“The UK is absent without leave.” I’ve not even had time to check whether I can record our conversation before David Miliband is off. Recently returned from a visit to drought-stricken east Africa in his role as head of the International Rescue Committee (IRC), an NGO, the former UK foreign minister and environment secretary is in no mood to mince his words about what governments should be doing to tackle the climate and humanitarian crises facing the world.
As we speak via Zoom on Wednesday afternoon, COP27 is entering its final days. Any agreement on loss and damage reparations—how rich countries should pay poorer countries that are acutely vulnerable to climate change—is still to be found. Although questions of finance dominated discussions in Sharm el-Sheik, little hard cash ended up on the table; in its place were various initiatives and pledges, from both governments and the private sector. But as Miliband makes clear, hard cash remains fundamental to reducing emissions and helping those on the frontline of extreme weather events.
While much of the global political focus at this year’s COP was on how governments might meet net-zero emission targets by 2050, that isn’t good enough for countries like Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, who are already facing “ground zero”, Miliband tells me.
In 2011, nearly 260,000 people died of famine in Somalia, half of whom before famine was officially declared by the UN. Today, 20 to 30m people in east Africa are still at high risk of extreme hunger and famine. “What are we waiting for?” asks Miliband. “You don’t drive a car by looking out of the rearview mirror, you drive the car by looking through the windscreen.”
In the past, under both Labour and previous Tory governments, the UK used to play “quite a distinguished role” on humanitarian issues—but now it is “totally absent without leave in the current crisis,” as Miliband says for the second time.
Back in November 2020, Rishi Sunak was fiercely criticised over his decision as chancellor to cut overseas development aid (ODA) from 0.7 per cent to 0.5 per cent of gross national income. At the time Sunak said it was a “temporary measure” to help balance the books following the pandemic, but any restoration of the aid budget is not expected for years. In this Thursday’s budget announcement the current chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, confirmed that the reduced rate of foreign aid will remain in place. Back in September, research by the Center for Global Development thinktank estimated that at least £3bn of this year’s ODA budget—or 25 per cent of the total—could end up being spent on hosting refugees in the UK rather than helping people in their home countries.
This cut to the aid budget makes it much harder for the UK to push other countries, as it could do in the past, to step up on climate finance. When Sunak spoke in Egypt last week—only after bowing to political and public pressure to attend in the first place—he insisted that the UK would deliver on its commitment of £11.6bn in climate finance, as well as triple funding to help low-income nations adapt to climate impacts to £1.5bn by 2025.
Miliband says he welcomes the focus by Sunak and others on adaptation—which was once “very much a second-class citizen after mitigation” when he was environment secretary 15 years ago—but that there is still not enough money being pledged for either adaptation or mitigation.
“There is a need for more drive, innovation and ambition” around climate financing, Miliband says, including better links between climate and humanitarian action. In Ethiopia and Kenya, “you can see mitigation has not been done, adaptation is not being done and so you have real loss and damage,” he says. “Any strategy for crisis-affected countries which ignores the climate dimension is not at the races.” He points out that six of the top 10 climate-exposed states are in conflict zones.
Part of the problem is a “mismatch” between risk and resilience. “Macro-politics around climate have more potential in them than for a long time, yet the prospects of poorer parts of world living with the climate crisis are pretty poor,” Miliband says. The EU, US and China have “serious commitments” to decarbonise their own economies, but they are not yet thinking globally. “We are living with more global risks, but resilience is going national.”
Miliband cites Lake Haramaya in Ethiopia as an example of the limits of national responses to climate change. Once more than 7km wide, around 14m deep and full of fish, the lake has since dried up and disappeared. “What this means for that part of Ethiopia takes more than the micro-social intervention of building a new water project,” he says; humanitarian aid isn’t “just about helping people survive, but about helping people thrive”. The IRC defines its work as “helping people survive, recover and regain control of their lives”.
So, what should the UK be doing to play its full role in managing these global issues? “The UK is obviously in a very difficult position,” Miliband says, underlining the “sheer sapping nature of its domestic challenges.” The government must nonetheless “rethink and reprioritise”: “Shouting, ‘look at GREAT, in capital letters, Britain’ will not do the trick.”
