Conflict, Climate and Extreme Poverty: Time for a New Approach -- Speech by David Miliband, President and CEO, International Rescue Committee

Publisher: International Rescue Committee

Author(s): David Milibrand

Date: 2024

Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes, Programming

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It’s nice to be back at Chatham House. I spoke here in November 2022 about the UK’s place in a changing world. Today I want to focus on some of the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the world; the climate, conflict, and inequality crises people living there face; the need for new thinking about how to support them; and the coalition that is needed to address their increasingly untenable situation.

When I was Environment Secretary in 2006/7, it felt as though talking about adapting to climate change meant admitting defeat on mitigating climate change. But now mitigation efforts have not gone far or fast enough to prevent severe damage, so we need significantly more adaptation efforts as well as an even sharper drive to decarbonization. Nowhere is this more needed than in the poorest places where IRC works. And nowhere is a different approach to adaptation needed, because business-as-usual is failing these countries twice over – on both mitigation and adaptation.

In the work we do at the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in crisis zones around the world, we see the climate crisis changing the geography of poverty. For example in the Central Sahel region of West Africa, temperatures are rising 50% faster than the rest of the world. National security officials refer to climate change as a “threat multiplier” because of the way it compounds and accelerates instability and conflict. But we’re also seeing that climate change is an “inequality multiplier” - ravaging the livelihoods of low-income communities and making it harder for them to pull themselves out of debt and poverty. This is the vicious circle we need to break.