The UK Foreign Office has said it does not know how many of its officials and diplomats are working on climate change and energy issues, in response to freedom of information requests.
The government has frequently described itself as a world leader on climate issues and the Foreign Office recently stated that “climate change remains an area of utmost importance and is a central focus of our diplomatic relations on a daily basis”.
The Foreign Office did give limited information on staff based in London but declined to give an exact figure, citing “national security” concerns. The Foreign Office provided detailed information of the number of climate and energy staff, at home and overseas, in 2016 and 2018.
The government recently axed its most senior climate diplomat post, the Guardian revealed in April. In June, Zac Goldsmith resigned as an environment minister, accusing the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, of being “uninterested” in the environment and claiming that the UK had “visibly stepped off the world stage and withdrawn our leadership on climate and nature”. The Guardian also revealed that it would be near impossible for the Foreign Office to meet its pledge of $11.6bn in climate aid to poor and vulnerable countries.
Sunak’s government was accused of a “culture of concealment” in June, after placing a record number of blocks on freedom of information requests in its first three months. Only 33% of requests received full information, compared with 56% under the premiership of David Cameron and 43% under Boris Johnson.
“Climate diplomacy should obviously be a priority for any serious foreign ministry,” said John Ashton, the UK’s climate envoy from 2006-12. “In any institution, when you set priorities, you make sure you know how much resource you are putting into those priorities and you tell the world about that.
“So the response from the FCDO is not only puzzling but worrying. What are they trying to hide? The suspicion must be that this is part of a deliberate and systematic defunding of climate diplomacy taking place under the Sunak government.”
Tom Burke, at the E3G thinktank and a former special adviser to three Conservative environment secretaries, said it sounded “completely implausible” that the Foreign Office did not know how many climate change and energy staff it had, given that the same information was provided previously.
“The number really matters a lot for the UK’s ability to have any impact on global climate policy,” he said. “Britain used to be a world leader on climate change but a diminution has taken place under a succession of Conservative governments.”
Freedom of information (FoI) requests made to the Foreign Office in 2016 and 2018 about the number of Foreign Office staff working on climate change and energy (CCE) issues received comprehensive responses.
These showed that the number of full-time-equivalent staff working on CCE, in the UK and at embassies abroad, fell from 277 in 2009 to 149 in 2016. During Boris Johnson’s tenure as foreign secretary between 2016 and 2018, the number of staff fell further to 108.
In 2020, the Foreign Office absorbed the Department for International Development, to become the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). The Guardian made a series of FoI requests to the FCDO in recent months, requesting an update on information on the CCE staff numbers released in 2016 and 2018.
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However, the FCDO said: “We do not have the management information needed to provide the total figure across the entirety of FCDO.”
The FCDO did provide data on the number of staff working specifically in its energy, climate and environment directorate, which was between 100 and 119 in 2021 and 2022 and between 120 and 139 in 2023. The FCDO said disclosing the exact number of staff “would not be in the interest of the UK’s national security [and] threaten our operations”. It did not specify how many of the staff worked part-time.
Gareth Redmond-King, at the UK’s Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, said: “British leadership has been important to global progress. Any downgrading does more harm than just to our own reputation. With half our food coming from overseas, and half of that from climate vulnerable nations, our national security is probably better served by rekindling that leadership than by withholding data on how many UK officials are working on it.”
An FCDO spokesperson said: “Climate change remains a top priority for this government. As hundreds of our staff across a range of directorates work on these issues either full-time, or as part of their role, it is very difficult to specify the exact number of staff working on energy, climate and environment issues in the department.”