Climate change will have a long-term impact on the nation’s security as wars break out over food and water supplies around the world, a report said yesterday.

Hundreds of millions of environmental refugees will seek new places to live, with many of them heading for Britain, according to the report for the Oxford Research Group.

The report said that security services would be challenged increasingly by the number of refugees, and the Government would need to consider stronger border controls. Protests against companies that continued to emit greenhouse gases were possible as climate change intensified and they might even provoke riots.

In other parts of the world the pressures caused by global warming, particularly through changes in rainfall patterns and the disappearance of glaciers, would provoke wars over agriculture and water rights.

It was “almost certain” that, by 2050, droughts, food shortages and flooding would lead to the mass movement of up to 200 million environmental refugees, the paper, An Uncertain Future: Law Enforcement, National Security and Climate Change, said.

Chris Abbott, a fellow of Bristol University’s Centre for Governance and International Affairs, said that attempts to tackle the new problems with old strategies would be doomed.

“If governments simply respond with traditional attempts to maintain the status quo and control insecurity they will ultimately fail,” he said. “The security consequences of climate change will not just manifest themselves ‘over there’, there will be domestic security concerns for both developed and developing nations alike.”

Times recommends

• Energy-saving ideas from switched-on professor
• Rooks are as clever with tools as chimpanzees
• Burping of the lambs blows roast off menu