Three questions we must answer for global security

Time is running out if we are to prevent a very grim future as the world grapples with the urgency of environmental limits, the deeply unjust economic system and the ready reliance on military force. A new book that I’ve co-authored hopes to shed light on how precisely the climate, economy and military are connected. It reveals that despite the daunting picture, there’s hope if we act now.

COP29 comes this year as climate scientists have pointed to a very dangerous near future as climate breakdown accelerates. The UN’s annual climate summit begins in Baku, Azerbaijan in two weeks but the aim of holding the increase in average global temperatures to below 1.5C is looking alarmingly distant.

This week also saw the start of the 16th session of the UN’s biodiversity conference in Cali, Colombia. Concerned with the overall state of global biodiversity it will be reporting on alarming evidence that the global ecosystem is already in serious trouble, with an increasing risk of irreversible damage to the environment in many parts of the world.

According to Tom Oliver, Professor of Applied Ecology at Reading University, interviewed in The Guardian this week: “We are already locked in for significant damage and we are heading in a direction that will see more. I really worry that negative changes could be very rapid.”

But the issue that is too often overlooked is that climate breakdown is intimately linked with two other massive failings in global society. One is the alarming levels of inequality and runaway wealth – and the other is the dangerous reliance by wealthy societies on short-term military answers to complex human problems. It is only when we put these three trends together that we can really comprehend the overall scale of the problem – and seek to overcome it.

Our new book, The Insecurity Trap: A Brief Guide to Transformation (published by Hawthorn Press) raises three key questions:

• Can we come to terms with the environmental limits to growth in time?
• Can we transform the world economy to ensure that there is far better sharing of what we have?
• And last, can we change our understanding and practice of international security to focus on a human security approach that works for all, not just a minority elite?

Environmental limits, not least in the shape of global heating caused by fossil carbon emissions, were recognised more than half a century ago and the specific issue of climate breakdown came into prominence in the 1990s. Early UN efforts at countering greenhouse gas emissions included the Kyoto Protocols but more recent progress has been appallingly slow.

To make matters worse, oil, gas and coal industries are still lobbying vigorously against climate breakdown and leading governments including Russia, Australia, Gulf oil producers and especially the US under Bush and Trump, have assiduously argued against change.

Second, economic inequality makes climate breakdown doubly problematic because it affects poorer societies. It is exacerbated by the established prevailing neoliberal system rooted in competition and deregulation, requiring large-scale privatisation, tax breaks for the privileged and limits on labour unions.

Neoliberal economics has been exceptionally good for the ultra-wealthy, especially the world’s thousands of billionaires, but of its many flaws the worst is that it cannot respond to the global issues of climate breakdown. Its primary function is to ensure short-term profitability with minimal government interference.

Preventing climate breakdown requires immediate state-level action across governments that involves massive spending with little prospect of early profits. It runs directly counter to the neoliberal belief in small government and the power of the market to solve all problems.

Third, on security: the world’s military industrial complexes are so often laws unto themselves and see any major new security challenge as needing to be met by military force. War remains the all-to-frequent response to new challenges, climate breakdown being the latest example.

If one consequence of climate breakdown is the mass migration of many tens of millions of people desperate to find safe places to live, then the military forces of richer states will focus on any means to “close the castle gates” including all the newer methods of warfare, especially lethal drone technologies.

That, in turn, will lead to new generations of paramilitary rebellions, inevitably labelled “terrorists” by the world’s wealthier peoples leading to what Edwin Brooks memorably described half a century ago as “…a crowded glowering planet of massive inequalities of wealth buttressed by stark force yet endlessly threatened by desperate people in the global ghettos of the underprivileged.”

Change is possible

The good news is that such a dystopic future is not inevitable and we have witnessed positive trends time and again.

Climate science has come on by leaps and bounds in recent decades and as a result the accuracy of prediction has improved markedly. Multiple technological developments have dramatically decreased the cost of electricity generated from renewable energy resources making it economically viable and eminently sensible to make the transition to ultra-low carbon societies.

Meanwhile, the actual experience of extreme weather events is increasing. There is also still hope while ordinary people, especially younger generations, engage increasingly in political activism from all corners of the world, playing their part in fighting the system.

The most significant is the rapid increase in the response to climate breakdown, especially that rapid decarbonisation can be achieved. There is also much good work underway on new economic approaches and on the rethinking of security.

It is increasingly a matter of exploring and promoting what can be done by individuals, local groups, national movements and even intercontinental actions. This is how the world will be transformed for the common good.

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