Page 28 - Australian Defence Magazine June 2019

DEFENCE BUSINESS
CLIMATE CHANGE
Reframing climate change as a
INSTITUTE FOR INTEGRATED ECONOMICS RESEARCH (IIER) | CANBERRA
The influence of the natural environment on military operations is as old as the battles of antiquity where soldiers and sailors fought against weather and terrain as much as they did their enemy.
TODAY we are confronted by global envi- ronmental degradation and climate change, occurring at an unprecedented scale and speed; with cascading and ramifying risks transferred to infrastructure, energy sys- tems and the global economy. At this scale climate change impacts at every level of our military and national security systems.
Yet, while the interlinking of climate and environment with national security is recog- nised, it is still seen as a driver that attracts only secondary or tertiary importance. This article is the third of the opening series by the Institute of Integrated Economics Research (IIER) – Australia, and completes the tril- ogy of economics, energy and environment framed within a national security perspective.
Why consider climate change and envi- ronmental degradation in a national secu- rity framework? Have we got the right secu- rity framework to understand and respond to the new environmental and climate secu- rity paradigm?
Environmental and national security
National security is deliberately an impre- cise term. This allows the government of the day to define national security in terms of an evolution of new threats. In 1969 the threat to Australia was the domino effect of communism manifested in the Vietnam conflict. Today the threat is multidimen- sional reflecting a world that is not clearly shaped by singular threats. Gareth Porter, in his comparison of national security to en- vironmental security in the early 90s, noted that the sovereign state almost exclusively needs an ‘enemy’ to define national security.
Porter further said that environmental security represents a departure from tradi- tional concepts of national security as it ad- dresses two distinct elements:
• the environmental factors potentially shaping violent conflict, and
• the impact of degradation on global well- being and economics.
In 2001 Jon Barnett wrote comprehen-
sively on the Australian perspectives of environmental security, but for the two de- cades since then the ideological divide, the ‘climate wars’ has silenced public debate. And lack of public debate as meant that there is little or, no policy on environmental security beyond the piecemeal legal protec- tion of the environment, largely implement- ed by states and territories.
This divide is serious and represents a well- entrenched organisational, ideological and cultural gap. A dangerous stereotype has emerged that places National Security as the business of serious people protecting our in- terests 24/7, and ‘the environment’ as being the hobby horse of well intentioned ‘greenies’ with a much narrower agenda and world view.
The challenge to change assumptions
There are at least five implicit assumptions in our political approach to climate change and environmental degradation that are questionable, and can continue to fuel the divide:
1. Australia’s policy approach is that environ-
mental degradation and climate change is not a significant national security risk. The extension is that, at best, it has the potential to cause instability in some other less devel- oped countries requiring us to respond.
2. The environment is something we can afford to consider, but only in a manner that doesn’t affect traditional security or economic arrangements.
3. This change will be slow and generational thus allowing time to prepare and respond. 4. Our systems (governance, defence, early warning, foreign policy, engineering, miti- gation) are robust enough to adapt to slow changing effects brought about by environ-
mental degradation and climate changes.
5. Australians are great innovators and can always stay ahead of unwanted changes.
An old security paradigm
Challenging the assumptions above, and beginning the journey to demolishing the ideological divide goes to the heart of break- ing conventional wisdom - a concept coined by Professor Galbraith, in his description of economic management in the affluent soci- ety. It is a description of the need for con- stant learning and agility.
The conventional wisdom is that you can- not have a good environment without dam- aging the economy and the well-developed systems of governance. This either-or argu- ment frames the environment as something which will get looked at afterwards, it is like the ‘environment will get the scraps from the table after the banquet’.
This conventional wisdom has the very distinct outcome of stove piping environ- ment and climate change as a very singular
28 | June 2019 | www.australiandefence.com.au
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