Independent Review of National Natural Disaster Governance Arrangements

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Australia’s national disaster governance arrangements need major changes to grapple with the increasing size, intensity, cost and complexity of climate-fuelled natural disasters.

These findings were arrived at by the Independent Review of National Natural Disaster Governance Arrangements, led by Dr Robert Glasser (ASPI Senior Fellow, Climate and Security Policy Centre).

The Review, which the Government released publicly last Friday, was commissioned in 2023 by the National Emergency Management Ministers’ Meeting, a Ministerial Council reporting to the National Cabinet.

“ Climate change makes it fundamentally necessary to discard the notion that national-scale natural disasters happen only infrequently; they will rapidly become annual occurrences, with less and less “down time” for first responders to recover, relief supplies and emergency equipment to be replenished, infrastructure to be re-built, and for communities to re-establish their resilience .” the report noted.

“ The litmus test of the effectiveness of Australia’s emergency management planning, investments, capacities, and governance arrangements, at every jurisdictional level across Australia, should be the extent to which we are mitigating the risks of intensifying, increasingly national-scale, year-round hazards, in which emergency preparedness, response, relief, and recovery will be required simultaneously. ”

The overarching conclusion in the Review is that the governance arrangements do not adequately address this emerging environment. This is reflected in a variety of ways described in the report:

  • Siloed approaches to address risks and threats that should be integrated;
  • Agendas and discussions in governance meetings focused on immediate challenges, to the detriment of emerging, more fundamental, and therefore more urgent, challenges;
  • Underinvestment in risk reduction and resilience;
  • Insufficient consideration of the sweeping changes and innovations required to address the emerging risks.

The findings emerged from extensive consultations with dozens of experts and decision-makers in the private sector, foundations, civil society, and the hazards research community – as well as Ministers, senior officials, Commissioners, and Chief Officers from Commonwealth, State, and Territorial Governments.

“ The climate is continuing to warm rapidly. We are now entering uncharted waters, where our historical experience in a broad array of areas, including our experience of disasters, is no longer a reliable guide for what lies ahead. This has enormous consequences for how we prepare for these extreme events and for how we structure and manage our national governance arrangements ,” the report states.

Click here to read the Review.

Michael Copage

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The geopolitics of water: how the Brahmaputra River could shape India–China security competition

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This report assesses the geopolitical impact of a possible dam at the Great Bend of the Brahmaputra. In particular, it exams the dam as a potential source of coercive leverage China may gain over India. A dam there would create four likely strategic effects: it would very likely consolidate Beijing’s political control over its distant borderlands; it would create the potential for massive flooding as a tool of violence; it may affect human settlement and economic patterns on the Indian side of the border, downstream; and it would give Beijing water and data that it could withhold from India as bargaining leverage in unrelated negotiations.

To mitigate those challenges and risks, the report provides three policy recommendations for the Indian Government and its partners in Australia and the US. First, it recommends the establishment of an open-source, publicly available data repository, based on satellite sensing, to disseminate information about the physical impacts of the Great Bend Dam. Second, it recommends that like-minded governments use international legal arguments to pressure Beijing to abide by global norms and conventions. Third, it recommends that the Quad—the informal group comprising Australia, India, Japan and the US—use its humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HADR) guidelines to begin to share information and build capacity for dam-related contingencies.

Roundtable on Climate Resiliency and Investment in the Pacific Islands

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On 29 July, ASPI DC was thrilled to host a roundtable discussion on Climate Resiliency and Investment in the Pacific Islands, which brought together government officials across a variety of agencies and departments, members of the think tank community, diplomats from Indo-Pacific countries, Congressional staffers, and experts in climate adaptation and development finance to consider the challenges and opportunities for climate mitigation and adaption in the Pacific Islands.

Following the viewing of an informational video from ASPI’s Head of Climate and Security Policy Centre, Michael Copage, ASPI DC’s Tasfia Zeba and Morgan Chen led the event, which solicited crucial insights regarding the need for greater cooperation among development finance organizations and nations, the importance of strategic messaging for target audiences, and the necessity of implementing a dynamic, bottom-up approach that considers regional perspectives and emboldens climate-affected communities in the solution calculus.

This topic is highly important to us, and we look forward to propelling the discussion further.

China, climate and conflict in the Indo-Pacific

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This paper surveys the current reporting and analysis on climate and security to explore the implications that climate change may have for China’s ability to prosecute its security goals in the region’s three major hotspots: the SCS, Taiwan and the India–China border conflict. Those three hotspots all involve longstanding border and territorial disputes between China and other nations and may draw in various levels of US involvement should China continue to escalate tensions.

China, climate change and the energy transition

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This report surveys China’s enormous energy transition to renewables. It begins by sketching the energy challenges China faces and its climate-change-related energy policies, in the context of the global geopolitics of the energy transformation. Next the report focuses on conventional energy sources (oil and natural gas), followed by electricity, and energy technologies. Although the report is intended primarily to survey developments to date, it concludes with some brief observations about the considerable energy challenges China faces in the years ahead.

Assessing the groundwork: Surveying the impacts of climate change in China

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The immediate and unprecedented impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly apparent across China, as they are for many parts of the world. Since June 2022, China has been battered by record-breaking heatwaves, torrential downpours, flooding disasters, severe drought and intense forest fires.

In isolation, each of those climate hazards is a reminder of the vulnerability of human systems to environmental changes, but together they are a stark reminder that climate change presents a real and existential threat to prosperity and well-being of billions of people. 

Sea-level rise will undermine access to freshwater for China’s coastal cities and increase the likelihood of flooding in China’s highly urbanised delta regions. Droughts are projected to become more frequent, more extreme and longer lasting, juxtaposed with growingly intense downpours that will inundate non-coastal regions. Wildfires are also projected to increase in frequency and severity, especially in eastern China. China’s rivers, which have historically been critical to the county’s economic and political development, will experience multiple, overlapping climate (and non-climate) impacts.

In addition to these direct climate hazards, there will also be major disruptions to the various human systems that underpin China, such as China’s food and energy systems as are discussed in this report. These impacts deserve greater attention from policy analysts, particularly given that they’ll increasingly shape China’s economic, foreign and security policy choices in coming decades.

This report is an initial attempt to survey the literature on the impact that climate change will have on China. It concludes that relatively little attention has been paid to this important topic. This is a worrying conclusion, given China’s key role in international climate-change debates, immense importance in the global economy and major geostrategic relevance. As the severity of climate change impacts continue to amplify over the coming decades, the significance of this gap will only grow more concerning.

Australia must get review of climate-change security risks right

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The most consequential gap in the climate policies of the Coalition government under Scott Morrison was not its weak commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or its reluctance to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, but rather its neglect of the security threats posed by climate change.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government moved quickly to address this gap by ordering an ‘assessment of the implications for national security of climate change’. The review will be led by Andrew Shearer, the director-general of the Office of National Intelligence, working closely with the Department of Defence. The review team faces a daunting task.

Defence ‘acutely aware’ of risks posed by climate change: ADF chief

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Defence has a key role to play supporting the government’s climate and disaster resilience agenda by integrating climate risk into the planning and conduct of its activities and operations, says Australian Defence Force chief Angus Campbell.

In a video statement at the launch of a new ASPI publication, The geopolitics of climate and security in the Indo-Pacific, Campbell described as ‘outstanding’ the work of ASPI’s Climate and Security Policy Centre led by Robert Glasser and said it performed an essential role in driving discussion of the long-term strategic consequences of climate change.

Read the full piece on The Strategist. 

The geopolitics of climate and security in the Indo-Pacific

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Climate change is much more than an environmental crisis—it’s a systemic crisis that will transform the geopolitical landscape. And the consequences for the Indo-Pacific, already the most exposed region in the world to climate hazards and home to the world’s fastest growing populations, economies and geopolitical rivalries, will be profound.

In this volume, leading experts explore the impacts of this rapidly emerging climate threat on regional systems by interrogating a 1.5°C 2035 climate change scenario developed by the ASPI Climate and Security Policy Centre.

The chapters here attempt to understand the unpredictable effects of climate change on the region’s already fragile human systems, from great-power competition and militaries, governance and politics, food and water insecurity, and ethnic separatism, to energy and trade systems, sovereign risk and digital disinformation.

What emerges is a vivid demonstration of the dangers of underestimating the systemic connections between those factors, including how risks in one thematic area amplify risks in others, completely reshaping the regional security picture.

Watch the publication launch event.