Climate and National Security: why is Albanese keeping the evidence secret? - Gregory Andrews

 Lyrebird Dreaming  –  Gregory Andrews

Author Gregory Andrews is: Founder and Managing Director of Lyrebird Dreaming A former Australian Ambassador and High Commissioner in West Africa Australia’s first Threatened Species Commissioner A leader in Indigenous policy

Something extraordinary happened in New York this week.

The UK Government briefed foreign ministers from around the world - including Australia - on the findings of a national security assessment warning about the potentially catastrophic consequences of climate change and ecosystem collapse.

The report was prepared by Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee. It examined what could happen if systems such as the Amazon and Congo rainforests begin to collapse. 

Among the risks identified were food shortages, mass migration, conflict over scarce resources, pressure on infrastructure and supply chains, political instability and, in extreme scenarios, even an increased risk of nuclear conflict. 

Some impacts on Britain’s food security could emerge as early as 2030. Pretty serious stuff.

There was another disturbing part of the story. The report had been due for publication before COP30 last year, but Downing Street had intervened and stopped its release. A partial version was eventually released after Freedom of Information requests. Now, somewhat belatedly, Britain is taking the findings to the world.

Reading this, I had an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. Because Australia has its own secret climate national security assessment. And ours has been sitting behind closed doors for nearly four years!

Soon after winning office in 2022, the Albanese Government commissioned the Office of National Intelligence - Australia’s peak intelligence assessment agency - to conduct an urgent assessment of the national security implications of climate change. 

It wasn't some peripheral exercise. Labor had promised the assessment before the election and, after taking office, publicly described it as an “urgent climate risk assessment” that would become an enduring part of Australia’s climate response.

The assessment was delivered to the government in December 2022. But here's the thing, almost four years later, we still haven't seen it. Not the classified document. Not a redacted document. Not even a sanitised public version setting out its principal findings.

Back in 2023 there was briefly some attention on this. Independent Senator David Pocock, Greens Senator David Shoebridge, independent MPs and former senior defence officials pushed for a declassified version. 

The government declined to release one, saying the assessment contained classified material and that other information about climate-related security threats was already publicly available.

Then, largely, the story disappeared. But the report didn't. In December 2024, the government and ONI privately briefed independent members of Parliament on its contents. In 2025, a Senate inquiry examined the continuing secrecy surrounding it and concluded that a declassified version should be released. The committee specifically recommended that it be tabled in Parliament.

But surprise, surprise - Labor senators disagreed. Their dissenting report argued that the government already reports extensively on climate-related national security threats and that ONI assessments of this kind are not normally released because of national security considerations. And as recently as February this year, the Albanese government confirmed that it still did not intend to release the ONI assessment.

That's what makes what happened in New York this week rather remarkable. Australia just sat in an international meeting and listened to Britain explain what its intelligence community thinks climate and ecosystem collapse could mean for national security.

Yet Australians remain unable to read even a declassified version of what our own intelligence community told our own government about precisely the same issue in 2022!

There's an irony here too. At Climate Week in New York this week, Anthony Albanese declared that “climate security is the new national security.”

So that raises an obvious question: how can Australians have an informed national conversation about climate security when one of the government's foundational intelligence assessments of that threat remains secret? Of course intelligence agencies possess information that cannot safely be made public. Nobody seriously argues that intelligence sources, methods or sensitive assessments should simply be dumped onto the internet.

But governments routinely produce public or declassified versions of national security assessments. Australia did precisely that with the Defence Strategic Review. 

The issue is not whether every page of the ONI assessment should be published. It is whether Australians can be told, in meaningful terms, what risks their intelligence agencies identified.

Albanese thought the assessment was important enough to make it an election commitment in 2022 and, once elected, described it as urgent. So why, nearly four years after receiving it, won’t his government release even a declassified version?  

Having spent three decades working in government, I find it hard not to wonder whether the answer lies in an uncomfortable contradiction: the findings of this serious and frank climate-security assessment would sit very uneasily alongside his government's continued coal and gas expansionism.

That distinction matters. Climate change is much more than an environmental problem. It affects food and water security, supply chains, disaster response, migration, regional stability, Defence capability and the resilience of our neighbours in the Pacific. 

These are impacts and decisions involving billions of dollars and choices that will shape Australia for centuries. And unlike a conventional military threat, climate risk is profoundly affected by decisions governments make today about emissions, energy, infrastructure, adaptation and resilience.

So the UK experience should remind us of something closer to home. Four years ago, Anthony Albanese told us that he would ask Australia's intelligence community a very important question: What does climate change mean for our national security?

He got the answer. The Australian people are still waiting to hear it.

Gregory Andrews Climate Change Articles

• Climate Warming Faster Than We Planned For?
• Weather Whiplash: Fasten Your Seatbelts
• Australia’s Flagship Climate Policy Is Failing to Cut Emissions
• Winter's Here, The Snowfields Are Open, But There's No Snow
• Worried About Climate Collapse? Here's Ten Things You Can Actually Do
• Fossil Fuel Fascism: When a Dying Industry Tries to Take Democracy With It
• Climate Policy Counts Dollars and Tonnes. What if We Counted the Dead?
• The Climate Crisis is a Health Crisis
• The Science Is In: Global Warming Is Accelerating
• While We Watch Iran, the Planet Keeps Burning
• Have your say on Canberra's next Climate Strategy: It will be make or break
• Science Warns of Future Where Billions Bake
• Two Years to 1.7°C: the “Prediction Game” We Can't Afford to Lose
• Emergency Photo Ops Aren't Climate Leadership
• Why Fascists Reject Climate Science
• Don't Be Distracted: Earth's Life Support Systems Are Collapsing
• Diesel rebates for miners and a new EV tax? Australia's climate policy double-think
• What Gas is That? Get to Know Your Climate Pollutants