E3G

The Geopolitics of Climate Change

By John Ashton and Tom Burke

Many climate analysts believe that we are already too late to avoid living in a climate shaped by a carbon dioxide concentration of anything less than 450 ppm. We have no idea whether economic development can succeed in such a climate. There is no experience in diplomatic history of having to negotiate under such relentless and implacable deadlines.

Any problem on this scale is bound to transcend traditional policy boundaries.  In particular, climate change blurs, perhaps eliminates, the distinction between foreign and domestic policy. Energy, transport, housing, agriculture, and many other policy disciplines must now be treated as an integral part of foreign policy.

Home departments must learn to think, with their foreign policy colleagues, about how to deploy foreign policy assets in support of shared goals on climate. In the UK, this has led to the creation of a symbiotic relationship between the Foreign and Environment Ministries in both the design and delivery of climate policy On this issue the traditional barriers between the two departments have all but disappeared.

At the same time the advocates within foreign ministries of this new approach to climate diplomacy need to convince their colleagues to take part in this mobilisation. The consequences of climate change will have such a profound effect on international affairs that they will come to shape the context within which diplomacy takes place.

This will happen – is happening – on many levels. Clearly, the physical impacts of climate change, for example the displacement of large numbers of people, will be significant. But, at a deeper level, the international system can only function effectively if everyone with a stake in it believes that they can make it work in their interests, and that others will take some heed of their interests. In other words, there needs to be a certain minimum level of equity in the system.

There is no greater threat to that equity than climate change. It is fundamentally inequitable: those most responsible for the problem are not the same as those most vulnerable to its consequences. As those consequences become more evident, they will impose increasing stresses on the framework within which other international conversations take place. We cannot expect to keep building rules-based international systems for dealing with other challenges – trade, terrorism, drugs, weapons proliferation – without a response to climate that bridges the equity gap inherent in the problem itself.