Chris Huhne on climate and security
There was potential for Chris Huhne to make a mess of a speech to the military think-tank Royal United Service Institute on the linkages between climate change and global security last week. But he did pretty well.
Mapping the complex effects of climate change – uncertainties included – onto complicated social processes like conflict and security is an area where it’s easy to miss subtleties and overplay things. Because of this, it’s perhaps unsurprising that there have been a lot of ‘climate change causes war’ headlines over the years which are neither helpful nor accurate.
But Huhne’s speech was a notable exception to this. Although he didn’t shy away from the very significant potential impacts that a changing climate could have on international security, the speech demonstrated a grasp of the detail, providing a carefully referenced run-through of the links between climate change and security which is well worth reading in full.
It’s difficult enough to work out what the impacts of climate change will be on societal processes that are more obviously linked to the climate – like agriculture. Geopolitics, wars and conflict are labels for incredibly complicated social processes, and mapping the likely impact of climate change on them is a formidable challenge.
Military planners however have been doing so – for example in the MOD’s ‘Global Strategic Trends’ report published last year – and drawing on this work, Huhne frames the issue well, discussing risk and climate change as ‘a systemic threat’, rather than using a reductionist ‘climate war’ approach:
“For many people, climate change remains an indistinct threat. It is seen as something that is far-off – and far away. We hear something about polar bears, and long-term temperature trends, and subconsciously discount the threat. Like car crashes or alcoholism, it does not happen to us. Wrongly, we conclude that if we stop using plastic bags and unplug our phone chargers we’ll be fine.
“This kind of thinking is seductive. No wonder; the illusion is a comforting one. It suits the vested interests and their lobbyists who seek to turn doubt into profit. The sceptics who enlist uncertainty in the fight against the scientific consensus. But indulging this thinking paints us into a dangerous corner.
“As a people, we have at best a surface understanding of climate risk. The reality is that the risk is much deeper.
“Climate change is a systemic threat. With luck, the UK may well escape the worst physical impacts. But in a connected world, we will be exposed to the global consequences. And they are both alarming and shocking.”
Reading the speech makes it clear where the policy world is at on this issue. Aside from Huhne’s own beliefs, the people he quotes are military planners, academics and politicians. In the policy world, climate change is first and foremost an issue that will affect food and water availability and human health. Polar bears are somewhat down the agenda.
The bulk of the speech deals with the military’s approach to the issue:
“The military perspective is instructive. Defence planners do not put much store by sceptics: their job is to identify, understand and prepare for threats.”
You might expect that senior military figures would be fairly skeptical about most things – including man-made climate change. But Huhne says:
“Around the world, a military consensus is emerging. Climate change is a ‘threat multiplier’. It will make unstable states more unstable. Poor nations poorer. Inequality more pronounced, and conflict more likely. And the areas of most geopolitical risk are also most at risk of climate change.”
He outlines the ways that climate change can increase the likelihood of conflict, and points out that the areas which are expected to be most as risk from the impacts of climate change are also the areas where ‘poverty, instability and conflict meet’:
“First, competition over resources will grow fiercer. Rising demand for finite resources and pressures on trade routes will once again provoke conflicts.
“…Natural disasters will also change our military priorities, as humanitarian crises become more frequent and more intense.
“…In weak and failing states, food and water stress will compound or cause internal security problems.
“Picture a map of the world. Picture the areas we’re most concerned about; where poverty, instability, and conflict meet. Parts of the Middle East and North Africa. Pockets of sub-Saharan Africa. Delicate borders on the Asian subcontinent. Now picture the areas where climate change will strike hardest. The overlap is uncanny – and unnerving.
It’s a solid take on the subject, and draws on the work of military planners in the UK and the US, as well as reports on the impact of climate change on health, water and food availability. The one point worth querying in the speech is the treatment of migration:
“Climate migration is already happening; not short-term displacement following natural disasters, but long-term movements of people away from areas which are becoming less habitable. When ecosystems can no longer support people, they will move.
“Faced with changing patterns of migration, the international community cannot simply pull down the shutters. We must have the political will and institutional readiness to cope with greater numbers of people fleeing environmental change.”
As we’ve pointed out before, the suggestion that climate change will cause large-scale migration across borders is far from settled. An expert on climate migration we spoke to described it as ‘contested’ that:
“…Climate change will cause rapid, mass displacement across borders. The vast majority of movement and displacement will occur within national boundaries.”
The media coverage
So how has the media covered the speech? There have been just two articles of note – one in the Guardian, and one in the Daily Mail. Both give a reasonably straight reporting of the speech, although the Guardian notes:
“Huhne will quote military experts, including the MoD and the US Pentagon, who have warned that climate change will increase the risk of conflict and potentially terrorism. Climate change intensifies security threats in three ways: increasing competition for resources; more natural and humanitarian disasters, such as the droughts now causing famine in Africa, which will also lead to mass migration and the conflicts that ensue; and threats to the security of energy supplies.”
Both the idea that climate change could inspire terrorism, and the idea that ‘mass migration’ leads to ‘conflicts’ are absent from Huhne’s speech – and largely absent from the literature on the subject, as far as I’m aware.
The Daily Mail article is good and a straight write up of the speech, although with their own particular twist on the headline – ‘Wars, food shortages and mass immigration: How global warming poses dire threat to Britain’s security’.
However, the Mail persist in promoting the false balance that says any article about climate change must include a quote from a climate skeptic who thinks it doesn’t exist, or isn’t a problem. Usually this role is filled by Dr Benny Peiser, Director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and true to form:
“Benny Peiser, of the sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation, said: ‘This is an attempt by Chris Huhne to re-frame the climate scare by linking it to national security.
“He is not alone in applying this new tactic. In recent months, green campaigners have focused attention on security issues in the hope of reviving their flagging campaign.
“…We are dealing with a very speculative linkage given that warmer periods, historically, have been more peaceful than colder periods.'”
This argument has limited mileage. Research into this issue isn’t being carried out or commissioned by Chris Huhne or green campaigners – it’s commissioned by the MOD, the US Department of Defence and the UK National Security Strategy, all of which are referenced in the speech. This issue has been on the agendas of the security establishment in the US since at least 2003, when Schwartz and Randall prepared a report for the US Department of Defence on potential links between climate change and security. (Which now looks pretty dated.)
Finally, Peiser’s statement that ‘warmer periods, historically, have been more peaceful than colder periods’ does have some basis in the scientific literature (that we have found). A paper by Tol and Wagner in 2008 and Zhang et al in 2007 both indicated that in the past, when there has been warming there has been more war, and when there has been less warming there has been less. This is because cooler temperatures – at least in temperate regions – led to less successful agricultural production and thus less conflict over resources. Tol and Wagner do point out however that:
“It does not follow that a warmer future would be more peaceful because the relationship between temperature and warfare may be reversed in the tropics- but this has yet to be quantified.”
Both papers also make a point of stating that their work isn’t particularly useful for predicting future trends. As we have outlined before, recent work indicates that climate change is likely to have negative impacts on food production around the world.
Far from re-framing the “climate scare” as Peiser puts it, Huhne has delivered a detailed, referenced speech, and has avoided adding confusion to an already complex and challenging topic.