Speech by Sir John Holmes, USG for Humanitarian Affairs and ERC, to the UK Parliament lunchtime event "The Humanitarian Implications of Climate Change"

I am delighted to be with you today, early in what the United Nations Secretary General has described as "the year of climate change", as we move towards the crucial deadline at Copenhagen at the end of the year.

I think that it is particularly good that this event focuses on the humanitarian implications of climate change, which I fear are too often forgotten as we understandably focus on the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and the question of how to adapt tends to be ignored. Climate change is not just an environmental question. What we have learned from the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, and from our own experience on the ground, is that the impact of climate change is increasingly central to the global economic and security agenda.

As the effects become felt, we need to face up to the fact that climate change is becoming a major driver of humanitarian need, and disasters. It is also likely to become a huge factor in future forced displacement. The point is that climate change is not just a future threat. It is an actual danger to millions of people, including many of the most vulnerable groups in the world. And this is bound to get worse.

Climate change is already increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme natural hazard events, particularly floods, storms, and droughts. And where these hazard events are allowed to become disasters by our action or lack of it, over the past decade, on average they are costing more lives and displacing more people, year on year.

The number of disasters recorded each year has doubled from 200 twenty years ago to 400 in the past two decades. Better reporting may have something to do with this. But today three quarters of all disasters are now climate related, compared with half a decade ago. Another example: in 2008 the UN humanitarian system issued 10 flash appeals. Every one of these was in response to a disaster resulting from extreme weather. In 2007, 14 out of 15 flash appeals were from were extreme weather disasters. Now, while we can't attribute any specific event directly to climate change, last year, floods and storms affected more than 65 million people worldwide. That is equivalent to the entire population of the UK, or one percent of the world's population. In just one year.

All the scientific evidence suggests this trend will continue and accelerate, whatever happens in Copenhagen. The challenge of addressing climate change is further complicated by its interaction with other global trends, such population growth and urbanisation, which are increasing risks to vulnerable populations. It also means entry and exit strategies for humanitarian assistance are becoming less and less clear as creeping changes in water and food availability create more 'slow onset' crises.

Defining humanitarian action by reference to trigger events such as natural disasters or conflicts, as we have done for so long, is less and less relevant in comparison with chronic humanitarian need in areas where drought, flooding, and sea level rise become the norm. In other words, climate change threatens to overwhelm the current capacity of the humanitarian system to respond effectively and to impose new models of prevention, preparedness and response. I will come back to this in a moment.

But it is much more than this. Climate change is also redrawing the world maps of population, wealth and resources and changing where and how people are able to live their lives. Sea level rise, the increasing climate-related disasters, and the more insidious impacts on water availability and agricultural production are already making some places uninhabitable.