Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
11 No island is an island
Security in a Four Degree World
Peter Christoff and Robyn Eckersley
Introduction
As early as 1977, Lester Brown from the Worldwatch Institute wrote that 'threats
to security may now arise less from the relationship of nation to nation and more
from the relationship of [humanity] to nature' (Brown, 1977: 6). Today, climate
change is widely acknowledged to pose the biggest environmental security threat
of all, but there remains considerable debate and confusion over how best to
characterize and respond to this threat. To the popular imagination, climate
change evokes the threats and challenges posed by the transboundary movement
of so-called 'climate refugees'. To traditional security analysts, climate change is
typically characterized as a 'threat multiplier' to national security. Yet climate
change also poses a fundamental challenge to the idea of territorial defence and
invites a re-examination of the basic purpose of security, the meaning of national
interest, conventional responses to insecurities and the conditions
for long-term
security.
This chapter briefly reviews projected climate change impacts in Australia's
region and shows that projected changes caused by global average warming of
4°C or even less pose very serious threats. It then reviews efforts to address
climate change from a national security standpoint and highlights some of the
contradictions that arise from constructing climate change simply as an external
threat to the nation-state. We show how national security can be reconcep-
tualized and integrated into a broader, nested framework of human security in
ways that avoid these contradictions. This framework also directs attention to
the key dimensions of Australia's existing domestic policies (such as its growing
investment in, and dependency on, resource industries and its growing trade in
fossil fuels) that undermine both homeland/national security and human security
in the region in the medium and long term. We conclude by pointing to some
of the core domestic and foreign policy responses that flow from this nested
framework, which would safeguard both Australia and the region from the risks
of climate change.
