Copenhagen: In the balance

08 Sep 2009

Opening remarks by Foreign Secretary David Miliband during a briefing with Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband on the UN Climate Change Conference.

Speaker:	David Miliband
Location:	London

Opening remarks by Foreign Secretary David Miliband during a briefing with Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband on the UN Climate Change Conference.

Read the transcript

David Miliband: … for a briefing on the state of the climate change negotiations and also a discussion of some work that I’m going to be doing this week with European Foreign Ministers to try to reenergise the global effort to secure a deal at Copenhagen.

You’ll know that for some time it’s been the position of the British Government that climate change is not just an environmental issue, it’s an economic issue, a, a security issue, and therefore a foreign policy issue. It’s a foreign policy issue because it involves very complex international negotiations but also because of the foreign policy consequences of the sort of climate changes that are underway. And I want to say a few words about that.

But the purpose of this press briefing is actually very simple, and that is reflected in the title that you can see behind me, that the deal that the world needs in Copenhagen is now in the balance. There is a real danger that the talks scheduled for December will not reach a positive outcome and there is an equal danger that in the run up to Copenhagen people don’t wake up to the danger of failure until it is too late. So this press conference and the attendant activity this week is intended to tackle those dangers.

The problem is not that the need is somehow less urgent, in fact all the science that’s been produced over the last year shows growing urgency. Nor is the problem that somehow the technology is not available; I’ll be visiting some working carbon capture and storage facilities in Rotterdam tomorrow. Rather I think the danger arises in part from the complexity of the issues raised by climate change, in part the fact that there are other very big questions crowding the international political agenda and also, we have to be honest, there is a suspicion, a deep suspicion, between the developed and the developing worlds about motivation and about intentions. So we have to overcome all those dangers.

I think there’s a pressing need to remind people what is at stake and a pressing need to remobilise the resources of international diplomacy to try to secure a deal.

I’m going to explain the case that I will be taking around Europe this week, in Paris, in Rotterdam, in Warsaw and finally in Copenhagen where the talks will conclude on Thursday, where, where I will be on Thursday and where the talks will conclude in December. Ed is going to set out the state of the negotiations and the key issues and in that sense provide the marching orders that we think are necessary for Europeans around the world who are committed to making a deal, European diplomats who are committed to making a deal.

I think it’s important to say that climate change negotiations are probably the most complex international negotiations ever undertaken. They have profound implications for economy, for energy and for politics. They raise questions of responsibility and equity, as well as technology and finance, and they require an individual commitment from every country in the world. But the real reason that climate change is a foreign policy issue as well as an environmental issue or an economic issue is evident from the map that I hope will appear behind me.

I want to talk you through the map that we have brought up behind us. Foreign policy is about the management and reduction of risk and the point of the map behind me is that climate change massively increases risk. Just so that you can all see it, this is a map that has been developed at the Hadley Centre, the internationally renowned centre on climate research. They’re working on the risks of rising temperatures and they’re going to be producing some definitive work in the next month or so, and what I’m able to do today is provide a, a preview of it.

The map is intended to show the dangers of business as usual, and the science is increasingly clear that business as usual would mean we were heading for a four degree world, a world in which temperatures rise by four degrees, probably towards the end of this century, 2100. Probably also in a non linear fashion. And I want to highlight three foreign policy risks that arise from this sort of climate change. The first is that climate change is going to cause migration because it will put land under water and it’s also important to stress that migration will not just be within nations, it will be across national boundaries. Ed was recently in Bangladesh and there are obviously dangers there. That makes climate change a foreign policy question.

Secondly climate change is going to threaten infrastructure through more extreme weather events and that infrastructure also crosses national borders, notably in the case of energy, one just has to think about the European energy grid in that sense.

Thirdly and critically climate change is going to massively increase pressure on resources through drought, deforestation and water shortage. This pressure on resources is a major potential source of conflict. Some people argue it is already the (indistinct) the, one of the causes of conflicts happening for example in Darfur. So foreign policy again is brought to the fore.

But there are two other points I want to bring out from the map. First is to highlight the areas of multiple stress. You may not be able to see but at the bottom of the map it points out that the pink shaded areas that you can see on the US, in North America on the borders with Latin America, that you can see right across Africa in to the Asian Sub Continent, there are areas of multiple stress where you’re going to see, not just one of the potential consequences of climate change, but a number of them.

And secondly the, we’ve highlighted on the map some of the areas of recent conflict with the red stars. The purpose of highlighting that is to show that climate change is going to exacerbate already existing sources of tension and often conflict.

So the purpose of this map, and the sources I gather have been distributed to you on your chairs and there’s details online that you can take away, the purpose is to make absolutely clear the, that this issue of climate change is going to be at the heart of foreign policy in the future, unless mitigation happens. And I think one stark way of putting it is as follows. The purpose of the United Nations Security Council is to discuss threats to international peace and security. At the moment climate change does not appear on the Security Council Agenda. If these predictions come true then the UN Security Council by the second half of this century is going to be dominated by climate change questions because climate change is a threat to international peace and security.

So if that is the case for Foreign Ministerial engagement on this issue let me just say a couple of words about what we’re going to do about it this week. I’ll be travelling to Paris today, by train I should point out, with, to meet Foreign Minister Kouchner of France and also Foreign Minister Bildt of Sweden, the Chairman of the, the Presidency of the European Union. We will do an event at Sciences Po and we will also meet to talk about how we can bring our diplomatic services together around the world; two hundred and sixty one British missions around the world, I gather two hundred and seventy three French missions around the world, a hundred Swedish missions around the world. Our intention is very clear, that every single part of European diplomacy is able to engage with their host Governments on the key issues that need to be resolved to get a deal.

The idea is simple; we want to make the European Union, not just a leader, but a force multiplier for positive conclusions on climate change. There are critical meetings coming up in Pittsburgh, Ed will say a bit about the travel that he’s undertaking to engage in some of the major, with some of the major negotiators, I will be hosting a meeting of Commonwealth Foreign Ministers at the UN General Assembly the week after next.

I think it’s fair to say that in our domestic legislation in the UK and also in the proposals that the Prime Minister has put forward on climate financing the UK has established itself as a world leader in the climate change debate. We now need to use that leverage to do everything we can to get a positive deal at Copenhagen, a deal which at the moment hangs in the balance.

Thank you very much. There’ll be plenty of time for questions but first of all Ed set out the scene.