Ecological security

Ecological security: an important moment

/ Dan Smith / Leave a comment

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.

Thoughts about a nuclear-free and ecologically sustainable world order

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This is a difficult time to be talking about disarmament or even arms control. The geopolitical context is about as unhelpful as it could possibly be and it is hard to imagine circumstances in which the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is ratified by all the world’s states. And yet, talking about disarmament and imagining a nuclear-free world is what I do in an article newly published by the Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament. To make a challenging ask yet more demanding, my argument is that we – humankind – need a new order that will guard not only against the existential nuclear threat but also against the dangers arising from severe ecological disruption.  

What follows is a short version distilled from the first draft of the article. Among other things, it leaves out some of the political philosophy. For the full version, follow the link.

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Sustainable Defence in a Challenging Environment

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For Europe, responding to insecurity and responding to ecological disruption are both era-defining challenges. In June last year, NATO decided to respond to the insecurity that member states and many, many citizens feel by increasing military spending to 5% of annual economic output, with a minimum of 3.5% devoted to what they called ‘core’ security, and up to 1.5% for cyber security, infrastructure and suchlike. No comparable pledge has been made for responding to the ecological crisis. Far from it, European (and other) governments currently seeming to be turning their backs on the green agenda.

There is an obvious risk that national security will divert and drain energy and resources away from other policies and priorities, such as welfare, health and education as well as the environment. And a further risk that the emphasis on national security and building up the military will have negative effects on the natural environment and accelerate ecological disruption.

Those are the risks. Does it have to be that way?

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360 degree security

/ Dan Smith / 4 Comments

Global security has been declining for some years now. There are many markers of this persistent deterioration – massive loss of life, rising numbers of displaced people (the estimate for 2024 is 130 million, a larger population than all but 9 countries), deepening crisis and confrontation, and unsolved social and ecological problems.

So how do we think coherently about security in these times when there are so many sources of insecurity ?

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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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