UK announces new climate envoy and investment facility

LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) -Britain on Thursday named Oxford University professor Rachel Kyte as its new climate envoy and announced a new investment facility, the latest steps in the new government's efforts to bolster Britain's role in international climate politics.

The appointment of Kyte, a climate policy professor, as the UK's special representative for climate comes six weeks before COP29, the latest annual U.N. climate summit. 

Countries from around the world will meet in Azerbaijan to try to thrash out new deals to halt rising global temperatures, mitigate the damage they have caused and raise funding for those who have been worst affected.

In her career Kyte has focused on ways to generate energy in fair and sustainable ways. She previously worked for the World Bank in the run-up to the landmark Paris 2015 Paris climate agreement, and later as a special representative on sustainable energy for the United Nations secretary-general.

"Rachel's expertise and experience in international and climate crisis roles will help drive UK international leadership on the agenda and across the world," British foreign minister David Lammy said.

Earlier this week energy security and net zero minister Ed Miliband said Britain was "back in the business of climate leadership", criticising the previous Conservative-led government for rolling back some of its climate targets.

Last week Lammy said Britain would put climate change at the heart of decisions about foreign policy, and appoint two new climate envoys: one for climate and one for nature. Kyte takes up the climate brief while the nature envoy has yet to be announced.

Addressing the U.N. General Assembly in New York, Prime Minister Keir Starmer, whose Labour Party won a July election, also announced a new facility "to mobilise billions in pension and insurance funds to invest in boosting development and fighting climate change."

British International Investment, Britain's development finance arm, will manage the facility, which aims to attract capital to invest in climate and sustainability-focussed projects in emerging markets by providing first-loss guarantees for the investments to reduce the risk.

BII said the facility offers a novel approach to mobilising private capital because it is aimed at a previously untapped pool of investors which it will bring in directly to the projects at a much earlier stage of investment.

"Public finance will never fully meet the needs, so we must use it as a multiplier to unlock much greater levels of private investment," Starmer said.

(Reporting by William James and Virginia Furness; additional reporting by Michelle Nichols in New York; writing by Alistair Smout; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Jonathan Oatis)