The UK government is planning to appoint a special envoy for nature for the first time, as the foreign secretary, David Lammy, seeks to put the UK at the centre of global efforts to tackle the world’s ecological crises, the Guardian has learned.
Labour will also appoint a new climate envoy, after the Tories abolished the post over a year ago, a move that dismayed foreign governments and climate campaigners.
Lammy, who met Sir David Attenborough this month to talk about the global response to the climate and nature crises, will make a major intervention on the topic early this week.
He will say: “The threat of climate change may not feel as urgent as a terrorist or an autocrat. But it is more fundamental. It is systemic, pervasive and accelerating towards us.”
Citing recent extreme weather in the Amazon, Syria and Africa, and the devastation caused by Hurricane Beryl in the Caribbean, Lammy will say that global political leaders must take responsibility, before climate breakdown can further exacerbate conflict and migration.
“These are not random events delivered from the heavens. They are failures of politics, of regulation, and of international cooperation,” he will say. “These failures pour fuel into existing conflicts and regional rivalries, driving extremism and forced displacement. And it would be a further failure of imagination to hope that they will stay far from our shores.”
Ed Miliband, the energy security and net zero secretary, has already begun an international charm offensive on the climate, inviting the president of the next UN climate summit, Mukhtar Babayev of Azerbaijan, to the UK over the summer. Last month he visited Brazil, which is chairing the G20 group of developed and developing nations this year, and will host the Cop30 UN climate summit next year.
The UK also hopes to unveil strengthened commitments on cutting greenhouse gas emissions at this year’s Cop29 UN climate summit in Azerbaijan in November.
Steve Reed, the environment secretary, will also this week announce close cooperation with Colombia, host of the UN Cop16 nature summit in October. He will reaffirm the government’s commitments to protecting 30% of the UK’s land by 2030 and forging a global deal on nature conservation.
The move to appoint two envoys has delighted campaigners, who were concerned by the last government’s downgrading of the UK’s role in international climate and nature talks. Rishi Sunak snubbed key climate meetings while prime minister and the abolition of the post of climate envoy was seen by many as a backward step.
Chris Venables, the director of politics at the Green Alliance thinktank, said: “This sends a strong signal on the international stage that Labour are serious about the environmental agenda, after a lacklustre performance by the last government.”
Rebecca Newsom, the head of politics at Greenpeace UK, said: “The climate crisis and the destruction of nature are two of the biggest global threats we face. So appointing a special envoy to deal with each of them sends a clear signal that they’re both foreign policy priorities for this government. And with major UN climate, biodiversity and plastics conferences just weeks away, there’s a lot of diplomatic work to be done.”
The two new envoys will work closely together, under the foreign secretary, and with Miliband and Reed. They will help to coordinate cross-government work on international nature and climate issues among the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Neither of the appointments has yet been decided, but the Guardian understands that the government is working from a shortlist on each role. Several prominent figures have been under consideration for the nature role, including Tony Juniper, the chair of Natural England and former chief of Friends of the Earth; Tanya Steele, the chief executive of WWF UK; and Edward Davey, a former aide to King Charles during his time as Prince of Wales, who is now at the World Resources Institute.
In a sign of Labour’s desire to keep environmental issues as a cross-party concern, in contrast to the last Tory government who waged a “culture war” on the issue, the former Tory minister Alok Sharma is understood to have been under initial consideration for the climate role. However, he has ruled himself out. The Guardian understands that another prominent green ex-Tory, Chris Skidmore, former “net zero tsar” under Boris Johnson, is also out of the running.
Michael Jacobs, an academic who was formerly an aide to Gordon Brown and helped forge a global deal at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, has also ruled himself out.
Some of the candidates for the climate envoy role understood to be still under potential consideration are Nick Mabey, the co-founder of the E3G thinktank; Rachel Kyte, formerly the World Bank’s top official on the climate and now a professor at Oxford’s Blavatnik school of government; and an internal civil servant candidate.
Two previous climate envoys – Nick Bridge, who was ousted 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.