Climate change and pandemic the new terror

BRITISH prime minister Gordon Brown said yesterday that climate change and pandemic disease threaten international security as much as terrorism and that Britain must radically improve its defences.

Brown listed the greatest threats to Britain’s peace as “war, terrorism and now climate change, disease and poverty — threats which redefine national security”.

“The nature of the threats and the risks we face have — in recent decades — changed beyond recognition and confound all the old assumptions about national defence and international security,” Brown told lawmakers in the House of Commons.

A classified list of threats to national security will be released to the public later this year, said the prime minister.

“Climate change is potentially the greatest challenge to global stability and security,” declared a report commissioned by Mr Brown to outline the new strategy.

British officials estimate a flu-type pandemic in the UK could cost as many as 750,000 lives, the report said.

It also claimed major coastal floods would likely need a military evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people.

Terrorism minister Admiral Alan West, a former head of defence intelligence, said that a new focus on climate change and disease comes as the threat of terrorism in Britain eases somewhat.

“I can put my hand on my heart and say that in the last year, though the risk hasn’t gone away, we are safer than we were a year ago,” West told BBC radio.

However, staff at MI5, Britain’s domestic spy agency, will increase from 3,000 to 4,000, in a move to help combat an estimated 2,000 potential terrorists in Britain, Brown said.

Resources and technology at the government’s secret eavesdropping centre also will be enhanced, in part to respond to a new threat from cyber attacks, he said.