Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
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Arnaud Boehmann
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Iraq sandstorm. Image by David Mark from Pixabay
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Author
Arnaud Boehmann
is a German-French sinologist and security analyst who is also active
as an advocate for climate action.
In early 2019 he joined
Fridays for Future in Hamburg and has since served as a press speaker,
campaign manager, and networker for the movement.
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When I became a climate activist in early 2019, I focused on issues at the
forefront of popular discourse: coal, cars, air travel, agriculture, and
construction.
I also
addressed shipping, because my hometown, Hamburg in the north of Germany, is home to one of
Europe’s biggest ports.
But as climate protests grew bigger, peaking
at
1.4 million people in Germany alone
in September that year, the discourse did not evolve at the same pace.
The same basic facts are debated today; solution implementation is
still just starting; and even the overdue COP26 climate conference in Glasgow
did not bring about paradigmatic change. As a security analyst accustomed to
working with soldiers of various backgrounds, I find the security perspective to
be widely absent from the discourse.
The climate crisis is here, and
security professionals like me now must fully grasp the extent to which we are
affected by it, and what our role in solving it can be, because it directly
intersects with our fundamental purpose.
Security, remember, is what this is all about. We are not protecting the
climate. We are protecting ourselves.
The British military’s
Climate Change and Sustainability Strategic Approach, published in March, and the
US intelligence community reports
released in late October offer a glimpse of how climate change will affect
national security and what defense agencies must do in response.
But
even with this growing awareness, many security professionals are still moving
too slowly on climate change. Its impacts on their work will be so profound that
they cannot afford to start shifting gears only when politicians do so.
They themselves must recognize the magnitude of the threat, advocate
for adequate responses, and become agents of change.
I do not ask my colleagues—in or out of uniform—to join climate activists in the
streets, though they are very welcome to do so.
But security professionals must reframe today’s hand-waving about
climate and treat it as a military-style threat that requires immediate and
decisive action.
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US Army personnel assisted with disaster relief during flooding
from Hurricane Harvey.
Image by andrewtheshrew from Pixabay
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The climate-security connection
In 2020, when I saw
US National Guard helicopters
rescuing people from California wildfires and
Australian Navy vessels
conducting amphibious evacuations from bushfire-ravaged beaches, I began to link
my perspective as a climate activist to my work and education in the security
field.
Climate security as a subfield of security studies
traces its origins back to the 1970s
but received little recognition until after the end of the Cold War. That’s
because the threat of nuclear annihilation dwarfed everything else.
Bulletin readers are, of course, familiar with the conventional wisdom
that a conflict between two nuclear powers is the worst danger imaginable.
Observers of the increasing tensions between China and the United
States, including myself, tend to take every new warhead or submarine or
strategic bomber very seriously, and we invest time and effort in getting the
nuances right.
With China’s ever-increasing pressure on Taiwan, and a
heated debate among Western scholars
and politicians about whether or not defending Taiwan would justify it becoming
a
casus belli involving NATO, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (the
United States, Australia, India, and Japan), the AUKUS trilateral security pact
(Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States), or any other
constellation of forces opposed to China, the ultimate threat has returned and
overshadows a much more concrete danger.
The dangers of a great-power war, real as they may be, remain hypothetical until
the first shots are fired. The carbon levels in our atmosphere, on the other
hand, grow day by day. They are closely watched but remain unchecked, not for
lack of information but for lack of leadership and willpower.
This is the dilemma of
securitizing
climate change—of making a security community that for the last 20 years fought
a global war on terror and was busy watching China aware that it missed
something big. This year, again, has seen heat records shattered and widespread
destruction caused by extreme weather. Humanity’s desperate clinging to every
drop of fossil fuel not only increases the
frequency and intensity of such tragedies, but also ensures larger ones to come.
Some laughed at Greta Thunberg when she used the metaphor of humanity’s house on
fire. Some said she exaggerated. Few are laughing as communities from California
to Siberia, from Turkey to Australia, helplessly watch fires devour everything
in their path.
A military mentality
In 2020
Prince Charles
said, “We must now put ourselves on a warlike footing, approaching our action from
the perspective of a military-style campaign.”
More recently, John
Kerry, President Biden’s climate envoy,
said
the world needs a “wartime mentality” to fight climate change. They weren’t
the first, but they are onto something.
Leaders could have reduced emissions while there was still time to limit global
warming to the relatively safe level of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial
temperatures.
Their negligence led us to today’s predicament: a civilization that
cannot function without fossil fuels and the massive exploitation of nature,
which in turn threaten the very existence of civilization.
Instead of succumbing to a feeling of helplessness, we need a different mindset.
A military mentality that can make uncomfortable but strategic decisions—based
on ends, ways, and means, for the security of us all—and that can deploy in an
effective way the resources at our disposal is the sensible approach.
Some of the biggest investments in history were made for security purposes. To
fight World War II, the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, and their
allies refocused their entire economies, because political leaders recognized
that they were facing existential threats.
Today the world once
again faces existential threats, but political leaders have not yet stood up to
the task. Multiple voices have called for a
climate effort akin to the Manhattan Project.
I believe that idea has failed because it suggests an escape
route—a miraculous technology that might change everything and allow for
continued delay on climate action. The value of the Manhattan Project analogy is
that it underlines the magnitude of effort needed.
But for such a massive effort to be put in motion, state-level actors would need
to treat climate change as a security issue—the same way they treat war.
This can be done by rhetorical escalation that preempts “
discourses of climate delay” and emphasizes the non-negotiability of the threat.
Once
established as a war-like threat, climate change can be addressed with the
gravity, urgency, and resources it deserves.
The recent US
National Intelligence Estimate on climate change,
Defense Department climate risk analysis,
Department of Homeland Security climate action plan, and
special White House report on climate migration
do not contain any spectacular new information, but they show that climate
change
has gained a new position
in the current administration’s security considerations.
Still, it is not yet being dealt with as a war-like threat.
Even under the Trump administration, the US Army took
significant initiatives
to securitize climate change, yet many current observers and actors within the
field still focus on how climate change will affect the military’s traditional
patterns of deployment.
They ask: “How can a security apparatus prepare for increased
migration?” or “Where does climate change create new vulnerabilities for our
forces?”
Few consider the role of the US, Chinese, and other armed
forces as some of the world’s largest
greenhouse gas emitters, and even fewer include the military as an actor expected to prevent global
warming from exceeding the limits set by the Paris Agreement.
Reframing security
Globally, millions of men and women in the armed
forces identify as security providers. With time running out and administrations
proving to be bottlenecks, defense agencies must take the lead in reframing
climate change as a security issue, a war-like threat that has already begun.
Society must come to the point where the installation of a solar
panel by an army technician is considered a security provision. This is not to
replace civilian initiatives, but to complement them with the military’s
powerful workforce, equipment, and strategic thinking.
It is not to
alienate soldiers from their role as fighters, but to give them an additional
dimension required by circumstances.
To break it down: The question is not whether your tank needs better air
conditioning, but what the military domain can do across the fields of research,
development, logistics, intelligence, materiel, and personnel to increase the
overall security of the population.
Security professionals cannot afford to dwell in climate denial. They must see
climate change as a threat to the people, stability, prosperity, and territorial
integrity of their countries.
Many of the officers I’ve spoken with,
from various nationalities and backgrounds, already understand the magnitude of
the climate threat.
It is difficult to maintain combat readiness
when your helicopters are evacuating civilians from wildfires, your military
installations are damaged by extreme weather, your army engineers are building
bridges across flooded rivers, and your soldiers are shoveling sandbags to stop
water, not bullets.
The resources currently being committed to maintaining and containing conflicts
between great nations—which, not coincidentally, are also the biggest
polluters—are the resources that are now required elsewhere to mitigate the
climate crisis. Without them, we will not live to fight another day.
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