In a day of special coverage across all of Sky News’ platforms, including a 30 minute extended report – ‘Climate Crisis: Prince Charles Speaks Out’ – His Royal Highness talks about the effect of climate change on humanity and the world – and what might be done to stop it.

In an exclusive interview (recorded before the Paris attacks) with Sky News’ Royal Correspondent, Rhiannon Mills, The Prince of Wales has said that he believes there are links between climate change and conflict and terrorism. Talking about the current refugee crisis, The Prince suggested that climate change may have been one of the root causes of the problems in Syria. He said “We're seeing a classic case of not dealing with the problem, because, I mean, it sounds awful to say, but some of us were saying 20 something years ago that if we didn't tackle these issues you would see ever greater conflict over scarce resources and ever greater difficulties over drought, and the accumulating effect of climate change, which means that people have to move. And, in fact, there's very good evidence indeed that one of the major reasons for this horror in Syria, funnily enough was a drought that lasted for about five or six years, which meant that huge numbers of people in the end had to leave the land”.

When asked if there is a direct link between climate change, conflict and terrorism, he added “It's only in the last few years that the Pentagon have actually started to pay attention to this. I mean it has a huge impact on what is happening. I mean the difficulty is sometimes to get this point across – that if we just leave it and say, well there are obviously lots of, there are endless problems arising all over the place therefore we deal with them in a short term way, we never deal with the underlying root cause which regrettably is what we're doing to our natural environment."

The Prince told Sky News that even at a time of austerity we need to invest in protecting our planet otherwise “nature's bank” is at risk of “going bust”.

In his only interview ahead of the UN’s latest climate change conference, The Prince of Wales expressed his concerns that we are heading towards “catastrophes and chaos” if we don’t address environmental issues such as a rise in global temperatures with much more urgency. The Prince, a dedicated climate change campaigner for the past four decades, will deliver a keynote speech at COP21, which opens in Paris next Monday. Asked whether we can afford to deal with the issues at a time of austerity he said “The trouble is if we don't, this is the awful thing, if we don't it’s going to get so much worse, then life will become very, very complicated indeed, and what we're experiencing now will be as nothing to the problems. I mean the difficulties in 2008 with the financial crash – that was a banking crisis. But we're now facing a real possibility of nature's bank going bust. If you see it like that, we've been putting so much pressure on the natural systems and all those aspects of nature that we take for granted.” Later he added “Obviously I try to be as optimistic as possible, but sometimes you think that – do we really have to face catastrophes and chaos before we understand that real action needs to be taken? The difficulty with all that, is that by the time you try to take the action, it's already too late.”

Looking ahead to the meeting The Prince expressed doubts about whether the countries of the United Nations will be able to reach a consensus on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. He said “There’s been so many of these conferences that have happened over the years and I think I go back quite a long way on all this. I haven't been to all of them but I went to Copenhagen in 2009 and that really ended in disaster, frankly, which is a total tragedy because we've lost all those years in between, so there's a lot to catch up on. The trouble is it’s not going to be, I don't think the conference is going to be an end in itself, because it's after that, after the conference, because it's going to be very difficult I think to get agreement on the necessary reductions and the necessary actions that need to be taken to keep global warming at 2 degrees, or ideally below. So we then have to follow up, this is the key, and ratchet up the commitments after the Paris conference.”

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Stephanie Jones

Sky News PR

Stephanie.jones@sky.uk