E3G

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

By Nick Mabey

A new security environment

In the next decades, climate change will drive as significant a change in the strategic security environment as the end of the Cold War. If uncontrolled, climate change will have security implications of similar magnitude to the World Wars, but which will last for centuries. The past will provide no guide to this coming future; a robust response will require clear assessments based on the best scientific projections.

Despite these threats, current responses to climate change are slow and inadequate. Even Europe, which leads global efforts to move to a low-carbon economy, is only spending the equivalent of around 0.5 per cent of its combined defence budget on tackling climate change, though this does not count the action achieved through direct regulation. There is a need for more direct and interventionist action to prevent climate risks. One reason for this is that economic analysis has systematically undervalued the potential extreme impacts of climate change, underplaying the implication of the most severe risks to policy makers. But a failure to acknowledge and prepare for the worst case scenario is as dangerous in the case of climate change as it is for managing the risks of terrorism or nuclear weapons proliferation.

The security sector must be part of the solution

Security sector actors must not just prepare to respond to the security challenges of climate change; they must also be part of the solution. Partly, this means reducing the climate impact of their operations and activities. Much more importantly, it means communicating the security implications and costs of uncontrolled and extreme climate change to political leaders and the public. Unless achieving climate security is seen as a vital and existential national interest, it will be too easy to delay action on the basis of avoiding immediate costs and perceived threats to economic competitiveness.

But climate change is also a security opportunity. A low-carbon global economy will be a far more energy-secure economy. Trillions of dollars otherwise invested in oil and gas production increasingly concentrated in unstable regions, will instead deliver new technology and local clean energy sources. This will lower geo-political tensions over fossil fuel reserves, and greatly reduce the security impact of ‘peak oil’ when it arrives.

The security sector has the vital – and expensively acquired – experience of how government can drive technological development and infrastructure deployment at a similar scale to that needed to respond to climate change. Security actors should promote dramatically increased investment in the development and deployment of technologies critical for energy and climate security. This will be expensive, but is achievable. Recent estimates suggest this would require investment commensurate with current spending on the War on Terror, and if a crash response is needed in response to extreme climate change, investment at levels similar to the Apollo programme.