Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
companies remain strikingly recalcitrant. Nearly half of executives admit that the
broader implications of climate change to their global operations are not built
into their corporate planning processes.
72
Many multinational corporations still
lobby that the climate security agenda is a
s 2011 Foresight
report laments the lack of business involvement in security planning and risk
assessments associated with climate change.
73
ction. The UK
'
Conclusion
At a formal level, the EU cannot be accused of having under-reacted to the
potential security impact of climate change. A huge number of European policy
documents and speeches have proclaimed that climate change will become not
simply another security issue alongside other threats, but the matter that conditions
all other international strategic questions. Incremental accretions to European
security strategies have progressively reinforced the centrality of this nostrum. The
cooperative
multilateral dimension has occupied a central place in EU thinking of
how to approach climate security.
Despite all this, however, policy-makers on their own admission appear uncer-
tain how to proceed further. The EU is renowned for its institutional
-
'
messiness
'
;
the climate security agenda has become strongly a
ected by this and entrapped
within opaque lines of responsibility. Indeed, the issue
s almost uniquely multi-
variate nature means that it has been particularly hard to establish any single insti-
tutional site unequivocally to take charge of taking forward a climate security
strategy. Climate security is judged to be important in the long run but apparently
not immediately urgent enough to prompt a quick improvement in the EU
'
'
s
institutional preparedness. It has been argued that the EU
s external climate policy
has been the product of domestic factors, inter-institutional rivalries and bureau-
cratic stickiness, much more than of an adequate response to changing global
conditions and alliances.
74
Conversations with diplomats reveal a widespread feel-
ing that while climate change needs to be understood as a security challenge, for
the moment the linkage remains too abstract to elicit serious attention; it has to
some extent been displaced by more immediate challenges like the Arab Spring
and the eurozone crisis. It is agreed that institutional structures will accord greater
priority to climate-security only when this is seen to require immediate and con-
crete responses in particular crisis scenarios. This may be an issue that requires long-
term planning and pre-emptive action, but in practice no one institutional site is
likely to seize full responsibility until a singular crisis makes the climate
'
security
link undeniably palpable. A trigger is likely to be required in the form of a disaster
somewhere where there is a clear security dimension inextricably intertwined with
the e
-
ects of extreme climate.
