Global security in the age of climate responsibility
Can you imagine the Ministry of Defence telling the Treasury to make sure the UK economy decarbonises fast enough to help ensure the world avoids the worst effects of climate change?
It’s an unlikely scenario, but a new paper has called for a rethink of the traditional boundaries between economic and security policy. Carbon Brief talks to the author, Dr. Simon Dalby, about the implications of his new paper, ‘Rethinking Geopolitics: Climate Security in the Anthropocene’.
Dalby’s work is based on the premise that humanity is now living in a new geological era, in which human activity is increasingly influential on the conditions we find ourselves in. Earth scientists call it the Anthropocene. Dalby tells us:
“We are no longer living in a natural world that is a given context for humanity, but in one that our systems are changing quite fundamentally. This increasingly artificial context is usefully discussed in terms of the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch in which humanity is remaking geological circumstances, literally deciding such things as how many polar ice caps the earth ought to have in millennia to come.”
Foreign and defence ministries are already preparing for the security repercussions of climate-related issues, such as shifts in water resources or rising sea levels. But Dalby tells us that if the security community is going to respond adequately to the Anthropocene, it needs to widen its focus. Rather than focusing on responding to the threats of climate change, he says the concept of geopolitics must grow incorporate the understanding that human economic activity that is causing warming in the first place.
Dalby calls for a ‘new geopolitics’ that takes account of this situation. He suggests security thinking should extend to considering an economic approach that limits the harmful effects of climate change:
“Recognising that we are making future environments now is key to the new geopolitics. We are literally shaping the future; business leaders and politicians now need to act on that premise. The new geopolitics is about what kind of world we are making; economies that don’t further destabilise the climate are key to future security for all.”
Climate security versus climate policy
The idea of geopolitics might seem rather outdated, evoking memories of Cold War competition between great powers. But the prospects of dramatic changes in water or fossil fuel availability, or competition over the Arctic’s resources, as the world warms have resurrected concern about tension between and within states.
The UK Ministry of Defence’s Global Strategic Trends programme treats climate change as one of several interacting so-called threat multipliers that could heighten instability in vulnerable areas. The consequences are likely to be complex and unpredictable. As US Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn has warned:
“If the destabilising effects of climate change go unchecked, we can expect more frequent, widespread, and intense failed state scenarios creating large scale humanitarian disasters and higher potential for conflict and terrorism.”
Dalby says the response from the security community – at least traditionally – is often to try to pull up the drawbridge, or to jockey for power or resources. He writes:
“Security is frequently invoked as a necessary response to [weather disruptions, droughts, floods and heatwaves], even if this is only a matter of dealing with symptoms.”
He says this reflects how security discussions have often been disconnected from other efforts to understand the climate system and policy attempts to avoid the worst effects of climate change. For example, he writes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s first four reports do not discuss security problems.
But that may be changing. The draft of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s new Working Group Two report was leaked last week. It includes research on the relationship between climate impacts and security. Associated Press notes:
“The [leaked draft of the] report uses the word “exacerbate” repeatedly to describe warming’s effect on poverty, lack of water, disease and even the causes of war.”
The draft report also makes the link between the actions we take now and the climate of the future. It highlights there are a number of directions future climate change and societal development could take, the action we take now determines how much we’re able to narrow those possibilities.
The IPCC calls the next few decades up to 2040 the era of ‘climate responsibility’.
This area of climate policy – focusing on cutting emissions rather than responding and adapting – has traditionally been the preserve of economics experts weighing up the costs and benefits of acting to cut emissions on a global and national scale.
Dalby argues that a broader definition of security needs to inform decision making about climate policy. He writes: “Decisions about energy systems and land use taken now have direct implications on how high sea levels will rise and how weather systems will shape agricultural possibilities in the coming decades”.
He tells us:
“[T]raditional military planning to fight big wars won’t be much use in the face of climate change. We are actively changing the geopolitical context and doing so by increasingly making artificial ecologies, both in terms of cities, but also in terms of how we remake agriculture and irrigate, dam and reconfigure “natural” landscapes to produce commodities and provide recreational spaces too. Calling the next few decades the ‘era of responsibility’ makes good sense. Simply assuming the environment for future generations will be the same context as we now know is no longer possible.”
Source: Dalby, S. (2013), Rethinking Geopolitics: Climate Security in the Anthropocene. Global Policy. doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12074