The UK appoints an environmental representative for the first time

The British government plans to appoint a special envoy for nature for the first time, as the foreign secretary, David Lammy, seeks to put the UK at the center of international efforts to tackle the world’s ecological crises, the Guardian has learned.

Labor will also appoint a new climate commissioner, after the Tories abolished the post more than a year ago, a move that angered foreign governments and climate campaigners.

Lammy, who met Sir David Attenborough this month to talk about the global response to climate and natural disasters, will make a major intervention on the topic earlier this week.

He will say: “The threat of climate change may not be as urgent as a terrorist or a dictator. But it is more basic. It’s systemic, pervasive and accelerating towards us.”

Citing the recent bad weather in the Amazon, Syria and Africa, and the damage caused by Hurricane Beryl in the Caribbean, Lammy will say that international political leaders must be held accountable, before the deterioration of the weather can exacerbate conflicts and migration.

“These are not random events that fell from heaven. They are a failure of politics, control and international cooperation,” he will say. And it would be a further failure of imagination to hope that they will stay away from our shores.”

Ed Miliband, the secretary general of energy security and zero, has already started an international hostility about the climate, welcoming the president of the next meeting of the United Nations climate, Mukhtar Babayev of Azerbaijan, in England in the summer. Last month he visited Brazil, which is chairing the G20 group of developed and developing nations this year, and will host the UN’s Cop30 climate summit next year.

The UK is also expected to unveil strengthened commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at this year’s Cop29 UN climate conference in Azerbaijan in November.

Steve Reed, the environment secretary, will also this week announce closer cooperation with Colombia, host of the UN’s Cop16 summit in October. He will confirm the government’s pledge to protect 30% of the UK’s land by 2030 and create a global agenda on nature conservation.

The move to appoint two delegates has pleased campaigners, who were concerned by the previous government’s downgrading of the UK’s role in international climate and nature talks. Rishi Sunak ignored important climate meetings when prime minister and the cancellation of the post of climate envoy was seen by many as a step backwards.

Chris Venables, director of politics at the Green Alliance think tank, said: “This sends a strong signal on the global stage that Labor is serious about the environmental agenda, after the poor performance of the previous government.”

Rebecca Newsom, head of politics at Greenpeace UK, said: “The climate crisis and environmental degradation are two of the biggest global threats we face. So appointing a special envoy to tackle each of them sends a clear signal that both are priorities for foreign policy for this government. And with major UN conferences on climate, biodiversity and plastics only a few weeks away, there is a lot of diplomatic work to be done.

The two new members will work closely, under the foreign secretary, with Miliband and Reed. They will help coordinate intergovernmental work on global nature and climate issues between the Foreign Office, Commonwealth and Development, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

No appointment has been decided, but the Guardian understands that the government is working from a short list of each role. Several prominent figures have been considered for the role of nature, including Tony Juniper, chairman of Natural England and former head of Friends of the Earth; Tanya Steele, chief executive of WWF UK; and Edward Davey, former aide to King Charles when Prince of Wales, now at the World Resources Institute.

In a sign of Labour’s desire to position environmental issues as a cross-party concern, unlike the last Tory government which waged a “culture war” on the issue, former Tory minister Alok Sharma is understood to have been under initial scrutiny. for. the role of weather. However, he has withdrawn. The Guardian understands that another prominent green Tory, Chris Skidmore, the former “net zero tsar” under Boris Johnson, is also out of the running.

Michael Jacobs, the academic who was once an aide to Gordon Brown and helped shape the international agreement at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, has also withdrawn.

Some of the candidates for the post of climate envoy understood to be still under consideration are Nick Mabey, co-founder of the E3G thinktank; Rachel Kyte, former World Bank senior climate officer and now professor at Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government; and a local civil service candidate.

Two previous climate commissioners – Nick Bridge, who was fired by Rishi Sunak despite helping to oversee a successful Cop26 in 2021; and John Ashton, who held the role from 2006 to 2012 – had also held civil service roles.