E3G

Security Implications of Climate Change

By Chris Littlecott

Mainstream media interest in the issue of Climate Security was evident following the discussion at the Royal United Services Institute last month.

The very same evening Channel 4 News included a report entitled ‘Climate change security fears’.

Posing the question “Will the security implications of climate change prompt an agreement on global warming?”, the report featured an interview with E3G Founding Director John Ashton in his role as Special Representative for Climate Change at the UK Foreign Office.

The whole report can be watched online via Channel 4’s media player. Following below is a partial transcript of Tom Clarke’s report, concentrating on John Ashton’s contributions.

John Ashton on Channel 4 News

Introduction from Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow:

Climate change needs a response from the West on the scale of the cold war. That’s the message from one of the government’s senior advisers on global warming. John Ashton, special representative for climate change at the Foreign Office, has told Channel 4 News that it should increasingly be recognised as a security issue - and an urgent one, at that.

Today Tony Blair welcomed President Bush’s reference to climate change in his state of the union address… So will security worries finally bring about an agreement where environmental concerns have so far failed?

Reporter Tom Clarke then provided a quick introduction of the security risks associated with Climate Change - from previous wars over water in the Middle East, to the linkage between faltering rains and ethnic violence in Darfur; on to the dependence of 1.5bn people on the glaciers of the Himalayas; and closing with the risk of flooding which faces Bangladesh.

Clarke ended his introduction with the statement that while scientists are still not certain as to the ecological impacts of climate change, its role as an agent of mass migration and conflict is almost guaranteed, and we need to act now to falstall it. That’s the message from Britain’s most senior diplomat with a climate change brief.

John Ashton:

It’s not just that people will be displaced, but that people will be displaced in tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, now you don’t need a great deal of imagination to work out that if that happens, over a short enough time period anyway, that will cause stress if not conflict”

Clarke then returned with a linking paragraph, which actually misses the main point of the climate security message, stating: If history teaches us anything, its that people are a lot better at fighting with each other than working together to solve global problems, and that calls for a shift in policy on climate change, viewing it as a security problem first and foremost.

I would suggest a rather different take, as recognising climate change as a security problem doesn’t stop us needing to cooperate to solve it - it much more simply means that we are recognising that in a globalised world the impacts of climate change will have far reaching consequences for peace and stability which require an integrated response of a depth not yet seen. I think that this is far closer to the point John Ashton then went on to make:

The cold war in a sense was, it gave us a way of organising a lot of areas of how we behave and the choices that we make and how our institutions operate, they all came together around the core strategic objectives that we’d set ourselves in the Cold War, and I think that this is, of course its a very different kind of problem, but the scale of it and the complexity of it are comparable to the Cold War.”

We tend in our societies to take security more seriously than we take anything else and you can do a lot of things in response to a security problem that you can’t do in response to other kinds of problem. You can mobilise, for example, public investment much more quickly and on a much bigger scale.”

Clarke then brought matters back to the day’s news: Today George Bush highlighted the need to cut fuel consumption in his State of the Union address, but his administration has hardly led on the Climate Change issue. But security is a language the US speaks far more fluently - could this be a diplomat’s way of getting them on board?

Back to John Ashton again:

Part of the shift that we’re seeing in the US is an increasing convergence, if I might put it like that, between the energy security agenda and the climate security agenda, and I think that was recognised in some of what the President said, its a welcome convergence, its a convergence which I think we would strongly encourage.”

The conclusion to the report from Clarke hit the nail on the head in respect to the nature of the policy response required:

Climate change as a cause of conflict is now another strand in our government’s multi-layered rhetoric on tackling climate change, but delivering on it will require united thinking on energy, trade, defence and foreign policy - and that may be as hard as securing international agreements on climate change.