E3G

Delivering Climate Security: International Security Responses to a Climate Changed World

By Nick Mabey

The multiplying security implications of climate change were increasingly acknowledged during 2007. Now, E3G Chief Executive Nick Mabey has authored a report for the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) which sets out how the security sector can not only respond to the increasing threats, but also become part of the solution.

Published as Whitehall Paper 69 and available from Routledge, the full paper runs to 137 pages and draws on Nick Mabey’s experience in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit where he led work on a variety of policy areas, including energy, fisheries, unstable states, and organised crime.

Following below and attached as a pdf for download is an edited summary of the paper.

Delivering Climate Security: International Security Responses to a Climate Changed World

Edited Summary

Food riots in Mexico City, environmental outrage from Osama bin Laden and Russian territorial claims in the Arctic: the past year has seen climate change emerge as a serious issue across the security agenda, from the abstraction of discussions in the UN Security Council to the brutal reality of drought-driven conflict in Africa. These are just the first signs of how climate change – and our responses to it – will fundamentally change the strategic security context in the coming decades.

Conflict over natural resources, whether driven by need or greed, has always been a part of human society. The past shows us that social tensions driven by past climatic change destroyed many advanced societies, such as the droughts which drove the collapse of early civilisations in Mesopotamia and Peru. The coming decades will see rising resource scarcity, greater environmental degradation and increasingly disruptive climatic change at levels never experienced before in human history. In an increasingly uncertain world these trends are disturbingly predictable.

Climate Security Whitehall Paper

Climate change is already creating hard security threats, but it has no hard security solutions. Climate change is like a ticking clock: every increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere permanently alters the climate, and we can never move the hands back to reclaim the past. Even if we stopped emitting pollution tomorrow, the world is already committed to levels of climate change unseen for hundreds of thousands of years. If we fail to stop polluting, we will be committed to catastrophic and irreversible changes over the next century, which will directly displace hundreds of millions of people and critically undermine the livelihoods of billions. There is some scientific uncertainty over these impacts, but it is over when they will occur not if they will occur – unless climate change is slowed. Preventing catastrophic and runaway climate change will require a global mobilisation of effort and co-operation seldom seen in peacetime.