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Beckett speech: The Case for Climate Security

By Chris Littlecott

On Thursday 10th May, I attended a speech given by UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London entitled ‘The case for climate security’.

Speaking to an audience drawn mainly from the security and diplomatic communities, the speech was a forceful exposition of the imperative of considering climate change as a security threat.

The Foreign Secretary underscored her conviction that this focus was not an ‘added extra’, nor a retreat from the traditional hard power concerns of foreign policy - no doubt partly in response to criticisms from diplomatic traditionalists that she has been overly focussed on her old ‘environmental’ remit.

Instead, she made a strong case for the continued analytical development of climate security concerns and their improved integration into diplomatic and political activity.

The full text is also available for viewing on the website of the UK Foreign Office - here below I’ve picked out some of the passages which struck me as the most important at the time. I make no apologies for the extensive quotes - it was a good speech and worth repeating.

Beckett Speech Highlights

Let’s start with a piece of context - climate security isn’t something divorced from other drivers of security threats:

Resource based conflicts are not new – they are literally as old as the hills. But global climate change gives us a new and potentially disastrous dynamic.

The good news is that we have the knowledge and ability to do something about it. Our forebears did not really understand the environmental changes that were happening to them and had little power to control those changes. We do and we can. Science has shown us a clearly identifiable process that is changing our climate and our world. We can predict the consequences of that change and we have the means to take action against it.“

But we can’t take this as a source of optimism:

The bad news is the catastrophic and global nature of the threat we face. Again, it is the countries already experiencing the damage of an unstable climate that have described that best. As the representative from the Congo said during that Security Council debate: ‘This will not be the first time people have fought over land, water and resources – but this time it will be on a scale that dwarfs the conflicts of the past’.

That then was the motivation behind my decision to use our Presidency of the Security Council to highlight the threat of an unstable climate. Just as it is the reason why I have made climate security such a priority of my first year as Foreign Secretary.“