Military institutions worldwide are strategizing for climate-driven warfare, but some experts say they should pay more attention to preventing—and not just reacting to—the climate crisis.
“The military strategies being generated to confront these new issues focus on adapting to the new challenges, not massively reducing their own carbon footprints. The Pentagon’s climate change plan does talk about reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but ‘mitigation’ is third on the plan’s list of guiding terms, after ‘adaptation’ and ‘resilience’,” reports The Daily Beast.
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Controversial academic reports are influencing military policy by claiming that climate change directly incited recent conflicts in areas like Somalia and Syria, the U.S. publication adds. Strategists are now looking ahead to identify areas where they expect to see climate-sparked wars in the future.
“The shift I see happening among [U.S.] defence policy-makers,” said Jeff Colgan, a professor of political science at Brown University, “is that they are starting to see climate change not just as a ‘threat multiplier’ (the Pentagon’s favorite phrase) or as a single issue, but as altering the whole strategic landscape that the United States faces.”
The shift in focus is not exclusive to the U.S., but is also occurring in discussions like those at the Seoul Defense Dialogue and The Atlantic Council.
Some initiating factors include rising tensions between the U.S., Russia, and China over resources in the Arctic Circle, and violence driven by distinct populations mingling through climate migration, The Daily Beast says. (This latter claim is based on heightened terrorist activity following flooding in Bangladesh. But human migration experts, like Robert McLeman, point out that migration-driven conflict is more often caused by inadequate policy than by human displacement itself.)
Olaf Corry, professor of global security challenges at the University of Leeds, agreed climate change will have a “huge” impact on security. But he questioned some of the hypotheses underpinning the discussions, including the conventional wisdom that draws a direct link from climate change to violence in Syria.
“The droughts were in the wrong place to correlate with the places the unrest broke out that were the trigger for the Assad crackdown,” he said.
Corry cautioned against allowing those responsible for starting wars to “get off the hook” by blaming climate. He also challenged the military’s approach centered on national security
“Why is it ‘national security’ and not ‘human security’ or an ‘ecological security’ crisis?” he asked.
But military establishments’ focus on national security is distracting them from addressing the root causes of climate change and their responsibility in causing it, The Daily Beast writes. A 2019 report from Brown University showed the U.S. Department of Defense accounting for up to 80% of the federal government’s overall energy consumption, and 2017 emissions from the U.S. military alone exceeded Sweden’s total emissions for that year.
By failing to address their own emissions, military strategists could make the conflicts they are preparing for even worse, and add to the inequitable global distribution of climate impacts, The Daily Beast concludes.
“If the rich countries—the chief causers of global warming—start pouring money into their national security apparatus instead of decarbonization and helping vulnerable countries adapt, it will add insult to injury,” Corry said.
