Tag Archive for: climate security

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

Australian policymakers are vastly underestimating how climate change will disrupt national security and regional stability across the Indo-Pacific.

A new ASPI report assesses the ways climate impacts could threaten Indonesia’s economic and security interests in the next decade, driving consequences across the Indo-Pacific at a crucial time for both the country and the region.

If we fail to anticipate and adapt to accumulating climate-driven risks, we risk stumbling blindly into crises that could lead to severe losses in security, finance and life. Indonesia is one of Australia’s nearest neighbours and will play an increasingly important role in regional affairs in the years ahead. We must understand and address the full implications of climate change for Indonesia and, by extension, our shared future.

The report identifies three key pathways to compounding and destabilising climate disruptions in Indonesia.

One is significant food insecurity that comes from declining domestic production due to shifting rainfall patterns and seasonal extremes, heightened sensitivity to global food price shocks, and a diminished government capacity to absorb these economic disruptions.

The second is large-scale population displacement. Indonesia has a high coastal population density and so is particularly vulnerable and exposed to climate-amplified coastal flooding from sea-level rise and storm surges.

The third is slowed economic growth resulting from reduced agricultural output, declining revenues from stranded fossil-fuel assets, and rising disaster-related costs affecting infrastructure and supply chains.

While the physical impacts of climate change are already intensifying, the most concerning outcomes globally will arise from social, economic and political disruptions which are far more difficult to predict or manage than isolated disaster events.

Given an already unstable global context of rising geopolitical tensions, climate impacts will only magnify this volatility. For example, in 2023, a drought rendered the Panama Canal impassable, just as Red Sea shipping was being disrupted by Houthi attacks. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 constrained a major source of global wheat supply, while India’s ban on certain rice exports further strained global food markets, affecting many communities globally that were already food insecure.

We have focused this report on Indonesia because of its geopolitical significance, rapidly growing economy, large population and its high exposure to complex climate risks. While we do not assess Indonesia’s considerable capabilities to manage these risks, we highlight the intensity of challenges that may be underestimated by policymakers.

With this in mind, the Indonesian government and its regional partners—including Australia—must work together to anticipate and prepare for climate disruptions of this scale. The report makes research and policy recommendations to guide those efforts and lays the foundation for proactive diplomacy and effective international development interventions in the Indo-Pacific. These include:

—Conducting future analyses of the systemic economic impact of climate change across the Indo-Pacific, with a particular focus on Indonesia;

—Prioritising regional collaboration on climate-amplified population displacement;

—Strengthening regional and global diplomatic efforts to enhance cooperation and reduce volatility in the global food system; and

—Expanding food security initiatives to mitigate the effects of climate change on domestic food production.

The report also suggests that Indonesia and its partners should prepare for diminishing economic and disaster relief support across Southeast Asia, including by advancing the value proposition for continued public and private sector investment in regional climate resilience

We hope this report sparks a vital conversation about how Indonesia, Australia and regional partners can better prepare for significant and rapidly emerging climate disruptions. In coming months, we plan to apply the same analytical approach to other countries across the region, as we have done by highlighting the significant risks Australia faces and the need for it to rapidly build climate resilience.

Beyond Indonesia’s preparedness, there is a pressing need for a deeper public discussion in Australia about cross-border climate risks. Despite Australia’s future being inextricably linked to the Indo-Pacific, awareness and discussion of these issues remain limited.

Neither the Office of National Intelligence’s national assessment of climate and security risks (or even de-classified findings from it), nor the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water’s National Climate Risk Assessment have been released publicly. In the absence of their release, more analyses like those in this report are needed to fill the gap in strategic public conversations on climate issues

We must clarify and prioritise national efforts to reflect the scope and scale of investments needed to adapt to climate change at home and abroad. Exploring complex climate risks also helps us better understand the underestimated high costs of inaction and the consequences of failing to prevent worst-case climate futures.

In the absence of this forward-looking conversation, we leave blinders on our security and economic outlooks, leaving us unprepared for climate-amplified disruption.

Centring people of colour to close the climate justice gap

Australia must do more to empower communities of colour in its response to climate change.

In late February, the Multicultural Leadership Initiative hosted its Our Common Future summits in Sydney and Melbourne. These summits focused on the importance of multicultural climate advocacy, the disproportionate impact of climate change on people of colour and the need to build climate resilience at a grassroots level.

These summits brought together a range of First Nations, Pasifika, people of colour, and culturally and linguistically diverse advocates and stakeholders. The need for a conference of this nature is clear: although climate change threatens us all, people of colour are often marginalised within mainstream climate-change discourse. As highlighted by Minister for Climate Change Chris Bowen in his keynote speech at the Sydney summit, we need to dispel the myth that climate change is only ‘a concern for inner-city Anglo-Celtic elites’.

The inclusion of people of colour in this conversation is an ethical imperative, as climate change often disproportionately affects people of colour. In Western Sydney, for example, more than half of the population speaks a language other than English at home and the proportion of low-income earners is higher than the rest of Sydney. This area is typically six to 10 degrees hotter than the rest of the city during extreme heat events. These events therefore pose a significant challenge to low-income migrants with English as a second language, who often lack access to quality healthcare and housing.

This is also evident in developing countries. Although the Global South contributes a relatively small amount to global greenhouse gas emissions, these countries are on the frontline of climate change. One only has to look at international headlines to see the severity of climate disasters, including floods in South Asia and rising sea levels in Pacific island countries such as Tuvalu.

These are not one-off events. They are emblematic of a broader trend of climate injustice: rich, developed countries are doing relatively little to respond to climate events, despite contributing more to climate change. In her report to the General Assembly, UN special rapporteur E Tendayi Achiume highlighted that ‘discrimination at the core of environmental and climate justice’ means that ‘race, ethnicity and national origin continue to result in the unjust enrichment of some, and the utter exploitation … and even death of others’.

International climate negotiation forums have also faced criticism for marginalising specific racial groups. At COP26 in 2021, many African voices were underrepresented due to limited funding and difficulty securing Covid-19 vaccines, both of which were necessary for in-person participation. This undermined the ability of African advocates to highlight the severity of domestic climate effects, such as prolonged drought in Zambia, which left about one million people in need of food assistance in 2021.

If Australia and Pacific island countries are successful in their joint bid to host COP31 in 2026, Australia will have the opportunity to address these inequities in climate negotiations. Discussions must focus on improving climate financing for the Global South, especially countries that are industrialising and therefore need access to energy sources. As green energy solutions are often costly, uptake in developing countries will require financial support from wealthier, developed countries.

Centring communities of colour within the climate movement will also help build grassroots resilience to climate impacts. As seen during the Covid-19 pandemic, governments often struggle to reach multicultural Australians, especially community members with limited English language proficiency or those who are recent arrivals. As climate effects become more frequent and severe, empowering multicultural community leaders to act as climate spokespeople at a grassroots level will improve Australia’s broader climate resilience.

While governments have traditionally relied on directly translating messages into community languages, multicultural leaders can more effectively influence their respective communities. Religious leaders, business owners, youth leaders and other prominent figures in multicultural communities are best placed to distil climate messaging.

Community leaders can tangibly illustrate the impacts of climate change on the wellbeing of multicultural communities. For example, they could point to increasingly common pollution-related health effects and highlight the effect of climate change on grocery and fuel prices.

During climate disasters, such as floods, bushfires and cyclones, these same community leaders are already well-placed to conduct tailored outreach to community members in line with government messaging, building community resilience.

Centralising the voices of communities of colour in the climate movement is integral to building national resilience and addressing the disproportionate effects of climate change on people of colour. The Multicultural Leadership Initiative’s summits in Sydney and Melbourne were the first of their kind, shedding light on issues faced by many in the multicultural climate advocacy space. The conference paved an optimistic path forward by finally centring people of colour as autonomous and empowered actors within the climate movement.

High-impact climate risks, low-probability? Think again

In a recent presentation, I recommended, quite unoriginally, that governments should have a greater focus on higher-impact, lower-probability climate risks. My reasoning was that current climate model projections have blind spots, meaning we are betting on best case scenarios.

Irresponsible at best and ‘fatally foolish at worst’, this approach is inconsistent with other security issues—I don’t know many analysts assessing nuclear escalation or a potential Taiwan Strait crisis from the best-case angle.

Globally, January 2025 was the warmest January on record. This included severe heatwaves across Australia, with maximum temperatures as high as 17 degrees C above average.

This warming was unprecedented and, importantly, unexpected. This is an ever-increasing climate-related trend—reality continues to outstrip scientific expectation. Given this, my use of the term ‘lower-probability’ was itself, in hindsight, an example of this best-case mentality: designating high impact climate events as low probability is likely, at best, a dangerous underestimate.

Beyond blind spots in climate model projections, theories and scientists (their calculations and biases) are not infallible. Therefore, the accuracy of probability estimates depends on the accuracy of the underlying logic. Regarding probability:

… if climate modellers wish to determine the implications our greenhouse gas emissions will have … their model/theory will not be adequate [at predicting relevant system features at useful levels of precision and frequency] unless it tells them the changes in the local temperature and precipitation.

Yet, current models seem unable to adequately predict global, let alone local, climate changes. In June 2024, for the first time, global mean surface temperatures reached the Paris Agreement’s aspirational threshold of 1.5 degrees C of warming for 12 consecutive months—again, much earlier than expected.

This is particularly concerning given that most climate impact research of the past decade has been based on temperature rises of 2 degrees C and below, this despite greenhouse gas trajectories setting the world on track to warm by more than 3 degrees C by 2100. Various studies even suggest that we cannot discount increases of up to 6 degrees C.

Various factors drive the mismatch between warming estimates and research coverage. Firstly, as 2 degrees C is the benchmark of international targets, research likely reflects policy demand. Secondly, due to well-funded misinformation campaigns, scientists have been labelled alarmist and want to avoid such dismissal. Thirdly, the consensus process of the International Panel on Climate Change is inherently conservative, which also compounds the previous factors.

How can we deem potential climate impacts low probability if we haven’t properly researched them and their potential dynamics under the higher temperatures we are headed towards?

Further, we today are locking in the events that will undoubtedly happen tomorrow. This is often overlooked and underestimated by security practitioners—unlike military conflict, for example, people are not fully in control. Feedback mechanisms exist within Earth’s systems that, once initiated by rising temperatures, will cause abrupt, self-perpetuating and effectively irreversible changes.

Thermal inertia reinforces this lack of control. The ocean stores more than 90 percent of Earth’s excess heat. Even if man-made greenhouse gases were to cease tomorrow, the world would continue warming for at least another several decades as this stored heat is released.

Due to the factors outlined above, there is uncertainty regarding the reliability of probability estimates for specific events, when they might occur, and the chains of cause and effect that may trigger them.

However, uncertainty does not equal low probability. A lack of certainty around calculation inputs merely lowers confidence in the accuracy of probability estimates. Consequently, the actual likelihood of a particular event occurring may be much higher than predicted.

Moreover, given existing blind spots and biases, it is highly likely that probabilities around singular high-impact climate risks are underestimated, particularly within the security community.

If we analyse climate threats on a cumulative risk basis, the margin for error grows, increasing the collective probability estimates of climate events occurring. Hence, we can have confidence, given our current trajectory, that the collective probability of at least some high impact climate events materialising is high. We shouldn’t use terminology suggesting otherwise.

We must stop analysing events in isolation and begin to better comprehend event compounds, cascades, and concurrency—and fast. This is especially true for probability, as it informs much of the world’s risk and security analysis and management.

All trajectories are subject to change and human decision. But until this change happens, we are heading into uncharted territory.

We can, however, learn from another high-stakes area in which decisions rely on scientific evidence: public health. Patients are not treated by scientists undertaking clinical research, but rather by general practitioners. Justine Lacey and Mark Howden argue that a similar separation between scientist and practitioner would support better climate-science advice to policymakers.

This separation can facilitate relevant and targeted advice encompassing a range of views, largely independent of specific researchers. It could improve the interpretation and translation of advice, enhancing decision-makers’ understanding. This could reduce conflicts of interest and avoid narrowly informed and disciplinary-siloed advice. It would also create shared responsibility, alleviating pressure on the climate science community.

Although intermediaries cannot remove uncertainty, they could help manage it—to the benefit of probability estimates, decision-making and the public.

The threat spectrum

 

Information operations

Australia has banned cybersecurity software Kaspersky from government use because of risks of espionage, foreign interference and sabotage. The Department of Home Affairs said use of Kaspersky products posed an unacceptable security risk to the Australian government, networks and data. Government agencies have until 1 April 2025 to remove the software from all systems and devices. The ban follows a February decision to ban Chinese-owned AI platform DeepSeek from all government systems and devices.

Among members of the Five Eyes intelligence partnership, Canada, Britain and the United States had already announced restrictions on use of Kapersky products. The US banned sales and licensing of Kaspersky products within the US or by US citizens last year over fears of Russian control and influence over the company. Kaspersky said the US decision arose from the current geopolitical climate rather than technical assessments of its products.

Follow the money

Talks in Canberra last week over the future of Darwin Port and its lease to Chinese infrastructure operator Landbridge Group ended in a fizzle. Northern Territory officials met with federal counterparts after federal Labor member of parliament Luke Gosling said the government was examining options for buying back the 99-year lease. The federal opposition supported that proposal, citing the strategic significance of the port for Australian and US defence posture in the country’s north.

But last week’s meeting ended with no clear pathway forward. Northern Territory Infrastructure Minister Bill Yan expressed dismay that the federal government, citing election timing, declined to make concrete commitments about the port.

The meeting followed recent uncertainty over Darwin Port’s finances. Last November the Port disclosed a $34 million net loss for the financial year 2023–24. The port company also said Landbridge had defaulted on corporate bonds worth $107 million and might sell some of its Chinese assets in coming months.

Terror byte

A new report from Australia’s eSafety Commissioner reveals that between April 2023 and February 2024 Google received 258 user reports of suspected deepfake terrorist content made using its own AI software, Gemini. Commissioner Julie Inman Grant characterised these and other gaps in Google’s content moderation as ‘deeply concerning’.

The commissioner issued transparency reporting notices to Google, Meta, WhatsApp, X, Telegram and Reddit in March 2024 requiring each company to report on its progress in tackling harmful content and conduct online. X challenged the notice in the Administrative Review Tribunal, and Telegram has been fined over $950,000 for its delayed response. The commissioner’s report, released last week, finds Big Tech’s progress on content moderation unsatisfactory, highlighting slow response times, flawed implementations of automated moderation, and the limited language coverage of human moderators.

The eSafety commissioner has repeated calls for platforms to implement stronger regulatory oversight and increase transparency on harm minimisation efforts. This follows the latest annual threat assessment from the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, which stressed the importance of stricter content regulation in prevention against radicalization and highlighted the role that tech companies can play in this domain.

Democracy watch

The New South Wales state government introduced new hate-crime laws into parliament in response to rising antisemitic and Islamophobic violence, including a 580 percent increase in Islamophobic incidents and threats against places of worship. These laws, which the parliament passed, expanded offences of advocating or threatening violence, imposed mandatory minimum sentences and strengthened measures to prevent ideologically motivated attacks. While intended to safeguard public safety and national stability, they have sparked concerns regarding possible infringement of democratic principles, particularly freedom of expression.

While these laws aim to curb hate-fueled violence, critics argue that they may limit free expression. Others say they create loopholes. The legislation permits individuals to cite religious text in discussions, shielding certain forms of extremist rhetoric from prosecution. Additionally, the introduction of mandatory minimum sentences has been criticized for potentially undermining judicial discretion and disproportionately affecting marginalised groups.

Planet A

Tropical Cyclone Sean forced Rio Tinto to shut down Dampier port in Western Australia for five weeks in early 2025, costing 13 million metric tons in lost exports. In 2019, Cyclone Veronica closed Port Hedland, reducing Rio Tinto’s iron ore production for the year by an estimated 14 million metric tons. More recently, in February 2025, Cyclone Zelia closed Port Hedland and Dampier, disrupting iron ore shipments and halting operations at BHP, Rio Tinto, and Fortescue Metals.

An ASPI report released on the 50th anniversary of Cyclone Tracy recommended that disaster resilience must go beyond infrastructure reinforcement. To mitigate climate risks, the country also needs advanced predictive technologies, such as satellite monitoring, and early warning systems.

The energy transition that couldn’t

Ideas, and the words we use to frame them, matter. For example, as the Cold War wound down, ‘the end of history’ suggested that the disintegration of Soviet communism would leave liberal democracy and market economies unchallengeable. That idea took hold among Western policymakers, leading them to believe they could afford to relax. Three decades later, ‘the end of history’, and the policies that followed from it, appears woefully misguided.

Today, it is ‘energy transition’ that has gained a hold over policymakers. While the term suggests the necessity of shifting from fossil fuels to renewables—a seemingly compelling idea that aligns with climate goals and technological innovation—it inaccurately describes what is happening (and will happen) and has led some governments to adopt costly, counterproductive policies. And it has pitted goals that should be complementary—addressing climate change and promoting energy security—against each other.

To be clear, energy transitions—moves away from one form of energy to another—have occurred throughout history, coinciding with economic changes that created demand for the new energy sources. After the Industrial Revolution began, the steam engine, the internal combustion engine and the rise of manufacturing economies impelled societies to shift from wood to coal and later to oil and gas.

Support for a transition away from fossil fuels reflects concerns about the actual and predicted costs of climate change and the evidence linking the warming of Earth’s atmosphere and oceans with the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (especially methane) emitted by burning coal, oil and natural gas. The goal of the transition is to achieve net-zero emissions (ideally by 2050) by phasing out fossil fuels and replacing them with renewables, including solar, wind and nuclear power.

This is not occurring. Nor is de-fossilisation. Fossil fuels—oil, gas and coal—still supply over 80 percent of global energy. Since 2013, global oil and gas consumption has risen by 14 percent, owing to a 25 percent increase in developing economies. Coal consumption remains indispensable in powering China, India and other developing countries, and reached record highs in 2023. Renewables, while growing rapidly, are not displacing hydrocarbons, at least for now.

The reason is straightforward: energy demand is increasing at an annual rate of 2-3 percent, and technological advances such as hydraulic fracturing (fracking) have made hydrocarbons cheaper and more abundant. The United States, already the world’s biggest oil producer, will produce even more during Donald Trump’s coming presidency, and growing populations and economies in the Global South will sustain robust demand.

Emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, electrified transport, and hyperscale data centres, are also driving energy demand—which renewables alone cannot reliably meet, reinforcing the role of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels likewise remain indispensable for energy-intensive industries such as aviation, shipping and heavy manufacturing. Renewables, while effective for electricity generation, struggle to meet these sectors’ needs.

Regulatory considerations and politics have also contributed to foiling the energy transition by slowing the permitting process for both nuclear power and wind. And many countries have not overhauled their tax systems to steer consumers and businesses away from fossil fuels.

With the factors undermining the energy transition unlikely to disappear anytime soon, one option is to ignore the evidence and press ahead. This seems to be the preferred approach of many who gather at the annual United Nations climate change conferences. In Dubai in late 2023, attendees issued a final agreement (signed by close to 200 governments) explicitly calling for ‘transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly, and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade.’

Europe has committed to do just that, setting ambitious targets for renewable energy and pricing carbon at levels that made energy and doing business more expensive. The European Green Deal, intended to decouple economic growth from resource use and make Europe the world’s first carbon-neutral continent by 2050, instead contributed to a fall in growth. The lack of investment in energy also left much of the continent dangerously dependent on Russian gas. In short, the premature embrace of the energy transition weakened economic performance and energy security alike.

As Thomas Kuhn famously argued in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, dominant intellectual frameworks persist until their limitations become undeniable, paving the way for a new paradigm. The energy transition has reached that point. Its absence from the final draft of this year’s global climate conference in Baku is telling. A new paradigm is needed: energy coexistence.

Such a paradigm would accept that energy consumption will continue to rise for the foreseeable future, with fossil fuels and renewables both playing a larger role. It is a question not of either/or, but rather both/and—all of the above and more of all—in order to achieve increased security, resilience and affordability.

The paradigm of energy coexistence requires targeted investments and policy reforms. Modernising energy grids to accommodate diverse energy sources and increase efficiency is critical, as is scaling carbon-capture and storage technologies to mitigate emissions. Encouraging the development of renewables through fostering public-private partnerships and easing site restrictions would help. Switching from coal, which causes the highest emissions, to lower-emission gas and renewables should be a high priority as well.

Some will object that energy coexistence is a rejection of much-needed policies to address climate change. But addressing climate change cannot come at the cost of energy sufficiency or security. Nor will it, given the politics.

Building necessary support for tackling climate change is more likely to succeed if the policies are not viewed as hostile to all fossil fuels. A transition from the energy transition would be a good first step.

To work with US on climate, focus on national security and economic ‘value propositions’

Even as the US is set to withdraw again from the Paris Agreement, and potentially the entire UN Framework Convention on Climate Change process, Australia can leverage its partnership with Washington to continue its support for strategically important climate efforts.

To do so, Australia must emphasise that the value propositions for US investments in a climate-resilient Indo-Pacific region are based in US national security and economic interests. It is far cheaper to prepare for future impacts than to react to increasingly intense and concurrent disasters. These investments will also ensure a more stable region less influenced by China’s own, often competing, investments.

This is easier said than done, but the goal is to use the next four years to build global resilience to intensifying climate impacts. The strategic and moral imperative of that goal means doing everything we can with the hand we’ve been dealt.

Early indications of the Trump administration’s approach to global climate resilience can be gleaned from Trump’s cabinet preferences and the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 policy documents—if incoming officials do indeed heed them.

Ideologically motivated perspectives exist. This includes Trump’s choices for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, and director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, who have both recently attacked climate as a security issue. Similarly, Project 2025 is critical of most US climate efforts, and includes recommendations that would damage US leadership in climate science.

So how can Australia and likeminded countries mitigate these risks and grasp opportunities?

Regardless of how loudly the administration might attack climate change as an ideological issue, key prospective officials seem to understand its relevance to national security—both in geopolitical competition and in adaptation for future climate impacts.

The geopolitical dimension will likely be important to keeping the US engaged on climate issues. The proposed national security advisor nominee, Mike Waltz, has been vocal about risks of depending on China for clean energy, particularly for critical-minerals supplies. As secretary of state, it’s clear that Marco Rubio will focus on holding China accountable for its responsibility to rapidly reduce its outsized and growing share of global emissions.

The national security case for adapting to climate impacts—traditionally less politicised than emission reductions—will also be apparent, regardless of whether it’s framed with climate-specific language. Rubio and Waltz have acknowledged the need to build resilience to climate-amplified disasters. As Floridians, they’ve seen first-hand the devastating effects of intensifying hurricanes and sea-level rise.

Even Project 2025’s chapter on foreign aid agency USAID, while advocating a wholesale redistribution of sources and engagement in the provision of aid, and cutting climate strategies and programs broadly, still says ‘USAID resources are best deployed to strengthen the resilience of countries that are most vulnerable to climatic shifts’. While it’s unlikely that an administration following Project 2025 will provide any support for multilateral climate finance programs, it could continue delivering bilateral and minilateral climate resilience investments.

Australia may have more in common with the US on climate than is apparent on first look, particularly with officials such as Waltz and Rubio. The Australian government will disagree on a broad range of issues with the new administration, including criticisms of climate science, the need for emission reductions, and the link between climate and national security.

We do not have the luxury of time to align on every issue, however, so we must advance mutual climate interests for the sake of a more resilient future. Identifying the specific areas where US national interests align with climate resilience can help deliver regional assistance where it’s needed most.

Many defence assets are exposed to climate impacts. Rising disasters at home and abroad will continue to distract the US military and its partners). Ignoring this will diminish military readiness and capability of the US and partners in the Indo-Pacific amid rising regional tensions.

Indo-Pacific geopolitics are sensitive to both climate impacts and investments in resilience. Pacific islands have long identified climate change as the greatest threat to their security. The US and partners such as Australia cannot take Pacific nations’ support for granted if they are left to deal with climate impacts on their own. They will increasingly turn to offers of support from alternatives, including China.

Southeast Asian countries are also vulnerable to climate impacts. The Philippines has just been hit by a sixth typhoon in a month, bringing this year’s total to 16—double the yearly average. As the Philippines’ secretary of defense noted at an event hosted by ASPI on 11 November, the annual cycle of responding and rebuilding after increasingly intense typhoons is costly.

He noted that this cycle affects the resources available for military priorities. He emphasised the importance of communicating the ‘value proposition’ for US support for the Philippines’ climate resilience. He referred not only to the strategic value of preparedness for military confrontation with China, but also the economic benefits of the Philippines acting as a hub for logistics and subsea cables.

This line of analysis will surely resonate with Rubio as secretary of state, who penned an essay in 2023 arguing for the importance of the US supporting the Philippines as it grappled with an increasingly threatening China in the South China Sea.

Advancing the economic value of climate resilience should also resonate with US national interests, as should the threat of losing out on the economic benefits of leading clean energy industries. The US is far behind China as the world’s largest producer of renewable energy technology. Australia should emphasise the need for the US to catch up on critical-minerals and clean energy supply chains to benefit economically and avoid economic coercion.

This administration will pursue policies that Australia and others will disagree with. These partners must ensure that US actions strengthen global and regional stability, not weaken it further—whether in its approach to ongoing geopolitical tensions, or future humanitarian crises. They must emphasise that the best way to minimise future risks includes reducing emissions, strong climate science, and investments in adaptation.

They can do so knowing what will resonate most with influential voices in the incoming administration.

This will be difficult, but not impossible. Success in climate policy requires coordinating broad coalitions around limited resources regardless of how dire the trends may seem, and how difficult progress may be.

This next four years will be no different.

National resilience for Australia—learning the lessons

The last four years have been tough for Australia. We have seen the disastrous 2019-20 fire season, the Covid-19 pandemic, devastating floods and cyclones, the most comprehensive punitive trade measures used against any country in recent history, a doubling of cybersecurity incidents, including some of the largest data breaches and the most serious ransomware cases, more Australians targeted for espionage and foreign interference than at any time in Australia’s history, the re-emergence of right-wing extremism as a more visible and a growing threat to national security, and an acute threat to Australia’s supply chains sparked by the pandemic and exacerbated by the war in Europe.

Never have we found ourselves facing such a range of challenges and risks at the same time. In a new report National resilience: lessons for Australian policy from international experience for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, I discuss how new uncertainties at the planetary level, including a climate and biodiversity crisis, an energy and industrial transformation and an explosion of new technologies will shape societal dynamics for decades. The Indo-Pacific region has become the focus for great-power dynamics, bringing a growing possibility of major-power conflict, as well as increasing calls to prepare for war. New ideological and populist forces are influencing the polity of Australia, Australia’s social cohesion is increasingly threatened, and our democracy is under rising pressure. Australia can no longer rely on the verities of our past to meet those challenges. We must adapt and transform to the new realities, preserving our core national values and institutions, while creating innovative new ways of addressing emergent challenges and reducing our fragility.

The Government has warned us that ‘Australia expects to face a future punctuated by more complex crises—particularly crises that occur at the same time or directly after one another. These types of crises are likely to exacerbate a range of pre-existing vulnerabilities in Australia’s systems, institutions and supply chains, placing our communities under enormous pressure and making recovery even more challenging.’ Experts have suggested that ‘the nation’s foundational institutions and civic infrastructure have become fragile and complacent, lacking the robustness and resilience to face the unexpected and prevail.’

National resilience provides a means to deliver a more systemic approach to preparing for and managing a future in which we face more frequent, severe, complex, cascading and compounding crises. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recognised the importance of a more encompassing, all-hazards approach to national resilience in his pre-election speech to the Lowy Institute in March 2022, noting that ‘fundamental to our national security is our national resilience’.

National resilience is a powerful concept to help nations develop the capacity to weather threats and challenges and emerge from crises in a better state than before. It is the ability to plan for, adapt to, prepare for, resist, respond to and recover from change and crisis, whether natural or man-made, singly or concurrently.  A national resilience approach to crises helps to frame an understanding of the interconnected and interdependent nature of the systems that a nation relies upon to function and provides a structure for making decisions during times of concurrent and cascading crises. National resilience also provides a powerful framework for deterring threat actors by ensuring that no single threat can overwhelm the basic functioning of society and the state. It helps governments to identify, resource and prioritise their investments in preparedness for, response to and recovery from crisis.

A comprehensive national resilience framework would also make economic sense for Australia.  According to a 2021 report on the economic costs of natural disasters in Australia, they currently cost the economy $38 billion per year, with this cost to rise to at least $73 billion per year by 2060. That report suggests that ‘The Australian economy is facing $1.2 trillion in cumulative costs of natural disasters over the next 40 years even under a low emissions scenario. This shows there is the potential for large economic gains from investments to improve Australia’s resilience to natural disasters.’   Australian and international studies show that investments in resilience can reduce the costs of natural disasters by at least 50% annually. Investment decision making focused on building multi-use national resilience capabilities can also leverage investments for natural disaster preparedness, economic resilience, civil and national defence needs, ensuring that Australia is resilient for a diverse range of crises in the most efficient ways possible and potentially saving Australia hundreds of billions of dollars over the long term.

In my report, I have reviewed the national resilience practices of other nations and analysed case studies of crises where national resilience, or the lack of it, has come to the fore.  There are many lessons that we can learn from their experience in developing national resilience, particularly as many countries, including several key partners of Australia, started down the path more than 10–15 years ago.

The report highlights the importance of a whole-of-society response to the challenges ahead, pointing to the important role that the community plays in its own resilience, and how other nations have harnessed the community to strengthen their democracies and for defence and national security. The safety and security of Australia isn’t a task that can be left to governments alone. The national industrial base, the active involvement of civil society and an informed and engaged community are all necessary elements of building our national resilience.

Australia has the necessary tools and capabilities to meet our future challenges and create a more resilient nation that’s better able to ensure the resilience of its society, its economy and its system of governance. Doing so will require a frank, honest and trusted appraisal of our vulnerabilities and a new culture of being willing to work together to use all the elements of our national power to their best effect. The report has identified some key learnings for Australia should it embark on a more formal consideration of national-resilience concepts.

The report presents nine recommendations to government:

Institutionalise national resilience through:

  • a national resilience strategy led by the Australian Government in collaboration with states and territories, industry and the community.
  • a national risk assessment, prepared by the federal government as a classified document after consultation with the states and territories, industry and the citizenry, plus a publicly releasable version presented to the Australian Parliament and the nation.
  • a national preparedness audit developed by the federal government in collaboration with state and territory governments, industry and civil society.
  • a national preparedness plan agreed by the national cabinet.

Create institutional capability and capacity through:

  • establishing a coordinating office of national resilience within either the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet or the Department of Home Affairs.
  • building national resilience training programs for governments, industry and civil-society leaders.

Establish a whole-of-society national resilience endeavour through:

  • establishing a national resilience council with industry, chaired by the office of national resilience.
  • forming national resilience community liaison teams within the office of national resilience to work with communities.

Build national resilience for deterrence and grey-zone defence through:

  • adopting a whole-of-government and whole-of-nation approach to the national defence strategy to be delivered in 2024.

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.

As the planet warms, risks of geoengineering the climate mount

Nations meeting to advance action on climate change at COP27 in Egypt know we’re headed for dangerous climate impacts. The UN Environment Programme confirmed in its 2022 emissions gap report that there is no longer a ‘credible pathway’ to keep global warming below 1.5°C based on 2030 commitments. The report, titled The closing window, suggests that we may still have a shot at keeping warming to 2.0°C, but only if all countries fully meet their net-zero pledges. That’s far from guaranteed or likely given the lack of detail in those pledges. We’re already seeing extreme climate events annually—but even more dangerous impacts are locked in.

The good news is that our efforts to deploy clean energy have succeeded enough to rule out the worst-case projected emissions scenarios and it’s now unlikely that we’ll reach catastrophic warming beyond 4.0°C. There’s one important caveat: modelling suggests that any warming over 1.5°C will increase the risk of self-reinforcing tipping points in the global climate system. Tipping points are temperature thresholds at which significant greenhouse gases can be released suddenly, greatly amplifying global warming—for example, a release of frozen stores of carbon dioxide and methane gas from thawing Arctic permafrost.

Because a climate-disrupted future remains possible, another danger needs our attention. As the impacts of warming become more extreme, countries are more likely to turn to riskier measures to combat them, including geoengineering.

Geoengineering can entail modifying local weather conditions (such as seeding clouds to change rainfall), removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (separating it out and storing it) or managing solar radiation (reducing the amount of sunlight that can get trapped as heat in the atmosphere). These options have been discussed in climate circles for many years—at various times considered a last resort, a moral hazard that could delay decarbonisation of economies, or generally a dystopian nightmare.

Solar radiation management is the most troubling geoengineering idea. The objective is to block sunlight entirely by deploying satellite sunshades between the earth and the sun, to dim the skies by dispersing reflective sulphate aerosols in the stratosphere, or to increase the reflectivity of clouds (cloud whitening) or surface objects like rooftops (or, in an extreme case, glass beads scattered across the Arctic).

In theory, these approaches could rapidly cool global temperatures—especially the dispersal of sulphate aerosols, whose effect would be somewhat like what happens naturally from massive volcanic plumes. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in mid-1991, for example, is estimated to have cooled global temperatures by 0.5°C for two years. Some geoengineering proponents believe that releasing sulphate aerosols into the atmosphere could achieve a similar result and help blunt the threat posed by climate change in the near term.

The danger with these approaches is that deep uncertainty exists about their impacts. They could drive severe consequences that—like global warming itself—don’t respect borders. Dimming sunlight with sulphate aerosols could diminish crop productivity while altering precipitation patterns and increasing the acidity of rainfall, all of which would further stress climate-change-affected regions and the global food system. The massive and rapid changes in atmospheric conditions from such cooling could have simultaneous and devastating consequences for food-insecure communities globally.

Other geoengineering approaches could backfire in other ways. For example, deploying a massive number of glass beads to enable the Arctic to reflect more sunlight could instead trap more sunlight as heat, likely resulting in faster melting of sea ice.

Scientific uncertainty about the use and consequences of geoengineering is a legitimate concern, but there are barriers even to studying it (particularly in the case of solar radiation management). The UN Convention on Biological Diversity has banned all but small-scale geoengineering experiments for over a decade. Earlier this year, a group of concerned scientists and governance experts published an open letter calling for a total ban on solar geoengineering on the grounds that its impacts can never be fully understood or equitably governed in the international system. The main international body that helps coordinate and prioritise climate science research, the World Climate Research Programme, is still determining what role it should play in research on geoengineering.

In response to a recommendation by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine in 2021 to help address uncertainties, the US began developing a research plan on solar geoengineering in mid-2022. Readiness to develop research isn’t matched with an eagerness to address governance issues, however. Under a different US administration, a 2019 proposal led by Switzerland asking the UNEP to produce a report on geoengineering was blocked by the US and Saudi Arabia.

What makes governance of these approaches difficult is that they may be cheap enough to be deployed by many state and non-state actors. The incremental cost of avoiding 1.0°C of warming with sulphate aerosol dispersion may be only US$18 billion a year, a significant but achievable budget allocation for many advanced and emerging economies, high-net worth individuals or companies.

In addition, it’s difficult to know when techniques like solar radiation management should be used because global average temperature rises will result in variable impacts. For example, 2°C of warming will be difficult for all countries but will threaten the existence of some. The cross-border and likely uneven impacts of geoengineering make it difficult to know who would benefit or suffer, further complicating a consensus decision on when the risks of something like sulphate aerosol dispersion would justify its use.

These dynamics mean it’s time to establish multilateral institutions and global norms for geoengineering research and use. We need to do that now. A fence needs to be set around geoengineering so that it can’t be used to justify backsliding among advanced economies to delay decarbonisation. Instead, the principles of its use and study must be informed explicitly by the countries that are the most exposed to climate impacts at any level of warming above 1.5°C and the least able to adapt.

Multilateral institutions are our best hope for governing geoengineering. As ineffective as they may seem at managing our shared atmosphere, particularly as we return to a multipolar world, they’re the reason we’ve avoided the worst-case emissions scenario—and are recovering our ozone layer. Energy markets and economic self-interest may drive the transition, but it was global scientific consensus and the UN that established the knowledge, imperative and targets driving global efforts.

There should be no doubt that geoengineering is an absolute last resort we should fear—for a worst-case scenario we can still avoid. Of course, we need to rapidly reduce emissions to avoid dangerous warming in the first place and redouble investments in adaptation. But as the UNEP emissions gap report suggests, we still need to prepare for dangerous climate impacts—including the possibility of disruptive tipping points. That planning process must include getting a better understanding of geoengineering and deciding what part it will play in our response.

We’re running out of time and can’t keep kicking the can down the road. With everything else climate change brings, in an era of renewed strategic competition, Australia cannot afford to sit this issue out.

Tag Archive for: climate security

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.

Guests:
⁠Justin Bassi⁠
⁠General Tom Middendorp⁠