Stripping German foreign office of climate responsibility risks weakening international dimension – experts

Several international climate policy experts have warned that the next German government’s decision to strip the foreign office of its responsibility for international climate action could weaken the country’s international involvement, reported Handelsblatt.

“The foreign office has diplomatic networks, multilateral experience and can strategically combine foreign climate policy with security and development policy,” said researcher Lukas Kahlen of the think tank NewClimate Institute. Moving responsibility back to the environment ministry risked weakening the foreign policy dimension.

Table Media had reported that the responsibility for international climate policy would be handed back to the environment ministry, where it had sat for many years and which will again lead negotiations at UN climate change conferences (COPs). The Social Democratic Party (SPD) will lead the ministry but has yet to announce a minister.

“Now that the US government is no longer involved in international climate protection, Germany urgently needs a person to represent international climate protection to the outside world,” Christoph Bals, chief policy officer at NGO Germanwatch, told Handelsblatt. However, such a climate envoy could also be part of the chancellery.

The outgoing government and foreign minister Annalena Baerbock from the Green Party had put a big emphasis on international climate policy, its security dimension and coordination with international partners by putting responsibility in the foreign office. It had bolstered the issue with a climate foreign policy strategy, which it closely connected with Germany’s first National Security Strategy and the China Strategy, and by creating a special climate envoy position filled by former Greenpeace head Jennifer Morgan.