Stop the World: Climate change and security with ‘Climate General’ Tom Middendorp
In this episode of Stop the World, Justin Bassi speaks to retired General Tom Middendorp – also known as the ‘Climate General’ – about the links between climate change, defence and security. They discuss the impact of climate change on the military and its role in disaster preparedness and response.
With a growing global population meaning a growing demand on natural resources, the conversation also explores how we can adapt and learn to do more with fewer resources. They consider the role that technology and innovation can play in responding to climate change, as well as the importance of supply chain security.
They also discuss the different climate risks in South and Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and how countries like Australia and the Netherlands can work together to support these regions and help address the combined climate and security threats we face.
Independent Review of National Natural Disaster Governance Arrangements
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.
The geopolitics of water: How the Brahmaputra River could shape India–China security competition
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
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.
National resilience: lessons for Australian policy from international experience
The strategic circumstances that Australia contemplates over the coming decades present multiple, cascading and concurrent crises. Ensuring a safe and secure Australia, able to withstand the inevitable shocks that we’ll face into the future, will require a more comprehensive approach to strategy than we’ve adopted over the past seven decades. We can’t rely on the sureties of the past. The institutions, policies and architectures that have supported the nation to manage such crises in our history are no longer fit for purpose.
The report highlights lessons drawn from international responses to crisis, to assist policymakers build better responses to the interdependent and hyperconnected challenges that nations face. The report brings together the disciplines of disaster management, defence strategy and national security to examine what an integrated national approach to resilience looks like, and how national resilience thinking can help Australia build more effective and more efficient responses to crisis and change.
The report concludes that now is the time to commence action to deliver a national resilience framework for Australia. Collective, collaborative action, enabled by governments, built on the capability and capacity of Australian industry and the community, and aimed at the goal of a resilient Australia, can ensure that we’re well placed to face the future with confidence.
China, climate and conflict in the Indo-Pacific
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
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
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.