Scientists say that the climate crisis is real, grave and driven by human activity. However, scientific consensus doesn’t solve four challenging political equations.

First, catastrophism doesn’t help. Extreme rhetoric makes domestic and international agreement, through compromise and accommodation among different political parties and governments, even more difficult, especially when it’s not clearly or consistently backed by the evidence. Seven scientists write: ‘If damaging tipping cascades can occur and a global tipping point cannot be ruled out, then this is an existential threat to civilization’ (emphases added). This is a multicontingent, speculative assertion. If the science is robust enough, the conclusions should be stated firmly and unequivocally.

Historically, climatic warming and cooling go through extended cycles with no apparent pattern to their intensity, severity and timing. The relative potencies of the different drivers of climate variability—CO₂ emissions, solar radiation, ocean circulation patterns, volcanic eruptions, planetary orbital oscillations—are not known.

Natural disasters caused substantially higher casualties in the first six decades of the 20th century compared with the following 60 years, but more extreme weather in the second 60 years accompanied rising emissions. The deadliest disasters have been earthquakes and tsunamis. Along with growing population, encroachments on habitats, land and water use practices, pesticides and overfishing have had major adverse consequences.

Many doomsday warnings failed to eventuate. In 1982, UN Environment Programme Executive Director Mostafa Tolba warned of an irreversible catastrophe by 2000. While another UNEP official in 1989 said 2000 was the cut-off date, in 2007 IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri warned that 2012 was the deadline for necessary action. In 2009, NASA scientist Jim Hansen gave President Barack Obama only four years to save the world from climate catastrophe.

Alarmist predictions become stuck in the ‘cry wolf’ trap. The UNEP’s Emissions gap report 2019 says that even if all current promises are kept the world will warm by double the 1.5°C ceiling by 2100. However, 136 of the 184 Paris Agreement’s climate commitments will not meet the 1.5°C or even the 2°C goal. Why bother, then?

Second, domestic politics militate against robust action. The sacrifices demanded are immediate, real and substantial. The gains are projected, future, generalised and diffuse. The logic of individual costs and benefits clashes with the logic of collective action. Protests against rising fuel and transport prices in France in 2018 and in Chile in 2019 are a harbinger of future riots elsewhere.

The equation just doesn’t compute. Poor countries don’t want to stay poor, and sizeable numbers of working- and middle-class people in rich countries will revolt if pushed into poverty. For Africans and Asians, climbing out of poverty is critical and urgent. Drastic climate action can wait until after they’ve risen on the income ladder. Equally, Western leaders will face political extinction if they commit to drastic drops in living standards to enable income convergence with poor countries and help them to decarbonise.

Third, the international political problems are formidable. Most of the global stock of CO₂ emissions came from the industrialisation of the advanced economies, powered by fossil fuels. There’s also a vast asymmetry between aggregate and per capita emissions. China’s annual per capita emissions (7.9 tonnes) are half Australia’s (16.8 tonnes), but the two countries account for 29.3% and 1.1% of world emissions, respectively. Unable to resist the temptation of finger-pointing for domestic political gain rather than problem-solving for global benefit, Energy Minister Angus Taylor argues that Australia’s emissions have fallen by 12.9% since 2005 but China’s and India’s have increased by 67% and 77%, respectively. They would point fingers at our per capita emissions.

China’s planned expansion of coal-fired power by 147.7 gigawatts matches the EU’s entire output. China is also financing more than one-quarter of coal development in other countries. Why should the rest cut coal production? India’s annual energy consumption is 1.0 megawatt hour per person, compared with the world average of 3.2 MWh and Australia’s 10.5 MWh. India is investing heavily in renewables as well as nuclear, but coal is essential for energy grid reliability and stability and, despite falling from the current 72% of electricity production, will still account for 50% by 2030. India’s coal-fired power generation is forecast to grow by 4.6% per year over the next five years—the highest growth of any country.

Worth A$67 billion, coal was Australia’s top commodity export in 2018. It makes no economic or environmental sense, and therefore no political sense, to stop exports to India. If India is committed to increasing its coal-sourced power supply anyway, why should Australia forgo export revenue and shed mining jobs? If Australian coal is cleaner than the alternatives (as seems likely), the exports should be net global emissions-neutral.

Fourth, because climate policy is not cost-free, governments will be tempted to cheat. To prevent a cascade of breakouts from agreed targets, we need mechanisms to detect cheating and enforce compliance. That’s inconceivable in principle, as it cuts to the heart of national sovereignty, and unfeasible in practice. In the top tier by both net (13.8% of world share) and per capita (16.4 tonnes) measures, the US has disengaged from international efforts to cut emissions. Absent an effective global regime to check national industrial, energy and development policies, defection from the collective regime becomes a rational response for individual countries, even though it amounts to collective suicide globally.

Aggressive action as a policy priority can come only from the world’s political leaders. Climate policy cannot dictate all public policies. While government decisions should be informed by the scientific consensus that the world is in the gloaming zone of climate change, the key calculations will be the balance of political risks and rewards of policy options.

All governments work to balance competing priorities of economic growth, job security, cost-of-living increases, energy security, industrial competitiveness, conservation, and environmental protection. The way to search for feasible and realistic political courses of action is not to repeat the scientific facts with rising stridency, but to find a path forward through the political dynamics at play both within and among countries. What is the decarbonisation strategy that is feasible, most affordable and least disruptive?

Extinction Rebellion protests calling for climate-change action can be annoying when they stop you in traffic or make idealistic but impracticable demands for policies that will keep the global temperature rise to under 1.5°C. And the movement’s call for governments to ‘create, and be led by, a citizens’ assembly on climate and ecological justice’ is likely to make conservatives and others see red, even without the ravishing Red Rebels’ robes and white kabuki faces.

But conservatives might want to take the wind out of the marchers’ banners by taking climate action themselves, drawing on the rich tradition of conservative thought.

National security is a central task of government for conservatives and a good reason to act, despite the security impacts of climate change sometimes being oversold; likely long-term impacts on security are often cited as nearer term than they probably are. And non-military security policy levers, such as international cooperation to stop illegal migration, have sometimes been downplayed in favour of costly military responses.

But impacts have been emerging sooner than scientists forecast only a few years ago and so are playing a greater role in the mix of causes of intra- and inter-state competition. There are, for example, many reasons why Rohingyas are persecuted and try to flee Myanmar, but one of them is that military officers covet their rice- and shrimp-growing land in a world where states worry more about food security and food prices.

Climate change will therefore bring further demand for involvement of the Australian Defence Force in humanitarian operations at home and abroad, potentially reducing readiness for other operations. Former US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld memorably declared that US soldiers are not babysitters; the ADF can’t only provide food, water and shelter to communities affected by longer, stronger natural disasters, despite the gratitude it wins at home and in regional countries.

Conservatives should also want to act on climate change because they might be better at it. If you don’t believe in the perfectibility of humankind, you’re less likely to waste time with individual actions that distract from systemic responses (your hemp shopping bag versus industry-wide overpackaging). And most conservatives are against subsidies, including hidden ones such as governments bearing the cost of climate impacts that greenhouse-gas-producing industries avoid.

So conservatives would tend to tolerate only the most effective state involvement in the economy to reduce market failures like greenhouse-gas production. Market mechanisms and efficiency are more likely to achieve that than a citizens’ assembly. The concept of individual responsibility would rule out compensation for those who take on clearly doomed investments in dirty industries.

In her 1989 speech to the United Nations about the urgent need to act on climate change, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was clear that greater wealth through growth would be required so that we could afford to protect the environment. Conservatives shouldn’t be prepared to see homes and businesses Australians have worked hard for being lost to more or more intense droughts, bushfires or floods. The jobs and innovation that new technologies bring would interest them, too.

Valuing growth and industry gives conservatives a natural advantage in working with developing countries like India and Indonesia that want to power their own growth. If science, economics and technology can square Australia selling coal to fire that growth, conservatism would be for it—but the role of reason in the conservative tradition would surely be against it if the trade-offs don’t work.

Instead, conservatism would acknowledge the role of industry and pursue growth for both Australia and poorer countries by licensing our climate-change technology and encouraging private investment and freer trade. These sorts of actions would also help Australia ensure international climate rules don’t disadvantage traded industries that are subject to climate-change-mitigation measures and don’t get unilaterally imposed on us.

Some conservatives might want to take effective action on climate change to conserve the richness God created. Thatcher ended her speech noting that ‘[W]e are not lords of all we survey … [W]e are the Lord’s creatures, trustees of this planet.’ For conservatives less influenced by religion, a school of thought born in a largely agrarian England would instinctively encompass the truism that there is no chance of a prosperous economy and stable society without a liveable environment.

It is only an artefact of annoyingly self-righteous activists, populism and special interests—no friends of the conservative tradition, or any other—that some conservatives think they should take little effective action on climate change. But those who care about farmers, the economy and society’s strivers shouldn’t leave the field just to idealists, anti-capitalists and protesters in bright robes.

Hugh White’s latest book, How to defend Australia, has attracted much attention. As the book’s back cover rightly claims, White is ‘Australia’s most provocative, revelatory and realistic commentator on defence’. But, as he himself might say, this is both good news and bad news.

The good news is that we have someone who is willing to think the unthinkable—the possibility that the US might leave the region and that we ought to think about getting nuclear weapons if it does—in a way many policymakers and strategic types find intensely discomfiting. The bad news is that White’s book is not nearly as ‘realistic’ or ‘revelatory’ as we might have hoped.

He’s not alone. On the contrary, the intellectual universe inhabited by ‘serious’ strategic thinkers is one that continues to revolve around a very traditional notion of possible security threats and the best ways to respond to them. One thing there does seem to be agreement on among Australia’s strategic elites, however, is that we ought to be spending much more on defence, despite real concerns about the appropriateness, viability and effectiveness of recent acquisitions.

But for an epistemic community that prides itself on its hard-headedness, it’s remarkable that climate change remains a niche concern and one that only really matters if it affects traditional geopolitics. While the recent speech by the chief of the Australian Defence Force, Angus Campbell, on the implications of climate change in the Pacific is a welcome acknowledgement of reality, his remarks were primarily concerned with the possible opening it provides China.

Campbell apparently assured his listeners that the defence organisation ‘has been preparing for the impact of climate change “for years”’. Whether his audience of senior public servants were reassured by that observation isn’t clear. Given that the ADF’s response to most issues usually involves buying more weapons and preparing for the worst, perhaps they were. That has been, after all, the default response of Australian strategic thinkers for most of our history as an independent nation. As White’s book reminds us, it still is.

No doubt many readers will think this is the self-indulgent nit-picking of an over-privileged limp-wristed liberal and/or inner-city greenie with no conception of strategic reality. Perhaps so. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that I, or—much more importantly—the vast majority of the world’s scientific community, aren’t right to be deeply concerned about our collective, entirely unsustainable, impact on the biosphere.

There’s one big difference between the possible threat posed by climate change and that posed by, say, China, India or Indonesia. As even the most bellicose and alarmist of the Canberra commentariat would (presumably) concede, it’s very difficult to conceive of any circumstances in which any of the usual suspects are actually likely to pose a direct existential threat to Australia.

Climate change, by contrast, is already happening, getting worse more quickly than even pessimists thought, and likely to affect the world’s driest continent particularly badly. Our very own water wars are a taste of what’s to come.

In the meantime, we spend increasingly large sums of money on weapons systems that no one expects to use, even in the unlikely event that they actually work as advertised. White implicitly acknowledges the inherent implausibility of traditional security thinking when he points out that even if Australia’s trade routes were threatened (a slightly more plausible scenario), ‘we would have no practical options to protect our seaborne trade from attack’. Quite so.

It’s also important to recognise that when—not if—the impact of climate change gets much worse, it is sure to exacerbate all of the ‘usual’ challenges that keep strategic types up at night, plus a few new ones that don’t bear thinking about. Environmental refugees are a problem that looks especially ill-suited to a military response. Or perhaps not, if our principal ally’s policy on border protection is anything to go by.

Indeed, Campbell isn’t the only one who has been turning his mind to the strategic consequences of climate change. His counterparts in America’s military establishment have also been war-gaming the implications of unmitigated climate change. They’ll need to do a lot more of it given that their commander-in-chief doesn’t think it’s happening and is seemingly intent on doing everything he can to make it worse.

Tragically, the most immediate, direct existential threat that Australia (and every other country, for that matter) needs to defend against is one that threatens the very foundations of human life itself, not to mention democracy and a civilisation worthy of the name. Hyperbole? Sadly, almost certainly not. Schoolchildren seem to get that, even if some of the smartest people in this country still appear to be incapable of doing so. When we have a real and immediate danger to confront, do we really want to waste our very limited time responding to the improbable variety?

Australia’s new Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne probably envied New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s welcome at this week’s Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting in Nauru. During the leaders’ retreat lunch break yesterday, Nauru President Baron Waqa joined a group of local elders to serenade Ardern with a song titled ‘Aotearoa our friend, Jacinda new star in the sky’.

Payne was never going to be described in such warm terms. After just over a week in the job, she had to convince Pacific leaders that Australia remained committed to being the region’s ‘principal security partner’ when the new prime minister, Scott Morrison, had chosen not to attend.

Morrison’s absence, and his non-appearance at the April 2018 Forum Economic Ministers’ Meeting, suggest that Australia’s continued claims about prioritising the region might be more hyperbole than fact. The PM’s failure to attend this week’s gathering also undermines Australia’s claimed recognition of the importance of building people-to-people links.

Although Payne is the person in Cabinet most likely to continue Julie Bishop’s positive approach to the region as foreign minister, she was hamstrung at the meeting by Australia’s hypocritical policies. The centrepiece of yesterday’s leaders’ meeting was the signing of the Boe Declaration, designed to update the 2000 Biketawa Declaration on regional security.

The Boe Declaration articulates an ‘expanded concept of security inclusive of human security, humanitarian assistance, prioritising environmental security, and regional cooperation in building resilience to disasters and climate change’. It’s a sad irony that this commitment to ‘human security’ was signed only kilometres from Australia’s offshore processing centre where the human rights of refugees are regularly violated.

This expanded concept of security also highlights the different priorities of Australia and its Pacific island neighbours. Australia is focused on strategic concerns, particularly the increasingly crowded and complex geopolitics of the region, which has negative effects in the Pacific islands. Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi warned in a speech in Sydney last week that the region is ‘seeing invasion and interest in the form of strategic manipulation’. ‘The big powers’, he declared, ‘are doggedly pursuing strategies to widen and extend their reach and inculcating a far-reaching sense of insecurity.’

The biggest challenge facing Payne was the reality of Australia’s climate change policies. The Boe Declaration identifies climate change as ‘the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific’ and reaffirms forum members’ ‘commitment to progress the implementation of the Paris Agreement’.

Payne faced a tough job convincing Pacific leaders that Australia is genuinely committed to meaningful action on climate change when her prime minister is a known advocate for coal-fired power and the government refuses to adopt an explicit strategy to meet its Paris Agreement targets.

There’s scope for Australia to improve its relationships in the region. For example, the Boe Declaration reaffirms forum members’ commitment to the idea of the ‘Blue Pacific’, which is intended to highlight the ‘collective potential of our shared stewardship of the Pacific Ocean’.

Australia already does valuable and valued work to help Pacific island states protect their ocean territories through its Pacific Maritime Security Program, under which it provides patrol boats and personnel to regional states. It’s now looking to bolster that with expanded aerial surveillance, with a particular focus on fisheries and, increasingly, undersea natural resource management.

The wider understanding of security outlined in the declaration also specifies ‘humanitarian assistance’ as a priority. Australia is already the primary provider of humanitarian and disaster relief (alongside New Zealand), which it can continue and expand. The declaration identifies ‘transnational crime’ as another priority, an area in which Australia provides significant support and which is likely to be enhanced when the proposed Australia Pacific Security College is established to train security and law enforcement officials.

The declaration specifically mentions the need to ‘improve coordination among existing security mechanisms’, which is likely to be assisted by Australia’s proposed Pacific Fusion Centre to connect regional security agencies. And the declaration highlights the need to promote the ‘prosperity of Pacific people’, to which Payne’s signing this week in Nauru of agreements with Samoa, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu to join the Pacific Labour Scheme (Kiribati, Nauru and Tuvalu are already members) will hopefully make a contribution.

However, this week’s forum leaders’ meeting again highlighted the counterproductive nature of Australia’s approach to the Pacific islands. Bishop worked hard to build bridges with the region when she was foreign minister, and was instrumental in formulating Australia’s policy of ‘stepping up’ its engagement with the Pacific islands, but those positive developments are undermined by Australia’s declared policy positions.

While it’s unlikely that Payne (or any Australian leader) will be serenaded by Pacific leaders soon, Australia at least needs to be singing from the same song sheet as the region, particularly when it comes to climate change.

Note: An earlier version of this post said that a clause about good governance that was in the draft text of the Boe Declaration had been removed in the final text of the document. In fact, it had been moved to another section of the document. The post has been amended to omit the references to the clause.

Seventeen billion dollars will be needed to directly replace critical infrastructure between 2015 and 2050 due to the impact of natural disasters in Australia.

That’s a key finding of this month’s report from the Australian Business Roundtable for Disaster Resilience & Safer Communities prepared by Deloitte Access Economics.

The study examined the financial costs of extreme weather events in Australia and the dramatic growth in anticipated costs to 2050. It found that in 2015 the total economic cost of natural disaster events in Australia exceeded $9 billion, or about 0.6% of gross domestic product. These costs are expected to rise to an average of $33 billion per year by 2050.

Another key finding showed that carefully targeted investment in resilience measures now will reduce estimated expenditure by Australian governments on natural disaster relief and recovery by more than 50% by 2050.

Resilient infrastructure will play a crucial role in helping communities to withstand, respond to and recover from the potentially devastating impact of natural disasters in Australia. But there’s still no requirement for government or the private sector to consider resilience when making investment decisions. The message is clear: we should be investing in disaster risk reduction.

The Insurance Council of Australia understands this very well. The ICA points out that climate change scenarios predict a progressive increase in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters over the coming 100 years.

We need to reduce regional exposure by making development decisions for exposed locations over the planned life cycle of a development and strengthening local infrastructure to achieve an acceptable residual risk of damage. Building codes need to be improved to ensure that built structures remain viable to predictable events over their planned life cycle.

The ICA’s message supports the key findings of the Turnbull government’s Northern Australia Insurance Premiums Taskforce which recently handed down its report.

The Taskforce found that mitigating the risk of damage is the only sustainable way of lowering insurance premiums in cyclone prone regions of northern Australia, saving lives and reducing property damage. Mitigation could reduce premiums by up to 15 percent, as opposed to a government cyclone mutual or reinsurance pool. The mitigation options outlined in the report include stronger building standards, better retrofits for older homes, mitigation awareness campaigns and making insurance more responsive to mitigation.

The expected long-term future losses from cyclones in northern Australia will average around $285 million per year. The Australian Government Actuary concluded in 2014 that the estimated cost of cyclone damage is likely to be the main reason why north Queensland premium rates are, on average, significantly higher than premium rates in most other parts of Australia: premium rates increased by about 80 percent from 2005-06 to 2012-13. Insurers still had to pay out $1.40 for every dollar collected in premiums across northern Queensland.

At the same time, the Productivity Commission concluded last year that current government natural disaster funding arrangements weren’t efficient, equitable or sustainable. The Commission identified natural hazard risk as the key driver of insurance premiums and recommended a five-fold increase in annual mitigation funding, phasing out of stamp duty on insurance and improved land use planning laws.

It found that private exposures just grow without robust price signals. International experience showed that government intervention in property insurance markets through subsidies was overwhelmingly ineffective—it created a moral hazard as well as fiscal risks.

The cost of insurance can be high in higher-risk areas, such as flood plains and cyclone-prone areas. But the best way to lower premiums and reduce the losses from natural disasters is through public investment in mitigation to protect infrastructure—not government intervention.

Motivating property owners to undertake personal steps toward risk mitigation can be difficult. While the cost of mitigation efforts that reduce damage is mainly borne by individual property owners, knowing what actually works can be difficult to determine.

Leveraging the input of science for disaster risk reduction will be important. A good example of linking disaster risk reduction research and the insurance industry has emerged in North Queensland. Research into cyclone damage by the James Cook University’s Cyclone Testing Station found that the severity losses during cyclones could be reduced by carrying out a series of relatively minor reinforcements or additions to homes.

These changes range from strengthening roofs of older homes by replacing how the roof framing is held together, adding connections between roof and foundations of a home, the addition of waterproofing under roofing as well adding protective shutters.

Suncorp, the biggest insurer in Queensland, recently introduced a new insurance initiative to provide a real incentive for disaster risk mitigation by Queensland homeowners, ranging from Rockhampton to the north of the state. Branded as the Cyclone Resilience Benefit, it provides a range of options to reduce the cost of home insurance, if homeowners add some or all of the suggested mitigation actions suggested by James Cook University’s Cyclone Testing Station.

Recognising and rewarding homeowners who make their homes more resilient shows what can be achieved if industry and communities work together on finding solutions to mitigating the effects of natural hazards.

When it comes to safeguarding our communities against natural disasters, prevention is always better than cure.