UK hands climate security job to spy watchdog chief in world first

Britain will name Madeleine Alessandri as the world's first special representative for climate security, with the role built to flag national security risks from the climate crisis before they turn into catastrophes. Alessandri chairs the UK's joint intelligence committee (JIC), the body that oversees MI5 and MI6. Prime minister Andy Burnham will announce the appointment on Thursday at Cop31, the UN climate summit in Antalya, Turkey, presided over jointly by Turkey and Australia.

Burnham arrives fresh from the UK's hottest summer on record, when back-to-back heatwaves drove health services and transport to breaking point, shut schools and cut short thousands of lives. He will tell the talks the crisis is already here, pointing to wildfires that destroyed lives and livelihoods, and will say the consensus on science and climate action has broken down. In his first Cop as prime minister, he is pledging what he calls a new era of British leadership over the next decade, keeping the UK on course for net zero by 2050. He will also back a proposed 35% electrification target by 2035 and efforts to raise £5bn in private finance for clean energy projects worldwide.

The role lands directly on the JIC's own findings. The committee worked on a secret report warning that within five years the UK could start feeling national security impacts from collapsing ecosystems overseas, including food shortages, rising food prices, mass migration and conflict between nuclear-armed states. The report was suppressed under former prime minister Keir Starmer; the Guardian revealed its contents last year, and a redacted version was published earlier this year.

Alessandri said climate change and nature loss are reshaping the security environment the UK operates in, squeezing resources, economies and communities globally, and that the best moment to address such risks is before they become crises. Foreign secretary Ed Miliband, who has been briefing foreign capitals on the report, called national security the next frontier of the climate fight and said scenarios once confined to science fiction now appear in daily news. He warned that governments burying their heads in the sand on climate are putting national security at risk.

Campaigners aren't buying the leadership pitch. Mohamed Adow, director of the Power Shift Africa thinktank, told the Guardian the UK is applying double standards by preaching clean development abroad while expanding fossil fuels at home, with Africa facing one set of rules and Britain another. Asad Rehman, chief executive of Friends of the Earth England, Wales and Northern Ireland, said UK credibility is crumbling and that questions over Burnham's climate record are justified. They point to a planned weakening of electric vehicle targets, the approved Jackdaw gasfield in the North Sea and a possible Rosebank oilfield west of Shetland.

The money is the sorest spot. Like many wealthy nations, the UK has rolled back climate finance and pushed funds toward military spending, and in July Burnham fronted a pledge to lower the cap on English bus fares by converting international climate donations into repayable loans. Prakash Dahal of Pro Public and Friends of the Earth Nepal said adaptation funding for his country must come as grants rather than loans, after August's catastrophic flash flood. Nepal, he said, is not asking for charity but demanding justice.