E3G

Club de Madrid: The Challenges of Energy and Democratic Leadership

By Nick Mabey

The V General Assembly and Annual Conference of the Club of Madrid took place over the weekend, focussed this year on “The Challenges of Energy and Democratic Leadership”.

The Club de Madrid is an independent organization whose purpose and priority is to contribute to strengthening democracy in the world. The personal and practical experience of its members - 68 former heads of state and government - in processes of democratic transition and consolidation is the Club of Madrid’s unique resource.

Nick Mabey from E3G participated in the conference, and contributed a briefing on the links between Energy Security, Climate Security and Democracy. The text of this follows below, and is also attached as a pdf document alongside the final statement from the Club de Madrid annual conference.

Energy Security, Climate Security and Democracy

Achieving energy and climate security globally is critical to maintain democratic values and multilateral cooperation based on the rule of law.

The changing geopolitics of energy is currently the greatest threat to the international rules-based order. Oil and gas markets are moving away from rules-based systems, with direct state control and strategic involvement increasing across the world. The increase in political and financial support to dictatorial regimes in Africa and Central Asia in order to secure access to their resources has led to democratic retreat and fuelled the destabilisation of whole regions. The anti-democratic changes in Russia are an example of the direction the world might move as geo-political competition for energy emboldens authoritarian regimes.

The strengthening engagement of China with repressive leaders in resource rich African countries embodies an even more serious risk. China argues that it is driven to engage with these countries as it feels excluded from investment in other areas by the “West”, notably the USA. If China continues along this “hard power” path to deliver its energy security, it could lead to an unstable world characterised by 19th century-style great power competition.

At the same time, if global carbon emissions do not begin falling in the next two decades, then the impacts of climate change will rapidly amplify these trends and destabilise large parts of the world. Unchecked climate instability will cause trillions of dollars worth of damage to the global economy; with the poorest people in the poorest countries suffering the largest impacts.

Fragile governments in the poorest parts of Africa and Asia will not be able to peacefully manage and adapt to the disruption caused by climate change. History shows that the politics of resource insecurity will erupt into factionalism and conflict. Darfur is one of the first examples of how long term climate shifts can break down traditional resource sharing agreements. Californians may be able to adapt to the loss of melt waters from the Sierra Nevada by building hugely expensive desalination plants. But that option will not be available to the hundreds of millions of Indians and Pakistanis who depend on Himalayan melt waters from rapidly shrinking glaciers.

Military planners in many major powers are already predicting the need for enhanced reactive military capability to counter-act mass environmental migration in the coming decades. The EU is already struggling with illegal immigration from countries in North and West Africa which are highly vulnerable to climate change; implicitly forcing critical value –based choices over building more intrusive border controls around a “Fortress Europe”. Climate change will create an environment where the values of open, democratic societies – in rich and poor countries – are increasingly harder to maintain.