Climate change ‘a national security threat’: report

Strategic planners ‘largely ignored’ security threat posed by rapidly escalating climate change impacts in our region.

Robert Glasser has called for the federal government to urgently recognise the security risks of climate-induced famines, rising seas and mass migrations affecting hundreds of millions of people. Picture: AAP

Rapidly escalating climate change impacts in Australia’s immediate region pose an unprecedented ­national security threat that has been “largely ignored” by strategic planners, a new report warns.

The former head of the UN ­Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, Robert Glasser, has called for the federal government to urgently recognise the security risks of climate-induced famines, rising seas and mass migrations affecting hundreds of millions of people.

He said sea levels in Southeast Asia were rising four times faster than the global average, while in Indonesia alone 165 million ­people lived in at-risk coastal areas.

Water shortages, heat waves, collapsing fisheries and devastating storms were imminent risks, Dr Glasser said in a report for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute. “Any one of the increasing risks would be serious cause for concern for Australian policymakers, but the combination of them, emerging nearly simultaneously, suggests we’re on the cusp of an unprecedented and rapidly advancing regional crisis.

“Australia urgently needs to begin thinking about political, economic and security tipping points generated by climate change.”

The head of ASPI’s new Climate and Security Policy Centre called for the government to prioritise investments in defence, foreign affairs, home affairs and intelligence agencies to assess climate risks and feed those assessments into strategic decision-making.

Defence’s posture, training and capabilities would also have to change to respond to more frequent, higher-impact regional natural disasters, while the aid program “will need to scale up its efforts to strengthen regional ­resilience”, Dr Glasser said. He warned that the regional impacts could “overstretch our operational capacities to act” by requiring the ADF to simultaneously provide disaster relief and respond to a national security crisis.

Scott Morrison acknowledged climate change as a security risk for the first time following the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires, saying responding to natural disasters would have implications for the ADF’s structure, capability, command and training.

Yet the word “climate” appeared just once in the 2020 Defence Strategic Update, which said the region would face more pandemics and growing food and water scarcity. “These threats will be compounded by population growth, urbanisation and extreme weather events in which climate change plays a part,” the key Defence planning document said.

Dr Glasser said accelerating climate change impacts meant “we can’t wait for the severity of the situation on our northern doorstep to become obvious before we act”.

He cited more frequent and intense fluctuations between El Nino and La Nina events as a key threat that would lead to more extreme droughts and floods, and food insecurity. “Crop yields will be reduced by rising temperatures, changes in rainfall, the expansion of the reach of crop pests and shifts in predators that keep crop pests in check.

“The number and duration of heatwaves are increasing, disproportionately affecting maritime Southeast Asia, where hundreds of millions of people are already exposed to extreme heat, including in the agriculture sector.”

Dr Glasser said there was some cause for optimism, with Quadrilateral Security Dialogue countries — Australia, the US, India and Japan — establishing a climate working group to co-ordinate actions and policies. US President Joe Biden’s new whole-of-government approach to dealing with climate change had also put the issue at the centre of nat­ional security planning, he said.