E3G

Beckett speech: The Case for Climate Security

By Chris Littlecott

Shifts in perception

Using the example of Middle East tensions, Beckett gave concrete examples of how climate change could exacerbate regional tensions, concluding that:

There are, of course, many ways in which we can and must analyse the security situation in the Middle East – national, religious, economic. But my argument is that to deliberately choose to ignore a process of the magnitude of climate change – a process that threatens to raise tensions between states, that has the potential to cause widespread political instability, that might swell further the ranks of the dislocated and disaffected – would be wilfully to restrict our understanding of the challenges we face and to hamper our ability to meet those challenges in good time.”

The shift in perception over the last couple of years is therefore a move in the right direction:

I am optimistic that the wind is beginning to change. Two years ago the debate about the science of climate change was still going on. Today that debate – as it relates to the main findings of human-induced global warming – is effectively over.

A year ago, when I became Foreign Secretary, the idea of ‘climate security’ was an alien one – to many inside the FCO as well as outside. Now, we have a group of the most senior retired US generals and admirals, including former Chief of Staff of the US Army General Sullivan and former Commander in Chief of CENTCOM, General Zinni, putting out a report that begins with the recommendation, and I quote: ‘The national security consequence of climate change should be fully integrated into national security and national defence strategies’.

...

But though this conceptual change is starting to happen, it is not happening fast enough. Just as ‘energy security’ is now an accepted and central part of the hard security discourse, so too must be ‘climate security’ – not least indeed, as I will come to later, because of the very close links between those two agendas - tackle one and you are tackling the other.”

Hard-headed about soft-power

When it comes to acting on this understanding, Beckett had a number of suggestions that pull together different analytical and diplomatic approaches:

I believe that it requires a whole new approach to how we analyse and act on security. The threat to our climate security comes not from outside but from within: we are all our own enemies. And what is at stake is not the relatively narrow national security of individual states but our collective security in an interdependent world.

So while an unstable climate has obvious hard security implications, the traditional tools of hard security – in simple terms bombs and bullets – are not going to be able to solve that problem.

Instead we are going to have to think a lot more imaginatively and a lot more broadly about how we can act together to guarantee that kind of security. And that will mean much greater understanding of and commitment to non-military options: to international diplomacy; to leveraging international finance and markets; to building coalitions between governments, business and consumers. In other words, we are going to have to get a lot more hard-headed about soft-power.”