Ana Yang, Director of Chatham House’s Environment and Society Centre, gave evidence to the UK Parliament’s Energy Security and Net Zero Committee on 8 July, as part of an inquiry examining the UK’s priorities and global standing as a leader on climate action.
In the second session of the inquiry, Yang addressed how the UK can strengthen its climate leadership on the global stage amid an increasingly difficult fiscal, economic, and political landscape. She described a geopolitical environment that has shifted dramatically since the 2015 Paris Agreement, one in which climate action has become deeply entangled with wider geopolitical rivalries, including tensions between the US and China, Washington’s disengagement from the COP process, and the ongoing conflict with Iran.
On the Strait of Hormuz, Yang pointed to what she described as a growing bifurcation between “petro states and electro states,” a divide she said complicates the broader climate negotiation landscape. She raised the deeper question of what the UNFCCC and COP process can meaningfully achieve in setting targets and signalling intent, versus the far harder challenge of implementation. “Implementation needs to link to national interests,” she said. “It needs to link to prosperity…it needs to also link to the security issue.”
Turning to UK policy specifically, Yang argued that Britain is missing a coherent re-industrialisation narrative tied to its climate transition. “What is the re-industrialization story for the UK…there is a missing story,” she said, asking whether the UK can use the clean transition to reinvent itself through a next generation of green industrial policies capable of transforming the country. She said such a story is currently absent, one that could inspire people, generate jobs, and connect climate policy to everyday life in a way that resonates beyond Westminster.
