E3G

Investing in climate security

By Chris Littlecott

“The first priority of any government is to provide the conditions necessary for security and prosperity in return for the taxes that citizens pay. Climate change is potentially the most serious threat there has ever been to this most fundamental of social contracts.”

That’s part of the hard-hitting political challenge that John Ashton has been discussing on his visit to Canada this past week.

On Monday the Edmonton Journal published an article written by John in a personal capacity. He starts by underlining how the shocking impact of Hurricane Katrina has played a role in increasing attention on the security implications of climate change:

Hurricane Katrina hit a city in the world’s richest nation. If anywhere should have been resilient enough to deal with the force of nature, it was the U. S. The economic and security impacts of extreme climatic events in more vulnerable regions—such as Africa and South Asia—or more strategically important regions such as the Middle East will be more dramatic.”

Given this reality, how can we develop a response at a sufficient level of ambition?

John Ashton makes a couple of suggestions. Firstly, about how we understand climate change:

...we need to treat climate change not as a long-term threat to our environment but as an immediate threat to our security and prosperity. We need to see a stable climate as a public good without which it will become increasingly difficult to deliver the other public goods that citizens rightly expect from those who govern them. We need to see the pursuit of a stable climate as an imperative to be secured through the urgent construction of a low-carbon global economy.”

Secondly, about how we start to make the transition to a low-carbon global economy:

Governments must make it profitable for businesses to invest in low-carbon infrastructure, such as carbon capture and storage. They will need to negotiate agreements that will enable business to do that cost effectively and without divisive market distortions. They will need to design and mobilize coalitions of mutual interest across sectoral and cultural boundaries to transform the way we supply and consume energy, achieve mobility and use land. And they will need to do all of this very fast. It is now becoming increasingly clear that it is what we do in the next 15 years that matters most.”

That’s a message John will have been discussing further today in his role as Special Representative for Climate Change at a breakfast meeting with the Calgary Chamber of Commerce.