The evidence is irrefutable: Climate change poses enormous risks to economic stability, public health, ecosystem services, and national security, as well as to the environment.
How should we manage those risks? The first step is to acknowledge them. The second is to start listening to the experts who manage risks for a living.
Over the past two months, I’ve attended several meetings of military and civilian experts in security, intelligence and risk assessment. They were unanimous in concluding that
- The risks of climate change are growing rapidly;
- Those risks are routinely underestimated by policy makers; and
- Little is being done to plan for contingencies, even in those regions of the world likely to suffer the most and even though the suffering already has begun.
One meeting of security and risk experts was organized by Nick Mabey, a former advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair and now the leader of E3G, a nonprofit organization based in Europe to promote sustainable development. Our mission was to explore how the science of risk assessment and management should be applied to climate change. In a Whitehall Paper written last year, Mabey explained:
Climate change will be one of the critical forces shaping the coming century”¦ It will fundamentally alter the way we live, the risks we face and how we interact in an increasingly interdependent world.
While scientists and environmentalists have been sounding warnings for years, an open discussion of the security risks of climate change started only a couple of years ago. In November 2007, the Center for Strategic and International Security and the Center for a New American Security issued “The Age of Consequences“; in June 2008, a blue-ribbon panel of high-level former military leaders, convened by the Center for Naval Analysis, concluded that global warming is a “threat multiplier” that will destabilize some of the world’s most volatile regions.
That finding was confirmed a year later by the National Intelligence Council in its first-ever assessment of climate change. It was confirmed again recently by the CIA’s creation of a new Center on Climate Change and National Security to centralize its expertise on “the effect environmental factors can have on political, economic, and social stability overseas.”
On Oct. 28, retired U.S. military officers warned the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee about the risks that climate change and fossil energy pose to national security. ”Our economic, energy and climate change challenges are all inextricably linked,” retired Vice Adm. Dennis McGinn testified. “If we don’t address these challenges in a bold way and timely way, fragile governments have great potential to become failed states “¦.a virile breathing ground for extremism.”
A day later in Washington, D.C., the same message was delivered in a joint statement issued by active and retired military leaders from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin American and the United States. In addition to calling on all governments to work for an “ambitious and equitable” international agreement at Copenhagen, the officers urged governments to make sure the security implications of climate change are integrated into their military strategies.
Mabey notes that climate risks – including drought and famine, loss of fisheries, coastal inundation, invasive migrations of climate refugees, natural disasters and water shortages – could go two ways. They could motivate nations to collaborate more on conflict prevention, contingency planning, economic development and disaster prevention and response; or, they could cause more tensions within and between countries, leading to conflict.
An example of collaboration are the Oslo Guidelines on the use of the military and civil defense agencies in disaster relief operations. An example of tension is the fence India has built along its 2,500 miles border with Bangladesh, in part to keep out illegal immigrants – a problem that may reach crisis proportions as residents of Bangladesh flee extreme weather, flooding and sea-level rise. As many as 30 million residents of Bangladesh could become “climate refugees” by mid-century, forced from their homes by sea-level rise, according to one government official there.
Public officials tend to be risk-averse in matters with potential political consequences; now they must become risk-savvy. Here are 10 ideas on how to make that happen:
- Policy-makers must listen to risk professionals and acknowledge the rapidly increasing dangers of climate change. Nearly all of us practice some risk management in our lives. That’s why we buy health insurance, liability insurance, homeowner’s insurance, long-term care insurance and vehicle insurance. Risk management is no less important in regard to global warming.
- Elected officials must listen to the climate science community. At the same time, scientists must clearly communicate the upper end of plausible climate risks rather than middle-ground risks. Politicians and policy makers tend to flock to the middle of the risk spectrum – a kind of Goldilocks and the Three Bears tendency where we want risks that are not too hot and not too cold. Good risk management requires that we anticipate and prepare for the worst.
- Climate scientists should interact regularly with risk, security, public health, and disaster prevention and response agencies to help them anticipate and cope with emerging climate impacts.
- To minimize climate risks, national leaders must find an effective balance between sovereignty and international collaboration. Existing international institutions probably will prove inadequate to deal with the unprecedented demands of climate change; new international institutions and mechanisms will be needed.
- Public officials and citizens alike must invest in prevention – in other words, mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions to reduce the danger of climate change, and adaptation measures that reduce the intensity of climate crises. We should not wait for the crises to arrive, any more than we can wait to buy auto insurance until we’re in the middle of a head-on collision.
- Nations should begin serious contingency planning now, internally and with other countries in their regions. Some of the most severe climate change will involve nations where historic tensions already exist. India and Pakistan, or India and Bangladesh come to mind. The time to plan is now, in hopes the overriding threat of climate change will be the external enemy that draws old adversaries together.
- Local officials should build risk assessment and management into infrastructure and climate adaptation projects. The World Bank estimates that 40 percent of development aid investment is at risk from climate change. To avoid carbon lock-in (i.e., actions that lock us in to greenhouse gas emissions for decades), we must stop building conventional coal plants and making other long-term carbon commitments. But we must also avoid “vulnerability lock-in”. The critical infrastructure we build today – ranging from power and water treatment plants to hospitals and vital transportation systems – should be designed for resilience and located to avoid floods, sea level rise and other impacts of climate change.
- The Executive Branch and Congress should regularly review climate risks to determine whether federal agencies have the authority and resources they need to respond rapidly to emerging worst-case scenarios. An even more interesting issue is whether the Executive Branch has sufficient power to prevent climate emergencies without Congressional interference – for example, by redefining 100-year floodplains based on anticipated future flooding rather than past flooding, and restricting development within predicted flood zones.
- Governments must put adequate resources into research that improves our understanding of how climate change will affect us at the regional and local levels. Research should include “perfect storm” events where multiple impacts and stresses occur simultaneously.
- Governments should classify climate change as a national security issue in budgeting as well as planning. According to the Institute for Policy Studies, the Bush administration allocated $88 to military forces in 2008 for every dollar it earmarked for climate stabilization. President Obama’s stimulus package and first budget narrowed the security-climate gap to 9:1 – a dramatic improvement, but still not an adequate reflection that low-carbon technologies and resources have become critical tools of conflict prevention, global stability and national defense.
We are rapidly approaching a time when the nations most threatened by climate change will regard coal-burning as an act of aggression and when nations will conflict over who gets dwindling supplies of finite resources. That makes solar collectors and wind turbines as important as conventional weapons in our national defense arsenal.
As I’ve written before, our biggest risk is that we’ll fail to close the gap between what scientists tell us is necessary and what politicians believe is possible. We won’t be able to narrow that gap until elected officials worldwide accept that the security risk of failing to act on climate change is far greater than the political risks of bold preventive action.
– Bill Becker
Suffering begun: http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14447171
Climate Solutions 2: http://www.wwf.de/fileadmin/fm-wwf/pdf_neu/climate_solutions_2___executive_summary.pdf
Mabey paper: http://www.rusi.org/publication/whitehall/ref:I480E2C638B3BC/
CIA climate office: https://www.cia.gov/news-information/press-releases-statements/center-on-climate-change-and-national-security.html
Oslo guidelines on disaster response: http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/lib.nsf/db900sid/AMMF-6VXJVG/$file/OCHA-Nov2006.pdf?openelement
IES statement: http://www.envirosecurity.org/news/single.php?id=148
CNA: http://securityandclimate.cna.org/
Oslo guidelines: ochaonline.un.org/OchaLinkClick.aspx?link=ocha&docId
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Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
sorry reposting here, much more appropriate!
We are late, late, late. When climate change will start hitting hard we will need to have the technologies ready. We will need to buy the time to do the changes which we should be already doing. Crisis situations will pile up: our society has been made possible by a stable environment and change will threaten our civilization in many ways. These threats will come all together!
Most likely, there will be a food crisis compounded by an economic downturn compounded by civil unrest, migrations, border shut downs and wars. All of this while unprecedented floods, droughts and extreme weather events hit… ah yes, and this is just the easily foreseeable “Hell” part…
Now add “high water”… ah yes ACID high water due to high concentrations of dissolved CO2. Ocean might stop being a food source: fish will die off, but so might also eatable algae. Expanding dead zones in oceans (also caused by overfishing and/or geoengineering experiments causing algal blooms) will release first stinking, then deadly H2S clouds and poison people,animals and plants on shores and inland (H2S clouds are already being released off the coast of Africa).
Add to that the geological effects of melting icesheets (with kilometer-high mountains of ice moving) and the movement of large masses of water from the rotational axis of earth to the equator… a tiny change of earth moment of inertia and day duration. Yet, some earthquakes and vulcanoes are likely to be destabilized. Ah yes, and a new ocean rift suddently opened a 35-km break in earth crust in Etiopia in 2005, surprising everyone with the incredible speed of the event. Lets hope that does not add a lot of Co2 soon.
Now in this environment can you assume we will have the time to research/develop/test/install/run effective countermeasures? That takes years, many years of hard work. And large investments made possible by rich, stable societies. We got to start now, else I strongly doubt we can make it… If we wait long enough, things will start happening so fast that there will be a race between a crumbling civilization and the climate change effects undermining the foundations on which society is based.
People must realize that we are not talking 2100 here. 10 degrees at 2100 means game over, probably. With 10 degrees of temperature change there will be no society on earth with the resources to do anything other than trying to survive disasters. Things will be extremely tough much earlier than that… the turning point, i think, dictated by summer sea ice: when will it be reduced enough to make its stabilizing effect insufficient? What mesoscale weather events will we see then? Will hurricanes in temperate zones become possible? Will they destroy our ability to do something?
Dear Bill,
I agree with your emphasis on governments being too stubborn with their political objectives and not giving enough attention to the long-term important issues concerning adaptation to climate change. I work for an energy and environment forum called Comment:Visions (www.commentvisions.com). Our current topic under discussion is: How must society adapt to rapid climate change to minimise severe upheaval? One of our contributors called Evan Evans, who works for WSP Environment and Energy, agrees with you on the societal changes that must be implemented in order for society to adapt. He gives concrete examples, which you could find quite interesting (http://www.commentvisions.com/month/november/2009/visions_from)
Would you be interested to share your views on our forum?
Kind regards,
Aleksandra Lange
On idea #2, I think there are practical issues. Scientists can be competitive and one will have someone like David King complaining about exaggeration to tear down someone more skilled who is discussing the outer bounds of risk. http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/fresh-warnings-on-climate-overstatement/
Getting scientists to speak with one voice then requires scientific reticence to be at the fore.
Perhaps the easier path is for the risk management community to learn more about the sociology of science so that they can learn to multiply reported risk by at least pi.
It is possible that there won’t be more than 5 meters of sea level rise this century but we don’t know. IPCC estimates are unbounded from above but you need to read the fine print to know this. What is at risk is huge. Risk managers need to be prepared to overcome such limitations.
I think it behooves the Governors to lead the charge.
1. The governors should develop detailed outlines of the likely devastating consequences of climate change on their state.
2. Demand that the U.S. Government address this interstate/international crisis to protect them from such consequences.
For example this means a state like New York acknowledging that New York City and the surrounding coastal area populations are in a very real danger of mandatory, permanent relocation. How can NY survive such a fate? The costs are incalculable.
This should be done for every state and start a damn revolution if necessary, to force PROPORTIONATE ACTION.
Avoid Reading This—At Your Own Risk
Risk “management” is a healthy and necessary thing, of course, IF done within the larger context AND in its proper role relative to what is usually the more essential goal, which is risk avoidance.
Even as we talk about “risk management” and of the people who “manage risk” as a living, we should make sure to begin at the beginning, get horse before cart, and place such conversations in the larger context. (People are forgetful beings and often benefit from being reminded: That’s what advertisers call “frequency”.)
My point is this:
Questions and aims of AVOIDING risks come before notions of “managing risks”. I realize, of course, that often the first goal is considered as being part of the second phrase, and included within it. But, the second phrase is ambiguous and allows easy slippage into a harmful and incorrect paradigm: that of accepting risks (that could be avoided) and thinking solely in terms of “dealing with them” as best as possible.
That’s a key point.
Part of the key point, or related to it, are the ETHICAL and common sense considerations associated with AVOIDING the creation of harmful risk in the first place.
In other words, one question is “Now that we have (blindly) accepted a risk, how do we manage things to mitigate harms?”
The earlier question is, or at least SHOULD be, “What are our human ethical obligations to avoid creating, and fueling, such a risk in the first place?”
Too often we “jump” to the first question (in the order I’ve listed them above) before doing a sufficient job of asking and addressing the second question, which really should be the first one, don’t we?
Of course, this is NOT a “theoretical” matter. It is part of everyday life, but we neglect to “see” it, sometimes, in complex situations or (in truth) when it is uncomfortable for us to see.
Consider these two simple illustrative examples:
If your son is drunk and (thus) if it would be dangerous for him to go out and drive (not only to himself, but very importantly to others), you don’t passively allow him to get into a car and drive just because he says that he’ll lean closer to the windshield (in order to see better) and that he’ll go five mph below the speed limit. In other words, it’s not sufficient to choose to drive drunk but to “manage the risk” in some sort of way. The ethical answer, and the necessary one, is for him to NOT drive at all, while drunk. See the difference?
Similarly, but perhaps even a better illustration:
Imagine that you have an empty revolver with six chambers (i.e, that can hold six bullets) and that you are considering a “Russian Roulette” situation, if I got that phrase right. Imagine that you know that there is one bullet in one of the chambers and that the other chambers are empty. But you don’t know which is which.
Here is a hint about human ethics or “common sense”, call it what you like:
You DON’T give the gun to your friend or allow him to play Russian Roulette with it. This is called “risk avoidance”. Indeed, if you are wise, you’ll take the bullet out and lock the gun in a cabinet, at the very least.
In contrast, here is an example of “risk management” if you merely accept (in an unexamined fashion) the risk and engage in a risky sort of “risk management”: Your friend has the gun. Knowing that there is “only” a one-in-six chance that the bullet is in the first chamber, he pulls the trigger, and you allow him to do it. If you are lucky, he may still be alive. Now, you then know that there is only a one-in-five chance that the bullet is in the next chamber. (At least, I think that’s correct, but close enough.) So, he and you say to each other, “we’ll do it one more time and then stop”. And whatever happens, happens. That is an example of risky “risk management”. And, there are HUGE ethical reasons and common-sense reasons NOT to even embark on that path.
In short, I think that we should have a VERY SOLID, and repetitive, discussion of the ethical and common-sense dimensions of risk AVOIDANCE, and that the media should do a MUCH better job of covering that KEY aspect of this whole matter.
Be Well, (and don’t try those experiments at home!),
Jeff
On thought #7, it seems to me that sea level rise should be a federal responsibility in avoiding vulnerability lock-in. The flood insurance system may be the best lever. The NRC, however, should issue a guidance now that all new nuclear power plants have to be located 50 meters above sea level or higher. We are not the UK so we really don’t have to commit to building dikes around power plants. Since these are our engineering projects with the longest planning horizon, it is time to issue such guidance now.
Jeff, it seems like we’re playing Russian Roulette with one empty chamber while driving incredibly drunk. . .
To mix more metaphors, it’s like we’re all in a lifeboat alone in the middle of the ocean rapidly taking on water. The deniers are saying we’re not taking on water. The rest are bailing too slowly, often arguing with each other about how to bail.
Or, as Andy said in the previous “Road to Copenhagen” post (#3), it’s like each nation is a paratrooper jumping out of a plane, chained together, each refusing to open their parachute first.
We need to each individually, every business, corporation and nation pull the parachute, bail as quickly as we can, while not playing Russian Roulette nor driving drunk, to mix all the metaphors.
Those who are doing all they can are evolving toward a new state of consciousness, maybe a new evolution of the species – while leaving the old self-destructive tendencies behind. Kudos to all those doing so.
To Richard (Comment 7)
Thanks for your comment, Richard. I agree with the vast majority of it, including the examples you give. (The only part I’ll “except” is the last comment about evolution, because I stick very technically to that word and concept when I use it, because of my main focuses.)
With that as context, I generally agree with your main points.
But, of course, the media (and even the blogs) don’t cover the VITAL aspect of this whole situation that involves the ethical considerations (and common-sense considerations) associated with situations of uncertainty and risk. In other words, they don’t cover what our examples point out.
It’s almost as if society doesn’t want to look at itself in the mirror (through and with the help of the media) and say, “You immoral dummy: you better do something to address the problems you’ve created!”
We don’t like to say that to ourselves, but we need to. And we need to explain (why this is the case) to ourselves.
I also think that more people of all disciplines and stripes should be speaking out, e.g., moral philosophers, ethicists, religious leaders, other philosophers, key change agents, economists (those who “get it”), and, of course, scientists.
Anyhow, thanks again for your comment. Be Well,
Jeff
“Those who are doing all they can are evolving toward a new state of consciousness, maybe a new evolution of the species –”
Hopefully it will be a slow evolutionary process. What would be the fun of being so much more evolved if there were nobody around to point to as being less evolved.
Jeff Huggins,
I disagree with you in many ways. I think it was Jon Holdren who said we have to three options: mitigation, adaptation or suffering.
Once we understand the cost of adaptation we will probably see the cost of mitigation as acceptable. In any case a lot of climate change is already locked in.
Some of the infrastructure we build today will be around in a hundred years. Airports or roads less than 1 meter above sea level are not going to be functional long before the sea level rises a meter.
We need to start replacing Sydney Airport now, not when a plane is circling to land on the water.
It looks as though suffering is inevitable.
Dear RB (Comment 10),
Thanks for your comment. I think you may have misunderstood me, or I may have not communicated in full context. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t take precautions, mitigate, prepare for what we’ve already caused, and so forth. I’m just saying that we shouldn’t do that INSTEAD OF addressing the problem in the first place, the very best we possibly can. We should understand prevention and avoidance, as well as “management” and preparation, and we should place those in their proper ethical and practical relationships. And, we should try to face and address the causal factors, clearly.
Way too many people, it seems to me, don’t understand this, and many also use the “we’ll have to live with it” argument as an excuse, in essence, for not doing what we should be doing.
Hopefully that clarifies my point.
Thanks again.
Jeff
Jeff -
Once again, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head. Or at least a nail on the head – you’ve hit somebody on the head, maybe a nail.:)
I feel we’ve been acting immorally as a species, nation and individuals, myself included, and the more we consume the more true this is.
That process of looking in the mirror is what the panels and town meetings I produce and moderate are often about. Now my events have physical scientists discussing the physical science (usually IPCC Report lead authors, group leaders, etc), then social scientists discussing what this all means to people, and now philosophers and deeply caring thinkers of all stripes discussing the morality of these issues.
If we can understand how we’ve altered our only home, we can get somewhere and do what’s needed to mitigate and adapt the best we can.
If we don’t understand our species impacts, we’re simply in denial.
Denial Delta, under water, to be more precise.
Jeff, it would seem we do agree. Adaption alone is impossible.
Jeff — Thanks for making the point about avoidance. I completely agree. We still have time to avoid some risks. Others already are inevitable and we need to manage them. Other impacts already are here. We need to acknowledge that they aren’t aberations; they’re part of an emerging pattern and we need to change behaviors, designs and policies to deal with them.