Security, defense and geopolitics in the climate emergency
Of equal importance to the economic implications of The Climate Emergency are the impacts on security and geopolitical stability. There are two aspects to this:
First is the instability and conflict that will be caused by physical climate change as a threat multiplier, especially mass refugee movements, famine, failed states and war. This has been well debated, though still not sufficiently addressed by the active defence and security community.
Second are the large geopolitical changes that will be created by successfully fixing climate change, particularly by the end of the use of fossil fuels for energy and the transition to a distributed, renewables-based energy system. This will have profound global economic and security implications - positive and negative.
Given we have left it very late in the process, a successful climate emergency mobilisation would still leave us dealing with both.
It is likely the security community will engage in supporting a Climate Emergency because without such an approach, the world becomes very unstable and potentially unmanageable from a security perspective. At 3°C we could have what is described by security experts at the US Centre for Strategic and International Studies as “outright social chaos” [FN4].
The geopolitcal and security implications of physical climate change
Many defence experts have contributed to our understanding of the security risks posed by climate change. The respected British defence think tank, the Royal United Services Institute concluded in 2007 that: “In the next decades, climate change will drive as significant a change in the strategic security environment as the end of the Cold War. If uncontrolled, climate change will have security implications of similar magnitude to the World Wars, but which will last for centuries” [FN5].
Another early contribution came in Gwynne Dyer’s 2008 book Climate Wars [FN6]. Dyer, a military and international affairs journalist with a solid understanding of climate change science, portrayed the collapse of the European Union in the 2030s. In his scenario, northern African refugees overrun southern Europe, and southern Europeans flee to the northern states to escape an expanding Sahara. Dyer sees potential for nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan over water resources and a completely militarized United States–Mexico border as the United States seeks to keep out massive waves of immigrants - a topical argument in 2019.
In April 2010, 33 retired generals and admirals wrote to the United States Senate majority and minority leaders, stating that “climate change is threatening America’s security [...] it exacerbates existing problems by decreasing stability, increasing conflict, and incubating the socioeconomic conditions that foster terrorist recruitment. The State Department, the National Intelligence Council, and the CIA all agree, and all are planning for future climate-based threats [FN7].”
The essence of the security challenge - and its complexity - is that while climate change directly causes some security impacts through for example sea level rise, its main contribution is as a ‘threat multiplier’. In other words, it helps create the conditions in which conflict caused by other issues can then be triggered or accelerated.
A good case in point was extreme weather and its resulting impacts during 2010 and 2011, with droughts in Russia and floods in Canada causing a global spike in food prices that saw wheat prices double in seven months. Noting that such food price increases were widely seen as a trigger—though not a cause—of the Arab Spring, Sarah Johnstone and Jeffrey Mazo, writing in the journal 'Survival’, argued that this was “a textbook example of what analysts mean when they talk of complex causality and the role of climate change as a ‘threat multiplier.’ ”[FN8]
Conflict and its causes is complicated and scholars and experts widely debate the connections to climate and will continue to do so, which is to be welcomed. But this goes back to our discussion of the science issue, where the lack of certainty becomes an excuse for not acting. In this case, where we might have a trigger or major contributor to full scale war or collapse, this search for certainty before acting is very dangerous.
What we know for certain from military experts is that climate change is a powerful ‘threat multiplier’. That is not in dispute. This means even if we embark on a Climate Emergency mobilisation - and successfully limit warming to 1.5°C or below - we will still see physical climate changes that will worsen security. We see this today.
One recent and hotly debated example was the war in Syria. It is clear that it is not arguable that ‘climate change caused the war in Syria’. What is clear is that there was a drought, which was likely to have been exacerbated by climate change, and that this drought created instability [FN9]. Instability creates the conditions for conflict. Thus, in Syria we have another classic example of the ‘threat multiplier’ phenomena.
Outside academia, it is not important to conclusively link any particular conflict to climate change. That misses the point. Conflict has always and will always exist. We take considerable measures to reduce conflict because the consequences of war are extreme. The war in Syria triggered widespread human, geopolitical and political impacts regionally and around the world [FN10]. This included the refugee crisis in Europe and resulting political polarisation.
The key is that while such conflicts will always have multiple causes, climate change will trigger more of them, which is why it is referred to as a ‘threat multiplier’. Whatever the causes of any single conflict, Syria provides a good example of what we can expect more of.
That means that even with a successful climate emergency mobilisation we will face conflict, mass refugee flows and widespread disruption to the food supply, water availability and possibly famine. It will probably be manageable compared to passing the 1 – 1.5 °C point, but it will need to be managed actively.
Accordingly, the military needs to become deeply engaged in planning for the complexity and urgency of these impacts. They will pose very significant security challenges and require major changes to resource planning and threat assessments.
The geopolitics of stopping climate change
In addition – and this has received very little attention in public debates [FN11] – we have to consider the implications of success. Removing fossil fuels from the economy and replacing our centralised energy supply with a distributed, technology driven system centred on renewables, will have large geopolitical impacts, both positive and negative.
We particularly need to analyse all the synergistic impacts given the use of fossil fuels has widespread security, social and economic impacts . This would be the case even if we transitioned away from them over 50 years, but if we successfully do so over a decade or two, it will be far more dramatic and potentially quite destabilising.
Consider for example the Middle East/North Africa and Russia/CIS. Both regions have a history of military tensions and conflicts and both have net oil exports valued at over 25% of their GDP. The implications of a rapid transition away from fossil fuels on these regions’ economic prospects, and as a result their political context, could be transformational to global economic and military stability.
While less exposed, we could also see high impacts in and around Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria and Venezuela – with all these and many others heavily exposed to fossil fuel income. Losing that income inside a decade would also be dramatic but could be managed with strong economic and diplomatic planning ahead of time.
There are many exciting and positive implications of this shift as well.
Consider all the energy importing countries diverting the massive costs of paying for these imports to instead be spent on local energy (and job) generation. The top 10 importers spend around $850 billion every year importing oil.
Consider the end of oil and energy supply as a source of conflict and thus as a security consideration for military planners and diplomacy.
Consider those living in poverty without modern energy, then having local and distributed power both available and cheap.
On this last point, a major international commission of inquiry into this question concluded: “Renewables also offer developing economies an opportunity to leapfrog, not only fossil fuels, but, to some extent, the need for a centralized electricity grid. Countries in Africa and South Asia have a golden opportunity to avoid expensive fixed investments in fossil fuels and centralized grids by adopting mini-grids and decentralized solar and wind energy deployed off-grid—just as they jumped straight to mobile phones and obviated the need to lay expensive copper-wired telephone networks.”
The key conclusion from all the above is that the climate emergency could be the single largest influence on geopolitics and security in the 21st century.
Footnotes
[FN4] Campbell, K.M., et al. (2007). The Age of Consequences: The foreign policy and national security implications of global climate change. Washington DC, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, pp 7.
[FN5] Royal United Services Institute (2007). Delivering Climate Security: International Security Responses to a Climate Changed World. Whitehall Papers, pp 4.
[FN6] Dyer, G (2008) Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats. Toronto: Random House Canada.
[FN7] For more information on the letter to Congress, see: Joe Romm (April 29, 2010). Senior Military Leaders Announce Support for Climate Bill. at "Think Progress”.
[FN8] Sarah Johnstone and Jeffrey Mazo (2011). Global Warming and the Arab Spring. In: Survival: Global Politics and Strategy 53, no. 2, pp 11–17.
[FN9] Quoting Henry Fountain (2015). “Drawing one of the strongest links yet between global warming and human conflict, researchers said Monday that an extreme drought in Syria between 2006 and 2009 was most likely due to climate change, and that the drought was a factor in the violent uprising that began there in 2011.” https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/science/earth/study-links-syria-conflict-to-drought-caused-by-climate-change.html
[FN10] Quoting Mark Fischetti (2015). “...drought in Syria, exacerbated to record levels by global warming, pushed social unrest in that nation across a line into an open uprising in 2011.” https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-hastened-the-syrian-war/?redirect=1
[FN11] The notable exception is this one important report by the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation: IRENA (2019). A New World – The geopolitics of the energy transformation. Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation. http://geopoliticsofrenewables.org/Report