UK foreign secretary urges treating climate breakdown as 'security threat'

The British foreign secretary said Thursday that the world must urgently recognize climate breakdown as a "security issue," warning of the implications for global stability and security.

In his speech on climate security at the 'Delivering Climate Security in Fragile Contexts' ministerial roundtable at the COP31 climate summit in Türkiye, Ed Miliband highlighted the importance of taking steps to address climate change.

"There is an urgent need, I think, to treat climate breakdown as a security issue, a global security issue, and to push it further up the multilateral agenda," he noted.

Miliband added, however, that naming it as a security issue is "not enough," pointing out the need to overhaul climate financing for fragile states.

"We need to reform the global financial architecture to do more to deal with these issues, including improving resilience, helping countries to improve resilience in the face of extreme weather events," he noted.

Miliband said that working together is the answer to the massive challenge, and that is "what the UK wants to do."