E3G

Climate change and global security

By John Ashton and Tom Burke

Hard rain

In the face of these stresses, countries will seek to preserve their own resources for themselves and to secure access to the resources of others by whatever means they have. In our interconnected world no one will be immune from these consequences.

Loss of meltwater from disappearing glaciers will drive very large numbers of subsistence farmers into India and China’s cities. The relatively affluent middle classes living there will then have to spend more their own security and less on the high value imports from us.

For the world’s poorest people living on unstable, deforested steep hillsides, in the deltas of major rivers, on small islands barely above sea level today or in the low-lying margins of some of the world’s largest cities, climate change threatens their personal security. It is unlikely that we will “make poverty history” in an unstable climate.

Because we see climate change primarily as just another environmental issue, dealt with by environment ministers, about reducing emissions and therefore about regulation, we see it as a constraint on choice and growth. That means we spend next to nothing on protecting ourselves from its effects.

It is right to applaud the British prime minister’s concern about the issue. But that only makes the contrast between his speeches on Africa and those on climate more striking. The former promise significant sums of public money to address the problems, the latter are largely exhortations to do more.

Preserving a stable climate is essential for personal, economic and national security in the 21st century. The maintenance of security in all three modes is the primary task of government. A stable climate, like secure borders, safe streets, a healthy and educated population or efficient transport infrastructure is a public good. It can no more be achieved without public investment than can any other public good.

Today there is a climate clock ticking out the future for us all. Its tick is the 1.8 parts per million (ppm) by which the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases each year. This may sound too small an amount to determine the state of the planet, yet that relentless increase means that there are now 378 ppm in our atmosphere – up from 250 ppm in pre-industrial days.

The countries of the European Union believe we must keep the eventual rise in the global average temperature to within 2.0 degrees Centigrade to ensure our safety. Some of our leading climate scientists have suggested that if the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeds 400 ppm there is only a small chance of achieving this goal.

The mathematics are not difficult. We will reach this point in a little over twelve years unless we act with the urgency appropriate to a security issue not our current environmental indolence. In the 21st century, climate security is as urgent and compelling a problem for Europeans as was food security in the 20th century. But there is as yet no sign that we are mobilising on the right scale to meet the challenge.

This is a problem we can still solve. We have the knowledge, technology and capital to do so. We have mobilised on the necessary scale in the past when the threat or opportunity has been clear. It is a challenge more to our wisdom than to our ability, more to our values than to our resources, more to our aspirations than to our fears.