Climate change

Ecological security: an important moment

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The UN General Assembly high-level week is an uber talkfest, so it’s important to use the opportunity to say something important. While most of the media attention has been on some more rambling boasting from the US President, UK Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband did indeed use the opportunity and used it well.

An intelligence assessment for the UK government on the security impact of ecological disruption was completed not far short of a year ago. It is a report of the Joint Intelligence Committee so it is not a surprise that the government sat on it for several months. What was a surprise is that when it was finally published in January this year, instead of there being a fanfare, it was eased into public view as a report from the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It was a kind of backhanded way of publishing it, suggesting a grudging acceptance of the need to publish it but no intention to go much further.

The Guardian says that the version that was published was redacted. If so, I shudder to think what may be in the full version. Here is the first sentence of the summary:

“Global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten UK national security and prosperity.”

So far as I can see on reading it, no punches are pulled. And by the way, the otherwise excellent reportage in The Guardian is wrongly headlined to say the report is about the impact of climate change. The report rightly goes wider than that, as its title as well as its first sentence make clear.

So what did Ed Miliband do? –– He spoke. He shared the substance of the report at a meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, speaking to foreign ministers of the EU, Kenya and others. And he finished off with a good, sharp message:

“The countries fit for the future will be those that see climate and nature as intrinsic to economic and national security. 

“Countries that anticipate risks and invest in resilience before crises hit. 

“Countries that seize the incredible opportunities the clean energy transition presents. 

“Countries that don’t just see the connections but act on them. 

“That is why the UK is placing climate and nature security at the heart of our national security and foreign policy decision-making.”

This is a realignment of security policy that is badly needed. It’s obviously not enough to say it, you have to do it. It’s not enough for one country to do it, there have to be more. But this is a welcome sign of the UK under a new government getting back to forefront of this discussion, where it was ten years ago, and moving the discussion (and hopefully the policy) forward.

World order §6: Ecological disruption and cooperation

/ Dan Smith / 2 Comments

Researchers, commentators and policy-makers are increasingly aware of the negative effects of climate change for peace and security. Climate change undermines conditions for peace and security for all, while increased conflict, disputation, instability and disorder add to the difficulties of arriving at agreements to slow down global warming. When we think about peace and security and about world order, climate change – and, by extension, the full spectrum of ecological disruption – should be in the centre of our attention.

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Ecological security: five questions

/ Dan Smith / 2 Comments

Ecological disruption takes many forms and poses many challenges because it leads to a weakening of the foundations in nature on which human communities and societies are based. One of these sets of challenges is in the security sphere, as set out in the recent SIPRI report, Five questions on ecological security, which I co-authored with Rod Schoonover. 

The security challenges of today and tomorrow include some that are unprecedented because they are driven by ecological disruption, the extent and kinds of which are themselves unprecedented. The issues are new and how they combine together is new. It follows that we need some serious thinking and rethinking about security.

I have been pondering and re-pondering what security means in some recent blog posts, and in last week’s post I looked at the policy implications of focussing on ecological disruption. Basically, step one is to find out more about the problems and their likely health, economic, behavioural, social and conflictual knock-on effects.

In this post, I summarise some of the science that lays out the challenge of ecological disruption in the security sphere.

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Ecological insecurity is about more than climate change

/ Dan Smith / 6 Comments

Beyond the climate crisis, other related aspects of ecological disruption are bad news for peace. Too little is known about the links between environmental change and its impact on societies, politics and peace, in part because there are many gaps in scientific knowledge about the dimensions and trajectory of disruption. As a result, not only can we not provide all the answers we need in order to know what is unfolding and how to respond, we also don’t know all or even most of the questions to ask. That said, we know enough to know there’s a problem, enough to understand the urgency of knowing more.

SIPRI has just published a report, Five questions on ecological security, which I co-authored with Rod Schoonover. It outlines the issues and begins the task of figuring out what to do about them. This post is a much-shortened version of the policy parts of the full report; my next post will summarise some of the underlying hard science knowledge and gaps. Or, to get it all in one go, turn to the full report.

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Insecurity, the Anthropocene & nature’s tipping points

/ Dan Smith / 1 Comment

Each February, leaders, policy-makers, thinkers and practitioners in the field of security, broadly defined, get together at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich for a three day international conference. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2019, Germany’s then Chancellor, Angela Merkel, opened her speech by reflecting on the world’s entry into a new geochronological age – the Anthropocene Epoch. 

She explained, “This means that we are living in an age in which humankind’s traces penetrate so deeply into the Earth that future generations will regard it as an entire age created by humans.” She briefly touched on different human impacts on the environment and then said, “All of this has implications for global security and for the issues that are being discussed right here, right now.”

Right here, right now, too right.

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Climate change: old news and a new start in 2023

/ Dan Smith / 1 Comment

The facts are simple and brutal: looking back at average global temperatures over four decades, 

  • 19 of the 20 hottest years on record occurred since 2000;
  • 29 of the 30 hottest years on record occurred since 1990;
  • 38 of the 40 hottest years on record occurred since 1980.

In short, each decade of the four has been hotter than the previous one. And what it is leading to is what we have seen in 2022 – the year when 35 per cent of a major country was flooded, when another had its worst ever drought, when a continent experienced a once-in-500-year drought, and when, at the end of the year, another major country was ripped into by a cyclone bomb – all that and more, and worse, and harder to bear.

Yes, it’s old news – older than you might think – but it’s worthwhile to keep on recalling it, so the increased awareness of climate change in 2022 does not go to waste.

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2022: the pear-shaped year

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I hope my levity does not make it seem as if I am dismissing the human reality of the horrors we have witnessed in 2022 or downplaying the seriousness of the events and their implications. But it is the way I express my assessment of the year in a brief interview filmed and disseminated as part of SIPRI’s Peace Points series.

It has been a year of war, crisis, the impact of climate change, growing hunger in poorer countries, and increased cost of living everywhere – rich and poor countries alike. And it came on the back of three years of pandemic for most of the world and a fourth year for China.

There is no point in sugaring the pill. The upshot is that this has been a bad year for peace and security . The only way we can figure out how to deal with all of that is to face it head-on with eyes open. Here’s the film.

The bright spot is that more people are paying attention. That’s the starting point for something better.

Environment of Peace: the research report in full

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In the last couple of months I have been writing and posting articles based on the material assembled for the policy report, Environment of Peace: Security in a New Era of Risk that SIPRI published in May and first launched at the Stockholm Forum on Peace and Development. Now, with not a little sigh of relief combined with a real sense of achievement, SIPRI has published the research on which the policy report is based.

It is published in four parts.

  • Part 1, which I had the honour of being the lead author for, is entitled ‘Elements of a Planetary Emergency’.
  • Part 2, led by Cedric de Coning, is ‘Security Risks of Environmental Crises’.
  • Part 3, led by Geoff Dabelko, is ‘Navigating a Just and Peaceful Transition’.
  • And Part 4, led by Melvis Ndiloseh and Hafsa Maalim, is ‘Enabling an Environment of Peace’.

It’s a pretty chunky read – 277 pages and, for those who like to keep count, 1648 endnotes with the supporting references. The five lead authors were backed by a team of about 30 researchers and guided by an international advisory panel.

At the close of 2022, perhaps some of us risk feeling overwhelmed. It is crisis, crisis, crisis all over the place: hunger, biodiversity, energy, economy, supply chains, mental health, security, migration, cost of living and climate. If we manage not to turn away from all of them, it is all too tempting to focus on one or two, either as the magic key for solving the whole lot, or because that’s all the mind can handle.

The uncomfortable fact is that these crises are connected and interacting. The aim of the Environment of Peace initiative that SIPRI set going in 2020 is to understand and explain how those interconnections work, and show how knowing about them can be turned to advantage as we find inter-connected solutions.

Probably the full research report is not everybody’s cup of green tea. But the policy report could be. I didn’t have a hand in writing it so I can contentedly say it is extremely well written and clearly presented and super-well worth the read. And for those who want to explore more deeply or check out the underlying evidence and analytical foundations, the full research report is there for you.

Between two COPs

/ Dan Smith / 1 Comment

It is well established that, worldwide, there is an unfolding, escalating, multi-factor environmental crisis. It is seen in the loss of biodiversity and of biomass, massive changes in the use of land, air pollution, chemical pollution, plastics pollution and climate change. It has effects on health, food security, livelihoods, social and political stability, conflicts and the ability to handle them.

There is no real empirical argument left about any of this. It is getting something done to arrest the slide that is hard.

Two main international agreements attempt to address the environmental crisis: the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. There was a Conference of Parties (COP) – a kind of health check – for the climate convention at the start of November, and there will be one on the Biodiversity Convention in December.

So right now we are between two COPs.

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The idea of security

/ Dan Smith / 2 Comments

2022: the year of insecurity – Ukraine, Taiwan, Ethiopia, happening against a background, as my last blog post set out, of record military spending, with refugee numbers already at a record high. It is tempting to think that this means we need to junk woolly thoughts about human security and suchlike and get back to old-style basics, in which security lies in a strong defence, in power, to be blunt, and more of it than any adversary has. It’s what is called realism in the study of international relations and the realist temptation today seems strong.

It is the direction in which the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the confrontation between China and the USA over Taiwan seem to be pushing us. A return to realism, hardening up NATO against Russia, though it’s worth acknowledging that the demand to get Western policy ‘back to realism’ is a long-standing idea . But why ever and whenever, it’s all about recognising that, if you get into trouble, only the exertion of power will get you out and that’s how it’s been for thousands of years.

Mm-hmm, except that 2022 is also the year of climate change: drought in China and Europe, floods in Pakistan, both in the Horn of Africa, unfolding in a context of several other aspects of serious environmental deterioration, as my last blog post also set out.

And since this means that the mix of challenges on today’s security horizon is not only complex and worrisome but also unprecedented, it suggests there is a need to think hard about what we mean by security – the security of whom or what, and against what – and, indeed, to be ready to rethink.

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