Climate crisis threatens national security for all, Ed Miliband tells Cop31

The national security of every country is at risk from the climate crisis, the UK's foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, will tell world leaders at the Cop31 UN climate summit in Antalya, Turkey.

Mr Miliband will say that security and defence objectives are the new "frontier" of climate action, because the rapid heating of the planet will bring food shortages, economic disruption, migration and conflict.

"National security is the next frontier of the fight for climate action; the scenarios once of science fiction are now regular occurrences in the daily news," he told the Guardian before his speech.

He said the climate crisis was among the biggest threats to national security.

"We should be clear that climate breakdown is one of the greatest national security threats we face," Mr Miliband said. "Food security, threats to infrastructure, and population movements [are resulting from the climate crisis]," he added.

He also criticised those who oppose climate action. "Those who seek to stick their heads in the sand on climate are putting our national security at risk," he said.

In his speech, Mr Miliband will argue that the world must now face the consequences of failing to cut emissions over the past three decades, the Guardian reported.

"It is a disaster for people and the planet, and we must reckon with its implications," he will tell the summit. "It will drive hardship and insecurity for billions of people."

He will say that an overshoot of 1.5C of warming above preindustrial levels, the limit countries set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, is now inevitable, because temperatures have exceeded that level for two years and are unlikely to fall significantly.

Mr Miliband will also point to the price of fossil fuels. Oil prices have soared this year after the start of the Iran war, now in its ninth month, which has disrupted shipments through the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway between the Gulf and the open sea.

"A new era of global insecurity means fossil fuel shocks are now the norm, the fossil fuel rollercoaster is here to stay," he told the Guardian. "First Russia, now Iran, next others, have identified global chokepoints and systemic overreliance [on fossil fuels] and the vulnerability of countries around the world that they expose."

He said the answer was to "double down" on cutting greenhouse gas emissions and to build resilience to extreme weather.

"Next year will be the year of climate fightback, as governments, movements and communities across the world step up to defend our shared home," he said. He will call for more investment in clean energy for transport and heating, urgent cuts to methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, and the protection and expansion of forests.

The UK pledged £331 million in September to the Global Environment Facility to address instability driven by climate change and biodiversity loss. Mr Miliband urged leaders at New York Climate Week at the time to include the climate crisis in their national security assessments.

Mr Miliband arrived in Turkey on Tuesday evening for the two-day leaders' segment of the fortnight-long summit, which began on Monday. Anthony Albanese, the Australian prime minister, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Turkish president, will open the segment on Wednesday, with speeches from the UN secretary general, António Guterres, Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose country hosted last year's summit, and Ethiopia's prime minister, Abiy Ahmed, whose country will host next year's. The UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, is expected to travel on Wednesday for meetings with other leaders on Thursday.

China's Xi Jinping, India's Narendra Modi, France's Emmanuel Macron and Germany's Friedrich Merz are among the leaders staying away. The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, will attend.

Campaigners say recent and planned UK policies will take the country off track from its target of net zero emissions by 2050. The government plans to weaken a mandate requiring carmakers to sell more electric vehicles by 2030, and it has approved a new gasfield in the North Sea, Jackdaw, while considering a licence for a new oilfield, Rosebank, west of Shetland.