Call to Australian politicians to make climate highest priority, decarbonisation by 2030 | Australian Security Leaders Climate Group

When even retired members of our military establishment are calling for a decarbonisation target of 2030, you have to wonder at the games being played by the Liberal, National and Labor Parties on highly insufficient 2030 climate targets, and the lack of preparation in safeguarding Australians from climate change impacts.

The Australian Security Leaders Climate Group issued a call to all political parties in an open letter, signed by 17 senior former defence and intelligence officials, asking them to make climate their highest priority and to aim for decarbonisation by 2030. The statement appeared as a full page in The Australian newspaper.

The open letter follows the Missing in Action report from September 2021. This report proposed that "Focus should be on the root causes of climate warming, principally eliminating emissions much faster than proposed, rather than just the responding to the symptoms." The report recommended "to the government a set of initial actions in a climate and security plan to Protect, Prevent and Prepare, starting with a realistic assessment of the risks.

• An urgent Climate and Security Risk Assessment
• Establish a dedicated Office of Climate Threat Intelligence
• Triennial National Climate Risk Assessments
• Build an Australian National Prevention & Resilience Framework 

Read more at the Missing in Action Summary (PDF) or Full Report (PDF)

Leadership in Australia has been failing citizens by the lack of a national climate risk assessment and a National Climate Adaptation Plan, and an increasing climate change security threat.

The Open letter in full is below:

A Climate for Leadership: how Australia should respond to increasing disasters with retired Admiral Chris Barrie | Webinar

Australia Institute webinar with Richie Merzian and Chris Barrie

Climate change is increasingly a national security issue and in this Australia Institute webinar Former head of the Australian Defence Forces Chris Barrie and Head of climate and Energy at the Australia Institute Richie Merzian discuss the implications for responding to increasing climate related disasters involving the ADF and some of the National Security implications of failure of leadership to address climate change at the Federal Government level.

Richie Merzian outlines how Australia shaped an outline that countries could adopt for climate adaptation plans. Australia is helping to fund and implement plans with countries in our Pacific region, yet have failed to draw up a National Climate Adaptation Plan for our own country. 

So Australia has not worked out a risk assessment for estimates of the cost of climate change and climate driven weather disasters. "It has left us vulnerable and luching from one disaster to the next, when the majority of countries have undertaken developing these climate adaptation plans."

"It's extraordinary we are missing in action in Australia, when it is the security of our own people we should be concerned about. Worse than that, as Richie has pointed out, we have not learned anything from being involved in the processes, putting these adaptation plans together. It is almost like the leadership is absolutely vacant at the moment and I think this should concern all of us." said Chris Barrie.

Storify: Climate security and health impacts for Australia and abroad #PopHlth2015

How do you write up a conference presentation which you did not attend and did not see livestreamed? Why through the magic of twitter #hashtag conversation of people live reporting the speakers important points. Add some relevant context and related articles and you have a report.

Rob Sturrock's conference presentation on Climate change and its health impacts at home and abroad at the Population Health Congress 2015 intrigued me, so I gathered all the live tweets from his keynote speech, selected a variety of comments and deleted any that were primarily duplicates and redundant.

In the process, I also read his study The Longest Conflict: Australia's Climate Security Challenge that was released in June 2015 by the Center for Policy Development. In fact before publishing this storify of his keynote speech I published an article on his study: Australian Defence Force poorly prepared for #Climate change. So I had a reasonable understanding of where he was coming from in his talk.

Australian Defence Force poorly prepared for #Climate change

This article was originally posted at nofibs.com.au

Rob Sturrock and Dr Peter Ferguson give some hard truths about the security implications of climate change now and in the near future for Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. In their June 2015 report they claim that climate change is the threat equivalent to a hundred years war, which Australia and the Australian Defence Forces (ADF), are ill prepared for on a strategic level.

"Without intending it, we are confronting a threat akin to a Hundred Year War." say Sturrock and Ferguson. While the Government focusses on hardware upgrades such as new submarine contracts and traditional short term defence asset replacements, the essential strategic planning for operating in a climate changed world is being sorely neglected.

Their report, The Longest Conflict: Australia's Climate Security Challenge (Download the PDF) was released in June 2015 by the Center for Policy Development.

According to the report authors, defence personnel indicate that climate change will not feature strongly in the upcoming Defence White Paper, due for realease in late 2015 or early 2016. The 2014 Defence Issues Paper, while identifying many security threats and opportunities, neglected to mention climate change was one of them.

Climate change, Water Security and drought in the Mediterranean region

A new study by NOAA - the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - has highlighted that climate change is a major contributor to more frequent Mediterranean droughts. According to the study in the last 20 years, 10 of the driest 12 winters have taken place in the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea. Water security, food security, and increasing wildfire frequency and intensity has the potential to destabilize the region producing conflicts over use of increasingly scarce water resources.

"The magnitude and frequency of the drying that has occurred is too great to be explained by natural variability alone,” said Martin Hoerling, Ph.D. of NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, lead author of a paper published online in the Journal of Climate this month. “This is not encouraging news for a region that already experiences water stress, because it implies natural variability alone is unlikely to return the region’s climate to normal.”

Health and military professionals call for urgent action on climate change

A statement calling for urgent action on climate change has been issued by doctors, health professionals and military personnel participating in a London conference on the health and security implications of climate change convened by the British Medical Journal.

Professor Hugh Montgomery, Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at the University College London and Director of the UCL Institute for Human Health and Performance, talking to OneClimate at The Health and Security Perspectives of Climate Change conference that he helped to organise in London, 17th October 2011.

Related: A Stark Choice between climate justice and climate war where Canadian journalist Naomi Klein discusses militarism and climate change - Peoples Conference on Climate Change, Bolivia, April 2010.