UKGBC responds to Ed Miliband's UN General Assembly Statement
This week’s news that Ed Miliband has taken the UK’s climate security assessment to the UN General Assembly is a significant step forward. Briefing fellow foreign ministers on the security risks of a destabilised climate and announcing a new special representative and ministerial taskforce to match is exactly the kind of leadership we need to see on the world stage ahead of COP31. UKGBC’s Chief Executive, Simon McWhirter, will be at COP later this year, making the case that the built environment has a core part to play in our adaptation to a changing climate, both at home and internationally.
Leadership abroad matters, but it only lands if delivery at home keeps pace. This has been a summer of heatwaves, and our buildings, and those living and working in them, have felt every one of them, in places never designed for this climate and infrastructure straining under conditions we’re only going to see more of. If climate risk is a national security issue, as this government report acknowledges, then the resilience of our homes, schools, hospitals and infrastructure must be treated as a security priority too, not an afterthought. This is where UKGBC has already been leading, bringing together the evidence, frameworks and practical roadmaps the built environment needs to understand and respond to these risks.
It’s the case we made when we launched our Climate Resilience Roadmap last year, and we’ve kept building the tools to back it up. The Stakeholder Action Plans we’ve just launched turn that Roadmap into sector-specific steps for developers, owners, occupiers, manufacturers and project teams. Our Framework for a Nature-Positive Built Environment does the same for nature loss, giving the sector a shared, credible definition to work from instead of another vague ambition. Government now has a clear articulation of the risk, and industry has a clear plan for the response. What’s missing is the link between the two.
That coordination is exactly what we’re convening people for this October, at UKGBC’s Autumn Parliamentary Reception. We’ll be showcasing both our Net Zero and Climate Resilience Roadmaps, bringing an influential group of member representatives together with MPs and officials to make the case that mitigation and resilience have to be tackled together, not treated as separate agendas, and to further the cooperation between policymakers and industry on a joined-up response to the risks this week’s announcement has put centre stage.
Making the case to the UNGA is a good step, but none of this works unless it changes what happens in Whitehall too. We’d like to help make sure it does.
Get in touch if you’d like to be part of that conversation
Policy & Advocacy
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