Climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’– where do we go from here?

There is growing if not widespread consensus that climate change now poses a serious threat to human and state security. Organizations from the International Crisis Group to the UN Security Council are acknowledging the seriousness of this threat and governments and communities around the world are already beginning to experience its effects.

Whether through exacerbating existing conflict dynamics, creating new conflicts over increasingly scarce resources, more intense and frequent natural disasters, or the forced migration and general political instability likely to accompany inadequate responses to climate change, it is clear climate change is indeed likely to act as a “threat multiplier” in the coming years.

The risks, although perhaps not yet fully understood, are becoming clearer. The real question is: how we can act upon this understanding? A growing number of militaries are looking at how climate change will affect planning and operations, from procuring equipment suitable for harsher conditions to preparing to respond to increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters and demands for humanitarian operations. All of these steps are essential, yet the best they can hope to accomplish is to respond effectively to a worsening situation.

In an era of climate change, we need to ask ourselves which factors will ultimately make us more secure. Just as policy and discourse evolved from state to human security over the past several decades, it is time to broaden our definition of security once again. Our security is inseparable from that of our natural environment, which we expect to provide us with food, water, shelter and “livable” conditions. Security policy and practice can no longer afford to treat the health and stability of local ecosystems as an externality. We no longer have the luxury of pursuing environmental sustainability as a discipline which is separate and distinct from security and it no longer makes sense to consider security solely from the perspective of human beings.

While climate change is indeed likely to be a threat multiplier, we have yet to tap into the full potential of nature as an enabler. In the coming years, the most innovative security policy will find ways to do this. Investing in the regeneration of local ecosystems, for example, may produce surprisingly positive security outcomes. Protecting them certainly will – a growing body of research is pointing to the links between violence against nature (taking forms such as illegal mining and deforestation) and violence against humans, especially women. When we secure nature, we secure ourselves and our future.

As someone who has spent decades working on the role governance can play in preventing violent conflict, I would argue that even before the security implications of climate change were being discussed as widely as they are today, the world was not on its way to becoming a safer place. We have often failed to approach security as part of an integrated whole – even the best intended efforts to keep the peace are in perpetual danger of being undermined by financial and political systems which promote conflict, extraction and domination. Reframing security with a greater focus on the security and health of our ecosystems might open up new spaces for problem solving and new opportunities for investments which produce positive outcomes in multiple domains.

This is not a call to environmental activism, although the work of environmental defenders is needed now more than ever. It is a call to examine what is working well in our current approaches to security, what is not working so well, and to be willing to experiment with new approaches. We have little to lose and much to gain.