climate change was something that the UK military wasn’t really paying attention to. There were pockets of good practice. But broadly speaking, it wasn’t being considered on a daily basis, or on a yearly basis, or even on a review basis. And so I raised it as a subject and offered to do a report examining climate change and its effects on the military, and also the impact of the military on climate change.
There was a general feeling, and it’s very common military thinking, that we will adapt to whatever the environment is. At the end of the day, we’ll just deal with what comes, and I don’t think that is enough. When it comes to climate change, I think there are very significant opportunities for the military, but there are also circumstances that the military will find very difficult to navigate if they haven’t planned ahead. And so what I tried to do in the UK military was provoke a discussion and debate on the issue and present opportunities for action.
Barron: Are there elements of your on-the-ground experience throughout your career that have elevated your concern about climate change?
Nugee: One example is my experience as a battle group commander in southern Iraq. We didn’t have any air conditioning and we were living in the desert where generally, it’s a very dry heat averaging about 40-45 degrees Celsius, and you can mostly cope with that. But then things change for about two weeks of the year, they call it the cooker. For two weeks, the temperature rises to 50 to 55 degrees and the direction of the wind changes. Instead of coming off the dry deserts from the north, it comes from the south, and straight across the Gulf. As a result, you get 100% humidity at around 55 degrees Celsius and it’s almost unlivable.
What I saw was my soldiers literally trying to avoid doing anything because it was too hot. A lot of soldiers were in the hospital for short periods. A few of my soldiers went back to the UK with heatstroke. And this was them doing their jobs. And it struck me that we were unprepared. If that is an example of what climate change is going to do to certain parts of the world as they heat up, it is going to be very difficult.
There are other examples; in Afghanistan, the fact that the snow was melting faster than normal in the Hindu Kush, meant that there were floods coming down the valleys. Instead of a gentle trickle of water all year round, you get a huge flood and then you get nothing. And if you get nothing, you don’t have water for irrigation. What we found was that farmers were rapidly turning to the Taliban as a source of income. There was no ideology at all, a very high percentage of those joining the Taliban were fighting for money, they were fighting to put food on the table of their families because the Taliban paid them five dollars a day. I think it’s desperately sad that people would turn to the Taliban to fight when actually all they wanted was to have a job.
Barron: Climate change has long been underappreciated as a security threat. Yet even in just the past five years, the conversation has accelerated greatly within institutions like the UK MOD and NATO. What is your perspective on these developments?
Nugee: There’s a really good example of these issues being brought right to the forefront in Europe in the last year. That’s because Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has deliberately, in my view, weaponized energy. Why is that relevant to climate change? Because, actually, for once we have an alternative to gas, we have an alternative to oil, and that is renewable energy. By weaponizing energy, Putin has highlighted the energy security implications of reliance on oil and gas. And by doing that, he has, I hope, encouraged many to think of renewable energy as a viable and cheap alternative to fossil fuels. Europe ought to be doing everything it can to build up its energy security, and it’s now largely within our grasp.
NATO countries are beginning to take this more seriously. It’s all very well talking about it, it’s all very well having horizon scanning as to what’s happening, but that’s not enough. I think we need to act, we need to act as militaries to take advantage of technologies and persuade politicians to try and support others with access to fewer resources. We need to build a narrative that says it is in our interest to do so. I mean, I’m being very clear. This is about national security.
Barron: I’m curious, has there ever been a moment in your work when you’ve been surprised or challenged to change your perspective on something in light of the new challenges the world is facing?
Nugee: One thing which I suppose really surprised me was the huge flooding in Pakistan last year. It is, of course, not just climate change that has caused the floods in Pakistan. It’s a number of factors combined together. But actually, climate change has exacerbated the whole problem to the extent that a third of the country was underwater. Now, why is that a concern from a national security perspective? Because actually, what happened, and it happens in Bangladesh regularly with flooding, is that the military forces pick up the pieces and try and solve the problems that these floods cause. Well, if they are doing that, you have to ask, what are they not doing in terms of protecting their nation?
Barron: What are your hopes for the next generation of climate security leaders and what advice would you give them?
Nugee: So I think there are two elements to this. The first is to embrace the opportunities that combating climate change gives us in terms of new technologies and innovation. Why wouldn’t we want to embrace new technologies that are better for capabilities and also reduce emissions? Look through a sustainability lens on everything you do, and you will end up much more efficient and effective.
The second piece is to invest in climate resilience in countries abroad by providing training and supporting adaptation. This builds on the ability of our militaries to think strategically, which we’re usually quite good at. It is an opportunity to help countries cope with the effects of climate change, which ultimately builds up stability around the world- including in Europe.