Indonesia in 2035: Climate risks to security in the Indo-Pacific

The Indo-Pacific region is particularly exposed to climate impacts, and Indonesia, like many countries, will be severely affected by climate impacts in the decade to come. The effects of climate-amplified disasters, combined with the political, social and economic consequences of climate impacts originating from within and across the region, will strain Indonesia’s economic and national-security interests.

This report presents the findings of a narrative-driven scenario to stress-test Indonesia’s climate risks emerging by 2035. Its objective is to identify opportunities for Indonesia and its economic and strategic partners to prepare for and mitigate the risks.

While Australian policymakers have devoted significant attention to the existential risks that Pacific island countries face, Southeast Asian countries are also highly exposed and often face similar risks. Within Southeast Asia, Indonesia’s climate risks have received very limited attention despite its high exposure to climate hazards, its very large population (over 10 times larger than all Pacific island countries combined) which is densely concentrated in vulnerable coastal areas and small islands, and its history of political unrest associated with disruptions to food and energy security. It’s also one of the closest neighbouring countries to Australia. Figure 1 on page 5 provides a visual summary of the interacting hazards, risks and consequences highlighted in this report.

The population size of Southeast Asian countries and their often-close proximity to one another means that climate impacts in one country will often have consequences beyond their borders and for their neighbours across the region. Gaining a better understanding of how Indonesia, as the largest country in Southeast Asia, will be affected by climate developments is vital, given both the domestic and regional consequences.

Even below the ‘safe’ threshold of a 1.5°C rise in global average temperature—the aspirational target set in 2015 by the signatories to the Paris Agreement—countries around the world are already experiencing serious, record-setting, climate-driven disruptions on a large scale. The era of climate-induced disruption is clearly already upon us—and it will intensify rapidly.

Building resilience while preparing for future disruption requires an enhanced appreciation of climate risk that goes beyond adapting to more frequent and severe natural hazards, such as floods and fires.

Development-assistance and defence communities have embraced the importance of treating climate change as a threat to human, economic and traditional military security. The challenge is to build the capacity and tools to assess the broad suite of security-related risks of climate change—and to translate that information into measures to mitigate the risks. Understanding the complexity and uncertainty associated with climate trends is a daunting task, greatly complicated by the need to incorporate the many ways climate change affects social, political and economic systems.

The scenario developed in this report isn’t a prediction of the future, but rather a description of a possible future. It identifies many climate impacts, but suggests three primary pathways through which Indonesia may face compounding and destabilising climate disruptions:

  • Significant food insecurity from losses to domestic production due to shifting precipitation timing and extremes across the wet and dry seasons, heightened sensitivity to shocks in global food prices, and reduced government ability to absorb economic shocks, such as food-price hikes.
  • Large-scale coastal population displacement driven by Indonesia’s high coastal population density and the significant exposure of that population to sea-level rise and climate-induced coastal flooding.
  • Slowed economic growth from lost agricultural output, declining revenues from stranded fossil-fuel assets, rising disaster costs at home and abroad affecting economic infrastructure and supply chains, and rising challenges in responding to domestic crises driven by food insecurity and population displacements.

A major finding of this research is that, in little more than a decade, Indonesia is likely to experience major climate disruptions that also amplify climate and security risks in the region, resulting in a range of additional and cascading risks for Australia. A second overarching finding in the report is that Indonesia may be underestimating the likely scale of the climate risks and should devote greater attention to analysing them. It’s in Australia’s interests to do the same and, as a good neighbour, to coordinate an Australian whole-of-government effort to support Indonesia to mitigate the risks, including cross-border risks.

National food security preparedness Green Paper

Australia’s agriculture sector and food system produce enough food to feed more than 70 million people worldwide. The system is one of the world’s least subsidised food systems. It has prospered under a global rules-based system influenced by Western liberal values, but it now faces chronic challenges due to rising geopolitical tensions, geo-economic transitions, climate change, deteriorating water security and rapid technological advances. The world is changing so rapidly that the assumptions, policy approaches and economic frameworks that have traditionally supported Australia’s food security are no longer fit for purpose. Potential conflict in the Indo-Pacific is driving enhanced preparedness activity in Australia’s defence force, but that isn’t being replicated across the agriculture sector and food system in a coordinated manner. Food hasn’t featured as a priority in the public versions of the Defence Strategic Review or the National Defence Strategy. This has created a gap in Australia’s preparedness activities: if Australia’s national security and defence organisations are preparing for potential conflict, then Australia’s agriculture sector and food system stakeholders should also be preparing for this period of strategic uncertainty.

Food security is a pillar of whole-of-nation preparedness for an uncertain future. While current targeted preparedness efforts and resilience mechanisms are valuable, they aren’t sufficient. Stakeholders are calling for stronger, proactive national coordination from the government to empower and support private-sector action. Meeting that demand is essential to strengthening overall resilience. So, too, is understanding that Australia’s food security relies on a holistic and interconnected ecosystem rather than a fragmented supply chain. Australia is a heavily trade-exposed nation that exports 70% of production, so any disruption to maritime and other transport corridors or to the infrastructure needed to move food risks undermining both national food security and Australia’s standing as a reliable global supplier.

This work has been written and constructed as a Green Paper, not an academic publication. Informed by six months of consultations with government, the private sector and civil society, the paper combines applied policy analysis and real-world insights to promote deliberate conversation about protecting Australia’s food security with the same priority as protecting Australia’s national security. The Green Paper is divided into four parts. It also includes three case studies in the Appendix, which use a threat and risk assessment to analyse three critical inputs to the food security ecosystem—phosphate, glyphosate and digital connectivity—to help stakeholders evaluate the vulnerabilities in Australia’s food security ecosystem.

The intention of this Green Paper is to deepen understanding of food security as a key public policy issue, stimulate public discussion, inform policymaking and provide both government and key stakeholders with policy options for consideration. This Green Paper’s 14 recommended policy options have been designed to equip governments and the private sector with structured national-security-inspired assessment tools and a framework to continuously identify, prioritise and mitigate vulnerabilities. That includes options to centralise the coordination and decentralise delivery of preparedness activities, establish accountability and embed food security as a national security priority and a key element of Australia’s engagement across the Indo-Pacific.

Pressure points: China’s air and maritime coercion

Pressure Points Website

New research from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute reveals a range of nations are increasingly willing to challenge China’s excessive claims in the South China Sea than they were previously.

The analysis, detailed in Pressure points—a world first online resource tracking the activity and behaviour of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the South China Sea and beyond.

The website highlights almost a dozen recent incidents of unsafe military behaviour by China against countries including the United States, Australia, Canada, the Philippines, the Netherlands and others, and finds these unsafe incidents have ramped up in recent years, after first beginning in 2021.

The research also analyses the Chinese military’s use of air and maritime coercion to enforce Beijing’s excessive claims and advance China’s security and defence interests in the Indo-Pacific.

As outlined on the website, the PLA employs a variety of risky and dangerous tactics to try to deter others from operating in areas of the South China Sea and East China Sea, including through the release of flares, the use of lasers, sonar bursts and other dangerous manoeuvres.

Through a detailed examination of which countries do or don’t use their military forces to challenge China’s excessive claims, the research also finds that not all countries are regularly publicising the challenges they are engaged in.

While the US, Canada, France and the United Kingdom regularly publicise their challenges, Australia, Japan and New Zealand are among the countries that do not.

The project also provides governments, as well as regional and global militaries, with policy recommendations to help push back against China’s ambitions to reshape the regional order.

These focus on enhancing transparency through regular public statements to reinforce the importance of their military actions, building and strengthening networks between like-minded countries and demonstrating perseverance.

This new ASPI project fills an information gap regarding the PLA’s regional activity, and through greater data-driven transparency the project aims to deepen and inform public discourse on important defence and security issues.

It provides the public with a reliable and accurate account of the PLA’s regional activity by highlighting and analysing open-source data, military imagery and satellite footage and official statements. Future expansions of the work will occur in 2025-26.

James Curran is wrong: ASPI is and will remain independent

James Curran gets a number of things wrong in his column on the Varghese Review and the work of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Above all, ASPI did not “work hand in glove with the Morrison government on how to play China as an issue in Australian domestic politics”. This is a baseless accusation, for which Curran provides zero evidence. One can only assume the intention is to make ASPI a political target in the aftermath of the review’s release. ASPI is a non-partisan institute that shouldn’t be painted as working or aligning with any side of politics.

Curran further alleges that ASPI has “strayed” from its founding charter, regarding itself as an “ideological font” for “calling out and confronting an assertive China”. ASPI is, and will remain, a non-partisan, independent think tank as stipulated in its charter, laid out in 2001.

He then avers that “some of its analysts created an atmosphere in which to question government policy settings on China was deemed unpatriotic”. These allegations are also completely unsubstantiated. Who is he talking about, exactly?

Varghese was indeed right to point out that Australia has failed to nurture academic expertise on China.

The only person at ASPI that Curran mentions by name is the executive director, Justin Bassi. He accuses Bassi of making a “reprehensible” and “juvenile” comparison between the 14 recommendations in former diplomat Peter Varghese’s report and the 14 grievances against the Australian government, aired by the Chinese embassy in 2020.

Bassi simply noted that there was a “grim irony” in the numerical coincidence, as one of the complaints was widely interpreted as a demand to defund ASPI because it has produced research and commentary critical of the Chinese Communist Party. How is this observation in any sense juvenile? Varghese did not recommend closing down ASPI, but he did recommend that direct government funding for ASPI’s office in Washington DC be discontinued, along with other moves designed to tighten government controls over the sector, including a role for ministers in setting research priorities and appointing government observers to ASPI’s board.

The fact that the government has agreed with most of Varghese’s recommendations is worrying in itself, but especially in light of the Chinese government’s long-running campaign to vilify ASPI. Regardless of the government’s or Varghese’s intentions, Beijing might be forgiven for leaping to the conclusion that ASPI has had its wings clipped in the diplomatic and economic cause of stabilisation – a policy that some ASPI analysts (myself included) have legitimately contested.

The fact that the government coincidentally celebrated the full resumption of the live lobster trade with China the same week it released the Varghese review and its official response can only have strengthened such associations, and perhaps even buoyed the belief in Beijing that its economic coercion of Australia was effective, after all. The timing of this statement, at a minimum, showed poor judgment.

ASPI continues to abide by the guidance in its charter that its main purpose is to provide “alternative sources of input to Government decision-making processes on major strategic and defence policy issues”. Also, that it should help to “nourish public debate and understanding”.

ASPI’s research output on China is an important part of what we do, though only one part. As an institution, ASPI is proud of the breadth of its China expertise and language skills, which is unsurpassed among think tanks in Australia. ASPI has also provided an outlet for prominent Australia-based academics to publish policy-relevant research on China. ASPI has contributed significantly to Australia’s stock of China expertise. Just this week, the US designated companies including battery maker CATL as Chinese military companies after years of research from institutions like ASPI about links to the Chinese government and military, and about human rights abuses.

Ministers from around the world seek out ASPI analysts for briefings on our research. Datasets we have built over the past decade as a public good have been used by governments and organisations worldwide.

Blind spot

In his report, Varghese was indeed right to point out that Australia has failed to nurture academic expertise on China. But universities, for their own reasons, have long since abandoned the field in the areas that matter most for Australia’s strategic policy – the external behaviours of China’s Communist Party, through its state security apparatus and the People’s Liberation Army. ASPI will continue to do what it can to nurture the talent required to fill that national blind spot and to publish ground-breaking research in these areas. ASPI’s researchers would collegially welcome a greater investment of resources by other think tanks, universities and the government in this regard.

Curran and others are free to criticise ASPI and other research institutes but should focus on evidence, not innuendo. I, for one, would much prefer to be writing about Australia’s regional security environment, defence capability and military strategy. A glance at the international headlines is sufficient to understand there is an urgent and growing appetite for expert analysis in these areas, to inform the general public, and provide alternative policy inputs for the Australian government.

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