Climate change

Five global hinge points

/ Dan Smith / Leave a comment

Among those sayings that encapsulate political wisdom but are either inaccurate or apocryphal (such as the ancient Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’ that is neither Chinese nor ancient, or the misinterpretation of the Chinese character for crisis as fusion of danger and opportunity), I have a soft spot for the one by Harold Macmillan. When asked either what he most feared or what was most troubling when he was UK Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, he may have replied, ‘Events, my dear boy, events.’

If he didn’t say it, he should have. The press of events is the bane of those trying to steer a strategic path in government. Today, it is particularly difficult because there are so many events consuming so much government oxygen while we face five major hinge points in global affairs that complicate everything.

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The nuclear challenge today and tomorrow

/ Dan Smith / 1 Comment

On 6 and 9 August this year, we will mark the 80th anniversaries of the two occasions on which nuclear weapons have ever been used in war – the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.* Humanity has perpetrated and experienced a great deal of harm in the past eight decades but nuclear weapons have not been used again. Despite today’s widespread and intensifying perception of nuclear risk, the nuclear taboo survives.

That does not mean the nuclear problem has been solved, of course. It is “an encouraging fact”, as the Nobel Peace Prize Committee put it when giving the 2024 award to the movement of Japanese nuclear survivors (the hibakusha), Nihon Hidankyo. But not more than that. And honouring the hibakusha in this way was also intended as a wake-up call to those many people who until recently regarded nucleapons as yesterday’s problem.

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World order §8: A multiplex alternative: international cooperation in bite-sized pieces

/ Dan Smith / 2 Comments

It is all very well to argue, as I did in my two most recent posts, that far-reaching international cooperation is essential to solve critical world issues and, furthermore, that there are issues on which it is evidently possible. But that does not solve the problem – the world order is in shaky condition and there is no consensus on how to fix it. Now’s the time to have a stab at what to do when consensus is lacking.

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World order §7: Shared vulnerabilities demand cooperation

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My previous post makes an argument that regular readers of this blog will find familiar: the challenge of ecological disruption including climate change crosses national boundaries and can only be tackled by international cooperation. It is not a problem that any single country, however rich, can solve alone. It is the superordinate challenge of our time and one part of the difficulty of rising to it is that, at the very time when we need a world order with strong institutions encouraging, facilitating and streamlining international cooperation, they are weakening. Deteriorating relations and increasing hostility between the great powers and their respective allies are undermining the ability of world order institutions to protect peace and security and get in the way of working productively on climate change and other issues. In the face of that, how can we do cooperation?

To the pessimism that might produce, I have a simple response. If international cooperation is necessary it has to be possible because the alternative is unacceptable. And if it is possible on the ecological crisis, I’m now going to argue, it’s possible in other areas as well.

This post is the next to last in a series on the shaky state of the world order. It is based on the introductory chapter to the recently released SIPRI Yearbook 2024.

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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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World order §1: Order under pressure

/ Dan Smith / 4 Comments

As global security deteriorates, one of the problems both in understanding it (even in knowing what to worry about most) and in figuring out what can and should be done is that so much seems to be going wrong at once. Beyond the individual issues of rising inter- and intra-national conflicts, ecological disruption, economic inequalities and malfunction, and fragmenting social cohesion in so many countries, there is a system failure on a world scale.

That thought directs attention towards the world order — the way in which international relations are arranged through institutions, treaties, law and norms — and the problems that are and have been chipping away at it.

The 2024 Yearbook of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) is out now, compiling and reflecting on the key data and trends in peace and security during 2023. In the introductory chapter, I explore the problem of the world order today. The chapter is available in full online. Here on my blog, this and succeeding posts will present the arguments in a somewhat tweaked, less formal and slightly fuller manner, with some updating to cover the way things have moved on.

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360 degree security

/ Dan Smith / 3 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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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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