Professor Tim Benton
Hello, everybody. Welcome to this Chatham House members’ event on climate change and the threats it poses to security. As many of you might know, I am Tim Benton, Research Director in Emerging Risks, and, of course, climate change is obviously a very big emerging risk that we have to cope with. We have known, for very many years, that climate change is a threat multiplier to society. We know it has played a role in issues like the Arab Spring, and the consequences of that have been significant, as geopolitical reconfiguration of the Middle East. We suspect that climate change has played a role in the emergence of COVID, just as it’s played a role in the swarm of locusts that is hitting Northeast Africa and Pakistan and India.
We know that climate change is increasing tensions between, for example, pastoralists and agrarian farmers in the Sahel and moving those two increasingly into conflict, as the amount of grazing and the quality of grazing changes and people move around. We know that countries are facing sea level rise and they’re going to lose access to existing urban habitation, that’s going to put knock-on pressures on moving infrastructure. We know that countries are going to face loss of land, through climate change degradation. We know that countries are going to have – face increasing insecurity in supply chains because of the way that climate change is impacting on things. So, effectively, that’s the topic for today’s panel, to discuss the relationship between security, in the broad sense, and climate change.
We have an absolutely fantastic panel. I’ll introduce our three speakers now before we go into their talks. Our first speaker will be Neil Morisetti, Professor, Rear Admiral, Vice Dean at UCL and former UK Envoy in Climate and Energy Security, and a former Foreign Secretary Special Representative on Climate Change, who is also an Associate Fellow in Energy, Environment and Resources at Chatham House. Our second speaker is Kate Guy, who is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Climate and Security in Washington DC, and is a Research Assistant and DPhil student at Oxford, where she also manages Oxford School of Climate Change. And our third speaker is Adriana Erthal Abdeneur, Professor and Co-ordinator of International Peace and Security area at Igarapé Institute, Brazil, sorry, and I can’t read my handwriting here, and has worked extensively with the UN on climate and security. So, fantastic panel.
The plan is that each speaker talks for between six to eight minutes. Thereafter, we can have – we’ll run through all of the speakers in turn and then we’ll have a question and answer session. Things to note: the meeting is on the record, so both the speeches and the questions will be on the record, and the webinar is being recorded and will be available for download later on. The way we’re going to manage the question and answer session is if you can write your question in the ‘Q&A’ facility on Zoom, so on the bottom panel, the bottom menu, there’s a ‘Q&A’ bubble, if you press on that, that opens a screen where you can write your question.
To make this slightly more engaging and slightly more live, so it’s not a Zoom thing, I’m not going to read out your question, but we will pick an interesting question and then we will, from behind the scenes, give you permission to unmute your microphone. You unmute your microphone, and then you can give the – your question directly to the panellists. If you go to the question and answer session and you see a question similar to the one that you would have liked to have given, rather than typing in an identical question or a similar question, feel free to upvote the question that’s already existing there. I know this is all a little bit unusual, in terms of how we are managing this, and it’s a little bit artificial, but the ones we’ve run recently have all worked really smoothly, and if you need reminding, or if there is a problem, we will cope with it, as we get through the seminar. Okay, so, let’s start off, Neil, it’s, by my watch, seven minutes past one o’clock, over to you for seven or eight minutes.
Neil Morisetti
Tim, thank you, and good afternoon to everybody. Tim has, sort of, set the scene in his opening remarks, but wherever we live today, we recognise that we face many challenges to our prosperity and wellbeing, or, in other words, our national security. Some of those fall into a traditional category, perhaps state-on-state or interest state, and tend to have a military component, be it the build-up of arms or whatever. But, increasingly, I think we’re seeing a rise of what I’ve described as transboundary, non-traditional threats that often do not have any form of military origin.
I mean, we’re living through one in the middle at the moment, in COVID-19. Other examples would be cyberthreats, transnational organised crime, and most definitely in that list, we should be including the impact of a changing climate, whether it be as a result of the onset of long-term trends, or following on from extreme weather events. Not because I think climate change is likely to be the direct cause of conflict, rather because it’s going to exacerbate existing tensions and stresses, and in doing so, increase the risk of instability and conflict.
We all know what the physical changes are, we’ve seen – I’ve seen them in many instances, but it’s those second and third order consequences, and especially as they relate to the availability of key natural resources, food, energy, water and land, and also, when they start to impact on people’s livelihoods. If you’ve lost your home or you’ve lost your livelihood, you’ve got a problem. And this is all happening at a time when the world’s population is growing and, in many cases, they’re becoming more demanding as well.
The effect of these consequences is to increase the stresses in countries, particularly those in the Equatorial Belt, that are already experiencing stress: food problems, water shortages, health problems, demographics, population growth, and countries that have weak governance or resilience. If you combine that with the results of population movements, or, in some instances, trapped populations that are unable to move, then you get the increasing evidence of climate change acting as a threat multiplier. Tim’s talked about the Arab Spring and we saw it in Syria, with the failed harvest after a prolonged drought, the movement of populations from rural to urban areas, which exacerbated existing tensions, and was a contributing factor to the conflict in that country.
Looking ahead, the Sahel again is an example where I think there’s vulnerability, similarly impacts in Southeast Asia and the agrarian communities. But we have to recognise that, while the physical changes may be happening in those countries, we live in a joined-up world, and the impact is far wider. If you’ve got that increased instability or risk of conflict, we see volatility in prices, whether it’s in the raw materials, such as energy, or from food prices, we see disruption in supply chains from extreme weather events, loss of markets in developing countries, and those populations that are trapped are increasingly vulnerable to being exploited by violent extremist organisations.
Other examples, and 2015 we saw the mass movement of populations, and whilst only, sort of, 10 or 12% of populations tend to leave their own country, if those numbers are large enough, and those that were moving to Europe started to cause tension within our own continent. Again, looking ahead, much talk about the opening up of the Northern Sea Route for goods travelling between, say, Hong Kong and Rotterdam in the summer months, and that is good news, in the sense it reduces the cost of transportation because it’s a shorter route. But the downside is that, for every ship that goes North, that’s one not going through the Suez Canal, that’s one that’s not providing income to the Egyptian economy and it’s already lost out to tourism in other areas, and we start to see vulnerability in the Maghreb.
Well, if that’s the problem, what can we do about it? I think climate change is different from other drivers of instability, in the sense it impacts countries through multiple routes, and it does it simultaneously. I mean, there is no hard security solution, but the security community, in its wider sense, does need to be engaged, engaged as part of a wider, whole of government and whole of society approach, which clearly needs to be led by government. I mean, at the end of the day, this is a risk management exercise, and we look – need to treat it in the way we treat many other threats. As governments, they need to understand the issues, they need to acknowledge the problem. For some, this is a problem far in the future.
The reality is, it’s coming, or, in fact, in many cases, it’s here already. We need to build our understanding of exactly what the problem is and gather that sort of information, which means we need to develop new, what I would describe as indicators and warnings, new sources of information, for example on extreme weather or long-range weather forecasts, price of wheat or rice or movements of populations, need to conduct the analysis that we’d do of any other threat, identify the risk both to national and international interests, and then adapt, act to adapt or to mitigate those risks, and you need often to do that at source. So, in other words, you need to take a much more holistic approach to security, and adapt our national and international institutions to meet the challenges of this century. It’s a global issue, and in many instance – but in many instances, it might be better to tackle it on a regional basis, but nonetheless, the international institutions need to be engaged, as well as national ones.
The UN Security Council regularly looks at the potential risks associated with a changing climate. Probably, it’s time now for climate change conferences, in the same way that Munich, Berlin and Halifax have looked at climate change, the climate change conferences, such as the COP, now needs to start looking at the security implications. But perhaps most importantly, in my mind, is there is a need for both a national – both at national and international level, to deliver – and develop and deliver a pan-security-focused, strategic message, which is part of a wider – a narrative, and a narrative that talks about opportunities, not just threats, ‘cause I think only then will we understand the totality of a risk posed by a change in climate and a need to act both individually and correctively. Thank you.
Professor Tim Benton
Thank you very much, Neil, a very interesting intervention. Let’s just move swiftly on to Kate to give her seven or eight minutes, so it’s coming up to quarter past, Kate, so 23 minutes past, something like that, to aim for. Thank you.
Kate Guy
Sure thing, and thanks for those specific details. So, yes, as Tim said, it’s great to be here. I’m actually here in London so it’s too bad we can’t all be together, but someday we will be again. But I’m a Senior Fellow with the Center for Climate and Security, which is a think tank looking at the intersection of these issues in the States and also working on a [inaudible – 11:53] research project on how climate change interacts with great power conflict and then might define those threats that Neil was just explaining.
So, a few things that I wanted to talk through today. The first is, as Neil was saying, we need better analysis of how the type of threats that climate change will bring about will affect international security, will change and interact with national interests in interesting ways, and some of this has certainly been done within international militaries and intelligence services, but we need a lot more of it. We need much better analysis of this type, that’s specifically looking at these threats. If you think about how a security committee would approach any other threat, be it nuclear, nuclear war, or, you know, international terrorism, the intense, kind of, security analysis that goes into those threats just pales in comparison to what we’re seeing on the very diverse transboundary throughout specifically climate change, which Neil just went over.
So, one approach to doing so is a report that I was happy to chair and lead the research on earlier this year, which is a security threat assessment of global climate change. You can find that on the Center for Climate and Security website, on my Twitter. I encourage you to do so, it’s very long and quite a depressing read, so maybe save it for a day when you haven’t consumed a lot of COVID news. But in this threat assessment, we try to do just that. We try to look at what are the security implications on global regions, on their security environments, institutions and infrastructure, and, kind of, pick them apart for each region of the globe and see where exactly is at risk, how is this affecting interests in institutions in those regions, from a security perspective, and we did this with a great panel of experts from the States, of people from US military and intelligence background. And the interesting thing about this scenario-based research is we actually did it looking at two different scenarios. So, what does near-term warming look like and what does more medium, long-term warming look like, across the century? And so that is, kind of, near-term, under 2o of global average warming, and long-term, kind of, rising above that 20 of global average warming. And we did that to really look at what are the different security implications under these different scenarios of warming, and, kind of, try to break that, as I said, regionally.
Now, kind of, summing up with the overall findings of that report, as you can imagine, the results are not encouraging. All regions will see incredibly severe impacts because of climate change. Those that will be hit first are certainly the ones that are already the most fragile, so along the equator around the world are already seeing intense vulnerability, for many other reasons, politically and conflict driven as well. And also, what’s really important, I think, is some of those near-term impacts are much more severe than we thought they would be, can be much more destabilising to governance than we might have imagined, can have much longer-term effects.
Now, when you start looking at the later end scenario, so what happens when we approach and potentially go past 20 of global average warming, is really no region of the world is unaffected, and those impacts are increasingly catastrophic. So catastrophic meaning that there is not a clear way back from them, that you will see changes to livelihoods and economies and really, the ability of communities to live in the place they currently live, and beyond what we’re now able to deal with. And that’s, we imagine, where you’ll start to see increasing incidents of state failure, migration among – in-between regions, intense border contestation over resources at the local and international level, and also, where our security institutions like NATO or the Security Council, even bilateral alliances are increasingly perhaps unable to handle the cacophony of climate impacts, which are stretching them and needing their response and resource.
So, it’s all a quite grim picture of what’s to come, but we really need to do that analysis to know where we are vulnerable, where we are at threat, and, kind of, where our interests lie, and I think one big takeaway from that is, well, you might imagine that there are perhaps winners and losers from climate change, right? That some countries will benefit more than others, that’s, of course, the case, but when you look even at the near-term scenarios, let along the longer term, there really are no winners, because the economy and because our local movements are so interconnected that no country, be it – no matter how far North it is and, kind of, presently cold it is, we’ll see intense impacts, in relation to the rest of the world.
Now, a few final thoughts, and drawing larger conclusions from this, this, kind of, threat assessment work, is how do we think about future transboundary security threats like Neil prompted us to, in this new COVID era? So, the world, especially western countries like the US and the UK, are much better prepared to handle traditional threats, the military threats that Neil outlined, and much worse, able to handle climate change pandemics and these types. And we’ve also done far too little to either mitigate or prepare for these types of risks, and, as I said, the evidence increasingly shows that the near-term impacts of these risks are much more severer than we had imagined. So, if we’re really approaching this in a way that’s trying to manage and maintain security, we have to put much more emphasis on these types of risk, and I think that the world today is showing that in heaps.
But also, we need to look at how the risks compound together, so it’s not just about thinking in silos about global health or silos about climate change, but how is the situation with the cyclone hitting in India and Bangladesh right now, interacting a huge climate threat, one of the worst cyclones to ever hit in the Bay of Bengal, interacting with global pandemic response in those areas and how are the two interactions together, along with economic crisis, making the situation there much more insecure and dire than we could have expected?
And, finally, I think we need to look broader than that and not just at security impacts on life or, kind of, conflict, but also, what are the security impacts on our institutions? So, at the domestic level, disasters like COVID or like climate disasters are huge opportunities for authoritarian power grabs and for consolidation in backsliding democracies. There are chances for governments to silence and, kind of, threaten the opposition, and there are also chances, and we’ve seen this in the Philippines and even Eastern Europe, backsliding democratic countries, there are opportunities to, kind of, consolidate that power away from democratic human rights and liberties. At the international level, we’re also seeing a breakdown of institutions and governance, so – and this is likely to continue. This is where a lot of my research is, but likely to continue in a climate changed future, increasing competition and breakdown amongst states, where we need co-ordination and cooperation instead, and the social infrastructure that we’ve really taken for granted at the domestic and international levels, we’re seeing as much more vulnerable to these types of events and threats than we had potentially imagined.
Now, I’ll leave it on just one point of optimism, and that is that I think, hopefully, this moment of COVID and pandemic response is potentially a stress test of these institutions, both the security institutions as well as the international co-operative institutions, so that we can see that they’re much more vulnerable than we had expected and don’t really hold up to the threats of the 21st Century that we need them to, and, in all hope, we can learn the lessons from this moment to reinvest in good governance and to reinvest in science-based decision-making, where we had, kind of, left that unfortunately behind, but to also plan for better resilience to these future shocks.
We know where now we’re vulnerable, where our food systems are vulnerable, where our populations are vulnerable, and with threat assessments like those that I discussed, we can see those impacts coming much better than we could in the past. And through those, kind of, efforts, hopefully our diplomats, our leaders, are able to, you know, build back better at the institutional level as well, and especially internationally, so we can think about resilience in our institutions to the future shocks to come. And I think that is definitely something that security and diplomatic communities need to do hand-in-hand. So, I’ll stop there. Thanks so much, Tim.
Professor Tim Benton
Thank you very much, Kate. Rather depressing, but, I guess, realistic. Certainly, in the circles that I move, there is a bit of a buzz around building back better, where better includes resilience, so perhaps you’re right in that silver lining to the cloud. Just before we move onto Adriana, I can see that there is the first question come in. Please feel free to type questions, as we go along, into the question and answer chat, and we’ll – question and answer box, and we’ll come back to those in due course. So, final speaker, Adriana, seven or eight minutes, starting now, over to you.
Adriana Erthal Abdeneur
Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here and to see colleagues again, and I think it’s very important to include voices from the Global South to offer different perspectives, because this debate has been deepening, has been spreading, including within global governance institutions, but the terms of the debate, and even of the research agenda, are very much still set by northern actors. And what I’m going to present here from Latin America, underscores a few points that are somehow – somewhat different from what we have been hearing.
First of all, the concept of security that we tend to work with here in Latin America stresses different aspects of security, whereas a lot of the debate, both the policy debate, but also the underlying research, has been focusing, for instance, on extremist violence in the Sahel. Here in Latin America, we are more concerned with organised crime, with patterns of violence, including homicide and feminicide, and also, aspects of human security, such as food security and energy security, that bear more, I would say, on the development and human rights dimensions of the climate and security debate. And those are aspects which cannot be cast out through an excessive focus, which can also lead to securitisation of this issue.
So, the first, I think, aspect that I wanted to highlight, within this somewhat different perspective, is that we view the relationship between climate and security as bidirectional. There’s a vicious cycle through which climate contributes, magnifies, as Tim put it, insecurity, but insecurity in turn, also contributes towards climate change.
So, first on the – the first aspect of this simplified cycle that I’m putting out here, what’s happening in Latin America? Well, last year, at COP, we released this report. It’s available in English, Portuguese and Spanish, on the Igarapé website. I edited this with colleagues Giovanna Kuele and Alice Amorim from the Institute of Climate and Security, also here in Rio de Janeiro, and what we tried to do is ferment research, empirical research, to gather evidence on the links between climate and security. So, we gathered a number of researchers from across the region, and some of the examples that were presented as case studies or as broad patterns involves, for instance, extreme events in the Caribbean. We saw the destruction of practically the entire health infrastructure of the island of Dominica, when there was a major – an extreme weather event, with very severe consequences for human security in that part of the world. We see a broad pattern of soil erosion in Central America that is clearly caused by climate change, and that is leading to climate migration patterns that have security implications. I’ll come back to the issue of migration because I think we have to be very careful on how we frame this.
We have shifting rainfall patterns in the Amazon, as well as in the central plateau of what is Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and these have consequences not only for food security for many, many millions of people, not only in the Amazon, but in the broader regions, but also we have seen, from work carried out by some of the researchers, that, for instance, extreme weather events in the Amazon have an immediate impact on crime patterns in the cities of the Amazon. We know that the melting glacier in the Andes are already causing security problems for local populations, including indigenous groups in the Highlands of Bolivia, but we also know, we have to remember that, for instance, the Amazon River and all of the rivers, in fact, of that entire basin, originate in the glaciers of the Andes. So, this melting has very, very grave consequences for entire downriver region, which, again, includes many, many millions of people, not just in the Amazon, but in the entire – and practically that entire party of South America.
So, we gather – these are some of the examples that we highlight in this organised volume, and some of the – two, I think, of the – of overarching issues that came out of these insipient studies are a) we have to understand the political economy in which we’re looking at the relationship between climate and security. In the case of Latin America, the extreme patterns of social inequality that we see, not only in terms of wealth, but ethnicity, gender, regional, urban versus rural, is a determining factor in how that interaction will occur. So we have to first think about that political economy.
And, second, the role of migration is still rather poorly understood, there’s a very heavy emphasis within international debates on the migratory patterns coming out of Central America. It’s very much skewed because there is a disproportionate focus on the migrants who are trying to reach the United States, due to the politics of Donald Trump, but most of the migratory flows actually are within the countries of Central America. Likewise, in South America, the vast majority of countries don’t recognise the category of internally displaced people, but we have estimated that, in Brazil alone, more than seven million Brazilians have been displaced, due to disasters or major infrastructure projects, since 2001. So that even leaves out violence as a displacement factor. And I think the last point about migration I wanted to make is that we don’t consider migration a security issue. We consider the inadequate reception of migrants to pose security threats when they create additional stresses for host community and, of course, create distortions within policy debates.
Now, the second aspect of the cycle has to do with how insecurity fuels climate change, and here we carry out fieldwork in the Amazon to trace the illegal sources of deforestation in the Amazon, which, historically, has been thought of as a development issue. But we look at how organised crime networks, who are specialising, for instance, in illegal land invasions, including of indigenous lands, illegal mining, illegal wood extractions, species trafficking, are driving most of the deforestation, and therefore, vast amounts of the contributions towards climate change coming from the region. And this is also the purview of private companies, including a lot of transnational companies, for instance, beef and soy companies, that carry out less than transparent practices, which we can also consider to be environmental crimes.
Now, to the last point, in terms of the responses, as my colleagues have noted, it’s very important to think not only of the gaps, but also possibilities, and it’s a very difficult moment in Latin America, not only because of the pandemic, but because we have a spread of nationalist populism, and the dismantling of institutions, in many countries, especially mine through the extreme right government of Jair Bolsonaro, who has really weakened or done away with the monitoring agencies, law enforcement and, indeed, the climate governance here at a national level, and at the same time that regional organisations are severely weakened.
So, we have a very challenging context, in which many countries don’t even acknowledge the links between climate and security, within defence policies. At the UN, they’re very reluctant to endorse this debate, not all of them, by the way, Dominican Republic has been a champion of this at the UN Security Council, but where – maybe in the recovery of the pandemic, where never that actually begins to happen, we have a strategic entry point to start thinking more seriously about climate action, including as it relates to mitigating the impacts of climate change on these different aspects of security in Latin America. I’ll stop there, thank you.
Professor Tim Benton
Thank you very much. A very stimulating intervention and thank you for highlighting the difference in viewpoint with the northern voices. So, we’re now going to enter the question and answer sessions, and, as always, a little bit of a, kind of, random pick for which questions to start off with, but I think let’s go to D. Smith to ask the question as an opening one. D, can you unmute yourself and ask the question, please?
D. Smith
Yes, can you hear me?
Professor Tim Benton
Yeah.
D. Smith
Okay, great. Thank you very much, really interesting and informative, if depressing, set of positions that were facing. What I’m wondering is how we motivate and effect the kinds of changes that have been discussed as needed, and I noticed that, in a great number of discussions, there is a – that I’ve been part of in the last few weeks, there’s an increasing emphasis on narrative and on the need to create new narratives that can motivate people and give them a, kind of, middle space to explore and create a new way of doing things that will allow for the positions that would let us begin to mitigate and begin to deal with these problems, and I’m wondering if the panellists have any thoughts on that? I mean, we’ve set out a huge array of really serious challenges, how do we get from A to B or from Z to D and so forth? Thank you.
Professor Tim Benton
Thank you very much, D., for that question. Neil, do you want to start us of?
Neil Morisetti
Yeah, certainly, Tim, and, D., thanks for the question. I think the narrative is key and, at one extreme, we have a narrative, which says this isn’t really a problem, or if it’s a problem, it’s many years away, we don’t need to do anything. And at the other end, you have, which says we’ve got to stop emitting CO2 now, doesn’t matter what it – the consequences are on our life, we – if we don’t do it now, we’re all doomed in the next five to six years. Reality is, we – the answer for being effective in addressing the impact of a changing climate, so managing the risks and allowing society to develop in all elements of it, lies somewhere in the middle.
Our narrative is key to that, in the sense it’s got to be a balanced narrative. It’s got to talk about the challenges we face, but also the opportunities and the benefits of action. For example, if we use less fossil fuels, our air quality improves, and therefore, we’ve got less respiratory issues, there’s more money for other health activity. If we stop importing fuels, which are – whose prices are going up and down, depending on what’s going in the world, we have stability of import costs for companies, and, in all of that, we reduce the risks of insecurity.
The challenge is, whether you’re a member of society or you’re a Politician, you’re probably at capacity at the moment. There are so many things going on, and your horizons are relatively short. There’s an immediacy, and it doesn’t matter where you live in the world, the immediacy may be different, but there is an immediacy that needs to be addressed, and therefore, we’ve got to be able to explain to our respective audiences why it’s relevant, why it’s important, what needs to be done, the timeframe it needs to be done, and how people will benefit from that.
I think we might have an opportunity at the moment, in the sense of a post-COVID-19 world, because people are seeing a transboundary, non-traditional security effect and the impact of it. But if we are going to have enough impact, particularly amongst the political elite, you’ve got relatively short horizons, and are certainly at capacity, then it’s going to need a lot of voices, in many cases trusted voices, highlighting not only the challenge, but where the opportunities lie, whether it’s on a national basis, a local basis, or a more international one, probably at the regional level.
Professor Tim Benton
Thank you, Neil. Kate, do you want to add anything and around the question of incentives and so on?
Kate Guy
Definitely. I mean, I think building from that and the discussion of narrative and making it relevant to people, there’s also a really important point of making it a high priority in areas that are not climate change and security is absolutely one of them. So, this is getting out of the silo of just climate activists care about climate change or just environmental policy people care about climate change, and really talking to people and meeting them where they are, and saying how the issue will interact with and make their lives a lot more difficult in whatever it is they do. So, I think that’s definitely the case in an economic policy, that’s the case in security policy, within the different regions as well. And to the extent that we – you know, the experts in this are successfully able to do this, I think we’re seeing changing incentives and changing narratives, within government structures itself. But it’s not just an issue that can be siloed or left to ministries that deal with the environment, but really every part of the decision-making apparatus needs to be thinking about how will climate impacts affect my portfolio, but also, what can I do to build resilience or to mitigate the threat within my portfolio? And, so, it shouldn’t be something that is just left outside of the traditional, kind of, economic or security apparatuses of government, but is actually integrated within.
Professor Tim Benton
So, not a trivial thing. Let’s reorganise government, so the government can deal with cross-cutting things more easily. I mean, I’ve been saying that for years around the issue of food security and so on. Right, Adriana, would you like to add anything to – before we move onto the next question?
Adriana Erthal Abdeneur
Sure. You know, this is an extremely depressing topic. So if you put yourself in the shoes of those who are sceptical or who tend to push aside the issue, they do need more evidence-based research, but I think we do need to find narratives that are more hopeful, and I think there are two possibilities at the narrative level. The first one is environmental peacebuilding, which has a connotation of moving forward and addressing not only armed conflicts in the sense of the UN, how it defines it, but also, prevention of violence and prevention of organised crime even.
The other one is, I think, pandemic recovery. I think there’s a growing awareness among most populations that we don’t want to go back to the old normal, and that the recovery – the economic recovery, not just the sanitary aspect, may present opportunities to think in new ways. The discussion is already taking off in Germany, far less so here in Latin America, but I think that pressure from civil society and from private sector, who feel the concrete impacts of climate and security, is absolutely essential.
And then, lastly, in addition to local and national initiatives, we need to think about the role of this topic within global governance, and at the UN, there is a UN climate and security mechanism, which was originally envisioned to provide inputs to the Security Council. It still does, but there was a growing awareness that presenting this as a hard security issue only would only address parts of the problem, and so now there’s an effort to mainstream this issue across the UN’s system, including the development in human rights pillars. And I think that coming up with ways for more countries to support, to champion this, through the group of friends of the climate and security mechanism, is really essential at a global level.
Professor Tim Benton
Thank you very much. That segues neatly into the next question. Cilat Camil Cilat, if we can open up your microphone and you ask your question.
Cilat Camil Cilat
Yes, hopefully you can hear me. My question relates to the water, energy, food triad or nexus, and the interfaces between them, in terms of the water footprint of food and the stresses that climate change has on specific regions, and the baseline where international trade has underpinned these flows from various regions in the world. So, what insights and what are your views on this issue? Thank you.
Professor Tim Benton
Thank you, Cilat. Shall we go in reverse order this time? Adriana.
Adriana Erthal Abdeneur
Thank you very much. On the triad, I’m not sure exactly what was your question, but I can make the observation that in all of the cases and all of the patterns that we’ve studied here in Latin America, water is always an issue. And, in fact, focusing on water sometimes is a more politically palatable way to get different stakeholders interested in this triad, and more broadly on the interconnections with security, and I think that the importance of this triad, if anything, is enhanced through the pandemic.
We’re reading about, for instance, in the US, food chains are getting disrupted, we’re reading about how, in some African countries, the food isn’t reaching local populations, here in Latin America as well, and even though Brazil, my country, for instance, is often presented as an agrobusiness giant, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the internal chains of distribution, so whenever we have extreme events within this context, we’re going to be facing, within the next few years, even greater security challenges, and most of them related also to energy and to food.
The second part of your question had to do with trade. Now, I think, for the most part, global trade regimes and agreements, especially this noodle bowl effect of free trade agreements, has taken place – they’ve been designed, divorced from climate action, and obviously, this is becoming untenable. Here, in Latin America, the major discussion – in South America, I should say, has been around the trade agreement between markets around the European Union, which has not yet been ratified by our parties. I don’t think, given the present politics, it will be any time soon, but the two sides have been working towards this for 20 years. It was carried out confidentially, there was very little transparency around the process.
When the text was finally made available, those of us who did read it realised that it has no climate teeth, and now I think there is, partly due to the pressure from consumer groups, efforts to think about how climate agreements – sorry, trade agreements, such as this, but also bilateral trade agreements, can incorporate clim – better incorporate climate considerations. And that means not just having a chapter on the importance of sustainable development, as is the case of the EU Mercosur trade agreement, but really coming up with binding clauses that – on which the trade agreement actually depends. And, so, this is a political discussion for, I think, many years to come, but it has started in Europe, less so in Latin America, but if one side starts it, the other one will have to engage in it. So, this also has to be addressed not only at the World Trade Organization, which, as you know, is being weakened by the day practically, but also, within the noodle bowl of individual free trade agreements. Thank you.
Professor Tim Benton
Thank you, Adriana. Kate, Neil, do you want to come in on that question?
Kate Guy
I’m happy to say one quick word, though, Tim, I think you’re the expert here, you should let us know how these systems are affected. Just to say that COVID has clearly shown how fragile, especially the food system, but as well as the energy system globally is, and if we don’t learn the lesson and take note of those vulnerabilities and plan systems that will be resilient in shocks like this again, we are just again preparing ourselves for more and more of the damage that Adriana just discussed. So, back to the, kind of, stress test or resilience planning point of we now know that these huge, vast globalised systems of trade in these sectors are not the most resilient. The most resilient are localised ones, which can quickly be pivoted to change need or to supply places near to home. So figuring out the right structures for that, and doing so through a security mind, right, that you are leaving yourselves, your countries, your communities, insecure if you are that reliant on another country or systems which are much bigger, is just an incredibly high priority these days going forward.
Professor Tim Benton
Thank you, Kate. Absolutely no need for me to add anything to that, that was brilliant. Neil, did you want to say something? No?
Neil Morisetti
No, no need for me to add anything on.
Professor Tim Benton
Okay. Next question, please, ‘cause it follows on from where we were. Laurie Goering, can you unmute yourself and ask your question?
Laurie Goering
Yes, I was wondering where you’ve seen the military, economic ministries or other non-climate actors put effective pressure on governments, the kind of governments that don’t particularly care about climate change, to act on the climate-related threats by framing them differently? Have you seen any good examples of that?
Professor Tim Benton
Kate, Neil, why don’t you start off?
Kate Guy
Sure, yeah, this is a great question, thank you, Laurie, for asking it, ‘cause I, in some ways, think this is the model going forward for encouraging climate action from laggards. At least within the US, interestingly, the Republicans within the Capitol Hill, both in the House and Senate, are much more sensitive to the security argument and the security risks to the climate change, and, even under the Trump administration, have passed significant legislation calling for studies and research onto how climate impacts the Department of Defense, it impacts our security interests. So, this is a space, I think, where an unfriendly, you know, not climate activist, kind of, actor is, of course – can’t set aside the security risk argument if they appear to, kind of, take security of their nation seriously, so I think it does have a lot of help. And this goes back to the discussion about how can you engineer governments or institutions to prioritise this, so that it’s coming from different voices and not just the environmental voices? And this is something in my day job, in my work, I actually am thinking about, you know, how could you structure a next administration under a US president to carefully prioritise these threats across working groups within the government and within the structures? And this is something that I think both security and economic, as well as health communities are all very important voices in, just because people take those voices very seriously through different narratives, as we were talking about earlier.
Professor Tim Benton
Thank you, Kate. Neil.
Neil Morisetti
Yes. I mean, as Kate says, there’s been a lot of work on this in the United States, and I’ve been part of that, going around in the past, talking with my American military colleagues about these issues, to audiences that you wouldn’t expect would be interested, including tea party gatherings and this sort of thing, so you can have that discussion. I think it’s also happening in Asia, and I think it’s when you start to bring together both the military voice, the economic voice, and the foreign policy voice, that you start to get what I describe as the Senior Ministers articulating the argument under case for action, in their respective Cabinets. So, helped by the fact there’s more evidence, as you look out of the window, of what’s happening, and the consequences, as I said, Syria, Sahel and the Arab Spring, but in those countries where the military are respected for their views and are able to work with other government departments, that’s where you see the most impacts, and – but at the front is very much the United States.
Professor Tim Benton
Thank you. Adriana, I’ll come back to you in a second, but there’s also a question from Brishni Mukhopadhyay, which is, I think, also relatively aligning with this question. So, Brishni, do you want to ask your question?
Brishni Mukhopadhyay
Certainly. Thank you, Tim. Can everyone hear me?
Professor Tim Benton
Yes.
Brishni Mukhopadhyay
Perfect. I just wondered whether there are any economic incentives that might perhaps be encouraged, either on a transnational basis or internationally if you will, or even regionally, for that matter, rather, to try and encourage achievement of these outcomes?
Professor Tim Benton
Thank you, and if I can add to that, because what Kate said a few minutes ago with respect to the food, water, energy nexus about the fragility of global trading systems, they might be fragile, but they’re economically very lucrative, and to build something resilient is always going to be costly. So, looping those – that thought process into what are the economic incentives that could be used to promote this, to couple with what Neil’s just been saying, that if you get Health and the other Senior Ministers, the Defence Ministry and Treasuries, etc., all talking off the same hymn sheet, then we’ve got scope for driving things ahead, but where does the economic fit into this discussion, Adriana?
Adriana Erthal Abdeneur
Thank you. I can address this question with respect to one of the sides of the vicious cycle that I mentioned, which is the impact of insecurity on climate. What we observe here in Latin America is that there is increasing awareness among consumer groups, right now more in Europe than in the United States, and far less so in China, well, that’s the biggest buyer of Amazon commodities, of the illegal causes, and of how consumption patterns are also driving deforestation in the Amazon. There’s also greater awareness among consumer groups, but also some Politicians in Europe, of the economic – of the impacts of trade agreements, in terms of climate change, and so I think there’s an incipient conversation that was very taboo, just a few years ago, but has changed, not only due to the intensifying effects of climate change, but also, South-South co-operation, which adheres less to the norms of the OECD, on conditioning certain forms of international co-operation on climate action. And, again, around the Amazon, you can see – it’s a very tense debate, of course, because of our extreme right government.
I wanted to say, by the way, a little bit about the previous question on the military, because I also work on this in Latin America, and the perspective here is quite different. The military, in most Latin American countries, they’re very reluctant to recognise officially that climate impacts security, even though there are risks to defence assets and there have been cases of extreme weather that have destroyed some assets, including in an air force base here in Brazil, and that comes, in part, out of this tradition – this discourse of national sovereignty. So there is an effort by civil society here in the region to understand, to engage with this debate, but there’s also a fear of it being led by the military excessively because, of course, here in Brazil, we have a military-led extreme right government, whose official position is climate denialism, and whose official position has been to dismantle what little climate governance we had in the country, and, of course this has influence at a regional level. So, we think it’s very important to engage with military actors, but understanding what the risks presented are as well as what the opportunities are.
Professor Tim Benton
Thank you. Neil, Kate, either of you want to say something about the economic side?
Neil Morisetti
Yeah, and very quickly. I mean, global supply chains are cheaper, and great when they work. When they break down, there’s a problem. We saw it in 2011 with extreme flooding in Thailand and the impact of the unavailability of PCs, whatever it – microchips for PCs or for cars, and we’re seeing in COVID-19, Jaguar and Land Rover flying out suitcases to China to get key fobs, so that they can sell their cars. The challenge we face is, post-COVID-19, we may move back to more – to shorter supply chains, but will that last when the Chief Finance Officer says, “We’ve got to cut costs again”? And it’s will we learn the lessons from this to start to address some of these issues?
Professor Tim Benton
Kate.
Kate Guy
All very well said.
Professor Tim Benton
Anything to add, Kate?
Kate Guy
Yeah.
Professor Tim Benton
Well, we have officially four minutes left. So, I’m sorry for everybody who’s asking questions that we don’t have time to cover. I would like to give each one of our speakers a minute for any final thoughts, preferably along the lines of, yes, we – there’s lots that we can learn from where we are now, but how do we actually do it? Where is the optimism coming from? So, let’s start off with Adriana.
Adriana Erthal Abdeneur
Thank you very much. I would like to conclude my statements by saying that we cannot leave out development and human rights from the discussion of climate and security. If we do so, we risk securitising this debate in a way that can become even interventionist through, for instance, UN mechanisms. But I also think, on a more positive side, that incipient discussions of even economic and social recovery from the pandemic are a very strategic space for us to engage in a proactive manner, as long as we include all of the key stakeholders, this cannot be a States-centric conversation. It needs to incorporate civil society and the private sector, as well as international organisations. Thank you very much.
Professor Tim Benton
Thank you very much, Adriana. Kate, final thoughts.
Kate Guy
Sure, and well said, I think Adriana’s point on risking and avoiding securitisation is an incredibly important one for everyone to take away. We didn’t have enough discussion on that today. But I guess my final points would be of optimism, that I think, from what I can, kind of, tell and feel and source from the discussion around this in recent months, I think people are waking up. Especially within the security community, I see increased demand for research in this space, for briefings on these types of issues. And I think it’s a welcome change, but in part because of the coronavirus pandemic that you see this, you see just the realisation that these types of threats can have massive, massive implications beyond which we’ve ever, kind of, allowed for planning, and that quickly, people are pointing to climate change as the next big thing, you know, if this is the stress test, climate change is the longer-term, more intense type of this kind of crisis. So that is encouraging, I think, that you see those Senior Ministers sitting up and taking note of it.
But back to the discussion about how important the voices of the security and economic community are. If anything, though, I think the real narrative shift has been, fortunately, from the young people and from climate activists. And just seeing, after the IPCC report came out last year or whenever, whatever year that was now, the big tidal shift in attention to these issues and demand for action on these issues has been society wide. And that is because, yes, of course, the great effort and analysis by economic and security and climate experts, but, more importantly from the people, and from the people demanding action on this. Ad if we can together support that drumbeat with good analysis, I think that’s really important, but that’s what’s really going to shift the political winds, I think, economically and globally.
Professor Tim Benton
Thank you very much, Kate. Neil, final words.
Neil Morisetti
Yeah.
Professor Tim Benton
Last but not least.
Neil Morisetti
Picking up on what Kate says, I think there is a growing – a real growing awareness of the challenge, in part because of evidence, but the fact that the UK has appointed General Richard Nugee to lead the Ministry of Defence’s approach to this is indicative of that. And they lead the analysis and therefore, they need to draw from all sectors, in order to fully understand it and be able to articulate that message in a language that everyone can understand, whether you’re a Cabinet Minister, an electoral representative, or a business leader or a member of the general public. But the key thing, I think, is we’ve got to acknowledge that, whilst we’ve been talking about a security issue this afternoon, there is no security solution to this. There is just greater insecurity if we don’t act. Conversely, there is greater global security if we do act, but in acting, we need to take the evidence in front of us, look for where the positive opportunities are, but also accept that, if it’s a 21st Century challenge, it’s going to need 21st Century solutions, and they will need to be delivered through a 21st process, which is different from many of the 20th Century ones.
Professor Tim Benton
Well, on that note, thank you very much to our three speakers, to Neil, to Kate and to Adriana. Brilliant timekeeping. Thank you very much to the audience for questions and being engaged and thank you very much to the behind the scenes team for keeping things going. These Zoom seminars do take quite a lot of backroom expertise to make sure that we’re not Zoom bombed and interrupted and everything works smoothly. So, on that note, it’s about two o’clock, thanks very much everybody and I hope you enjoyed this really stimulating discussion, even if it was a bit scary. Thank you everybody. Goodbye.
