ENVIRONMENTAL SECURITY

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BRITISH soldiers could be sent in to battle to stop countries cutting down rainforests and drilling for oil, according to the former foreign secretary William Hague.

The former cabinet minister says the focus of the Armed Forces could soon switch from protecting energy supplies to guarding the natural environment.

“In the past the UK has been willing to use armies to secure and extract fossil fuels,” he writes in the Environmental Affairs journal. “But in the future, armies will be sent to ensure oil is not drilled and to protect natural environments.

“The UK will need to use all of its diplomatic capacity to ensure that these resources are not used and that natural environments are protected.”

Referring to Brazil, Lord Hague predicts that “as climate change climbs the hierarchy of important political issues, it will be increasingly difficult to square our climate change policy with agreeing a free trade deal with a country that clears a football pitch-sized area of the Amazon rainforest every minute.”

He also says Britain is too reliant on China for the components of electric batteries, warning that “it is now impossible for us to remain dependant on them in such a critical area”. As a result, our policies towards China and climate change have become unavoidably linked,” he adds.

Lord Hague, who was Conservative foreign secretary from 2010 to 2014, says Britain “cannot get away with talking the talk without walking the walk” on the climate.The UK has launched a strategy that will see the Armed Forces going as “green as possible”. In the last few days, the UK has said it will speed up cuts to emissions so that they would be reduced by 78 per cent by 2035, compared with 1990 levels.

TWO

THE Secret Intelligence Service has begun “green spying” to ensure nations uphold their climate change commitments, the head of MI6 has said.

Richard Moore, known in Whitehall as C, revealed the new form of espionage after world leaders made stronger pledges on tackling global warming.

“Our job is to shine a light in places where people might not want it shone,” he told Times Radio.

“And so clearly, we are going to support what is the foremost international foreign policy agenda item for this country and for the planet, which is around the climate emergency.

“Where people sign up to commitments on climate change, it is perhaps our job to make sure that actually what they are really doing reflects what they have signed up to.”

Mr Moore who took charge of MI6 in October, described the new task as “a bit like what we have always done around arms control”. He said: “On climate change, where you need everyone to come on board and to play fair, then occasionally just check to make sure they are.”

He declined to go into further detail about what “green spying” would involve and did not explicitly name any countries.