Thank you very much Michael and thank you to everyone for giving up some of your afternoon
evening.
It is a pleasure to be here in Hamburg, it's the first time I've managed to make it this
far north in Germany and while it's probably starting, the weather is starting to turn
for some of you in a negative way I should point out that some of us who don't actually
get to experience anything that can be defined as seasons, living in subtropical environments
like Brisbane, they do appreciate the cold and the opportunity to see that apparently
leaves when it starts to get cold turn yellow which is something I had no idea, just looking
at some of the back that's still exciting to me.
We have two seasons in Brisbane and one is hot and the other one is not quite as hot
so it is a novelty and a great opportunity to be here.
I should apologise in advance, my background is clearly in international relations and
the study of security, broadly speaking in political science.
Some of this will be about debates within international relations and security studies
and some of the latter work or the latter points I'll get to around the contours of
what an ecological security discourse might look like are probably points where actually
those natural scientists in the room might have something to say so I'm hoping that that
will be an opportunity for you if you feel that it's two international relations heavy
or that the politics of it sound fine but actually the contours of what constitutes
an ecological security discourse are problematic I'd be particularly happy to hear from you
in that context.
So this is part, I am currently on study leave based in Lyon and this is part of a broader
research project, this presentation around ethics of climate security is really part
of a broader research project on ecological security that I've been engaged with and
I'm really at the starting point of this so it does mean, it means a couple of wonderful
things one that I'll actually be grateful for some feedback rather than thinking I wish
this had come before I'd submitted all this work on this project.
The other thing it means is that I'm in a very exciting period of actually being able
to read some work at the moment which I'm sure many academic colleagues would know isn't,
it should be what most of us spend our time doing but isn't necessarily the case when
teaching and marking and administration start to dominate our lives at certain points.
So this project has some basis in terms of my previous research and I wanted to build
on a couple of points here by way of making an introduction to this discussion of climate
security and in particular ecological security.
The first is around my work on security theory and my take on the way security works and
Michael's already suggested I'd locate myself in critical security studies broadly defined
and there are kind of three key insights here about the way security works that might be
relatively self-evident to critical security scholars but nonetheless is kind of central
to the ways in which I would engage security in this particular space.
One is the idea that security is socially constructed, that essentially what security
means is different for different political communities and different for the same political
communities over time.
So essentially security is the product of process of contestation and negotiation between
different groups about what our, between and within different groups about what our core
values are that are in need of being protected, one of the best ways of actually going about
protecting those values and where threats to those values actually come from and different
political communities I think we all know this intuitively, answer those questions in
very different ways.
So it's a fairly obvious point but actually when we as analysts start to say well this
is what security means, it means the territorial preservation of the nation state from external
military threat, what we ultimately do is close off the realisation that actually different
political communities do understand security in different ways.
So that's point one.
Point two is that this isn't just a nice neat insight about the way security works but that
it's actually politically significant because security itself is politically significant.
The claims of what our core values are of how they should be protected are politically
consequential.
They're central to the range of ways in which key institutions in international politics
whether they're institutions like the UN or indeed states, they're central to the ways
in which those institutions define their reason for being, you know, we're here to provide
for the security in the UN's case, we're here to maintain international peace and security
in the case of states.
The goal of providing security for individuals is really central to their reason for being.
Others would make the case that actually in that context especially claims of what constitutes
security become high politics.
So security issues are seen as particularly important in the political space and some
go further and say that actually if an issue is effectively sold as a security issue then
it enables emergency responses to deal with that, it enables prioritisation, it enables
emergency and urgent measures to deal with it.
So in this sense recognising the way in which and interrogating the way in which security
is understood is actually important because of how central security is to politics.
And then finally security in this sense is also ethical that actually questions about
whose security matters, about what constitute threats, what are appropriate means of dealing
with those threats are fundamentally ethical questions about how different priorities should
be managed, about whose security and whose values actually matter in the first instance.
So ultimately this means that what matters is how security is conceived in terms of the
type of practices that we've seen and I define this in this and in other work in terms of
discourses of security.
So a discourse of security involves discourses made up of particular answers to questions
of whose security matters, from what threats are they seen to matter, which actors or agents
are responsible for providing security and through what means.
And we see very different answers to those questions in terms of political interventions
on questions like climate change for example and this is something Michael's written about
and others in the room are familiar with as well.
But if we say well there are lots of different discourses of security, some focus on the
nation-state, some focus on the individual, some focus on ecosystem integrity, not many,
some focus on the international system and its preservation.
If we say there are these different discourses out there and that they do have different
implications in terms of the types of practices they prioritise, then the next step it seems
to me is to say well what sort of discourses are more progressive in terms of their ethical
defenceability and the types of practices that they will encourage?
What are ultimately progressive security discourses in the context, in this particular context
of climate change?
And I mention here that I draw on some of this in the book Security of the Environment
and Emancipation that along with this book Ethics and Global Security are currently somewhere
in the top I think as high as 5 millionth best seller on Amazon so they're doing very
very well.
I was able to pay for lunch today on the basis of royalties that I received from them over
about the past three to four years.
Seriously though they aren't really, I mean Christmas is just around the corner and these
books are an ideal gift for that special someone, sorry in all seriousness.
The other origin of this project, so some of it builds on work that I've done on the
way security works in the international system really and the attempt to apply that to issues
like environmental change.
More recently I've published this book Ethics and Global Security with some colleagues,
some Australian colleagues and in this context started to, the book essentially made a case
for approaching security in global terms rather than national terms, made a case for
the utility of cosmopolitanism as a framework for thinking about something unethically defensible,
approach to security not least in the context of essentially a globalised world.
The problem for me in some senses is that being a task in perhaps inevitably to draft
the environmental security chapter of this particular book, it's not hard to get to
the point where you start to think actually there are limits to where cosmopolitanism
as an approach can actually get you when you start thinking about something as complex
as environmental change and in particular the example that I've used here and in other
work that of climate change.
Here there are clear issues about the extent to which this type of approach can come to
terms with the nature of obligations to future generations for example, the nature of obligations
to other living beings or even the changing nature of our relationship to the environment
not least in the context of the Anthropocene, something I'll talk about a little bit more.
So in that context this project both builds on some of the theoretical work I've done
to date but also some of the limits in terms of recognising actually some of the humanist
conceptions of ethics that characterise what constitute progressive ways of thinking about
security don't necessarily get us where we need to go in terms of questions like climate
change or at least that's my argument.
So ultimately then in terms of the context of this project and the argument that I'm
advancing if security is politically important or consequential and if it's socially constructed
and if the politics and ethics of security are significantly determined by the discourse
of security that underpins how issues are conceptualised and addressed then this encourages
for me at least the following questions.
First what constitutes a progressive discourse of security?
Second what prospects are there for such an approach to be articulated, embraced and even
institutionalised by key political actors?
And third in recognition of the fact that what constitutes an appropriate way of thinking
about security will be somewhat issue specific.
How should we approach security with reference to an issue like climate change?
So why begin with climate change?
Well ultimately it's in the title of my presentation but I'd written that before I'd started the
research project.
There is an argument to be made if we are thinking about security some would say well
why look at an issue like climate change that isn't necessarily self-evident as a
security issue.
I confess I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the science of climate
change in part because I don't, I'm not a scientist and so that I can't speak intelligently
to that necessarily but also in part because I'm just assuming that we're all on board
with the idea that climate change is happening and it's human induced I don't feel like I
need to walk you through why this might be the case I'm just going to assume that no
one in this room is crazy.
Okay so climate change is the most significant or profound existential challenge facing the
planet and it also raises for me so that in and of itself is an important reason to think
about you know if we are thinking of fundamental existential challenges then why not think
in terms of an issue like climate change when thinking about redefining security.
It also raises some of the most profound questions about international relations and security
and the possibilities and limits associated both with the key institutions and mechanisms
that we have at our disposal in global politics and also about the theoretical and analytical
resources we have within the discipline itself.
It's been a key example over a long period of time in debates about changing definition
of security over time we've seen a particular focus particularly in the 1980s there was
more of a general focus on environmental change and the way in which a range of scholars in
the waning and end of the Cold War started to talk about why environmental change should
be seen as a security issue and this was as much a kind of normative as analytical argument
it was a normative argument in the sense that they were saying if these issues are
seen as security issues then they can be prioritised and given the level of funding consistent
with just how consistent they are and indeed many making this claim were associated with
environmental organisations.
More recently in the mid 2000s we've seen the return of this argument and more specifically
then focusing on climate change as pointing to the fact that we do need to reconsider
what we mean by security and international relations and it has of course also in political
terms been a key example in recent and consequential political interventions in debates that of
course featured in debates initiated first by the UK and then by Germany in 2007 and
2011 in the UN Security Council.
It's featured increasingly in national security strategies of states and it features prominently
in analyses by a range of think tanks indeed in 2007, 6, 7, 8 there seemed to be hardly
a public policy oriented think tank in the United States that wasn't talking about climate
change as a threat to national security and on that latter point I would note Michael
Broska's work has been particularly important in identifying the range of ways in which
different institutions have linked climate change and security.
So that's why we think about climate change.
There is a more fundamental question in my view about why define a project that's ultimately
about thinking in terms of how we can progressively approach a question like climate change.
There is a more fundamental question about why use the discourse or language of security
and there are a range of analysts who would say actually there are profound problems or
limits with this.
Well some would simply say and I think this is absolutely true that we can talk about
ethics without the language of security and some very, very smart people do this very,
very well.
People like Simon Caney and Steven Gardner are at Ed Page on future generations.
Some excellent work basically talking about the nature of obligations and what these should
look like in terms of questions of climate change without recourse to the language of
security.
We can also map different environmental or climate discourses without defining these
as security discourses.
We can basically say there are different sort of analytical lenses that states use, different
approaches that they employ, that different actors employ when engaging climate change
that aren't necessarily security discourses and a range of analysts again Martin Heyer
for example John Dreisek have basically located these different climate discourses and point
or environmental discourses.
It's clearly possible to do that.
Some would say that actually if the rationale is that security is particularly politically
important and mobilises responses that actually we haven't seen this relationship between
security and mobilisation.
So Matt Patterson makes the point that actually in climate politics terms what really mobilised
an international response to climate change wasn't really the language of security.
It was probably more of language of ethics or indeed language of economics.
So he'd use the example of the Stern Review of 2006 saying that this report on the impact
of climate change for global GDP is just as important, probably more so than any single
intervention linking climate change and security.
Nolay Vaver who I know some of my colleagues here are familiar with who has written extensively
on this securitisation framework, this framework that basically talks about how if issues are
defined and accepted as security issues it enables emergency responses to deal with them,
it enables a prioritisation that we otherwise wouldn't necessarily see.
He's made the case that actually when it comes to climate change that securitisation doesn't
seem to quite work as we expect, that we largely see actors saying this is a security
issue.
We also see audiences often accepting that this is the case in terms of public acceptance,
yes that's fine, it's a security issue.
But what we don't see are the mobilisation of extraordinary resources.
In some countries we see enough problems and I'm not talking in very embittered tones about
the limits of my own government's approach to climate change but we see enough controversy
over something as simple as carbon pricing for example, again I'm not bitter.
Others would make the case that securitisation may actually be a negative thing and something
worth avoiding so rather than suggest that actually it might mobilise a response that
maybe we don't want to link climate change and security because it might trigger responses
at the political level that we don't really want.
Daniel Doudney was making this point in the early 1990s and others generally have this
view of security as an inherently negative thing, necessarily tied to the state and the
military, encouraging responses that are about secrecy, about surveillance, about all sorts
of things we don't necessarily want to endorse when thinking about climate change.
So there are a range of pretty compelling reasons not to use the language of security
to start thinking about how we can more effectively deal with climate change at the political
level.
However, it's a linkage that is made increasingly at the political level itself.
It is something that we see there and we can't, as much as some might think it's the best
option, we can't simply ignore the fact that key institutions are making this link.
And if security is politically significant and if it's constructed we need to ask how
it's given meaning, what the implications of those particular meanings will have and
what a defensible linkage between security and climate change actually looks like.
In other words, we can't simply avoid the language of security, not least given that
this linkage is becoming more and more prominent in the ways in which different institutions
are engaging with climate change itself.
So before making a case, in particular for a particular ecological security discourse
for thinking about and addressing the issue of climate change, I want to illustrate this
argument that actually different discourses of security as applied to climate change have
potentially radically different implications, which is an important consideration in ethical
terms, but they are also founded on different sets of ethical commitments in the first instance.
So in other words, we see these different security discourses, but rather than assume
that we will see progress or negative implications of time, climate change and security, we should
actually spend some time to think about how these linkages are made, because they do have
radically different implications.
Some would say that essentially climate change constitutes a security threat to the extent
that it can challenge the nation state, its sovereignty and its territorial integrity,
for example.
My favourite, if perhaps one of the more appalling examples of this discourse is one provided
in a Pentagon report in 2003, Schwartz and Randall were asked to provide a report for
the Pentagon on an abrupt climate scenario and its implications for United States national
security.
And among a range of things they argued that might happen as a result of climate change,
one particularly notable example, or one memorable to me at least, was the argument
that relatively self-sufficient states that can withstand climate change in the first
instance, it's a direct manifestation, it's like the United States, might actually find
that it's in their interest to erect stronger national barriers to prevent those who are
displaced from climate change actually reaching the American state.
Now I'd like to think that most people in this room, most relatively rational people,
would see that as a fairly perverse response to the problem of climate change in terms
of what states should be doing, and especially what a state like the United States should
be doing on questions of climate change, yet it is one that is fundamentally consistent
with a national security focus, that is basically about the preservation of the territorial integrity
and sovereignty of the state.
So if understood in this way, climate change could be a threat to national security, one
of the policy responses we might see is one that has no bearing at all on helping us address
a global problem, and that actually treats victims of climate change as a threat to US
national security.
This is problematic, and I'm sure most of us could immediately recognise this as problematic,
and does suggest that actually this argument that securitisation might be a good thing
should at least be questioned.
One more recent approach is that linking climate change and international security.
The argument is essentially that we can see climate change potentially as a threat to
international order, or indeed the rules and norms of a so-called international society.
So in 2006-07, the UNEP and Ban Ki-moon made the case that actually a conflict in Darfur
might potentially be caused by climate change, and we've seen more recently arguments on
the extent to which conflict in Syria, for example, might be related to climate change
itself, and indeed the emergence some even suggest of the Islamic State.
Some of the problems of this discourse, while it does seem progressive at least in the sense
that it does still seem to focus on the idea of international cooperation to address climate
change, and it does suggest the need to focus on climate change because it can disrupt international
order.
It can have implications in terms of triggering humanitarian crises, for example.
It's still ultimately about the preservation of an international status quo, and a range
of analysts have suggested that actually maybe this status quo isn't quite fit for purpose.
If the international system and key institutions of global politics haven't got us to the point
where we've got a clear response to climate change, and clearly given the scale of admittedly
allowing for the possibility of a massive breakthrough in Paris in just a few weeks'
time, we haven't really seen through international cooperation to date the types of responses
that we would need to see to climate change to really justify the idea that actually this
international system is functioning well when it comes to responding to climate change.
Similarly, some would argue that actually it's not just that, but that actually the
international system serves in various ways, including through key institutions, to actually
create conditions conducive to the problem of climate change itself.
Some would say here that actually the extent to which an international system helps facilitate
the expansion of a neoliberal economic system, and with it the idea of increasing levels
of consumption throughout the world, then this is actually a large part of the problem
of climate change itself.
So international security also is progressive, at least in recognising an international community,
but also has limitations in terms of the ways in which it can conservatively focus on the
preservation of an international order.
Some from a relatively or a comparative radical perspective then make the case for focusing
on human security and suggest that actually human security, at the human security level,
it's important to recognise that climate change can and does undermine the realisation of
human livelihoods and potentially pose a direct threat to human lives itself.
The IPCC, for example, in its most recent report included a chapter on human security
where it mapped the ways in which climate change was a potential threat to human security
or indeed already constituted a security threat.
Now this again is a progressive response relative to the previous discourses, but here there
are also problems confronted by this human security approach.
Problems that are consistent in some ways with some of the ecological security discourse
that I ultimately want to make a case for, particularly when it comes to the question
of how this actually becomes enacted in practice.
Because here, like with the ecological security discourse, there's a sense that actually you
need existing institutions of international politics to effectively act for others and
in particular for vulnerable populations.
So in this sense there is a sense that you need states and international institutions
to act outside their own immediate self-interest and for many this simply isn't going to happen.
In that context it can mean defaulting to problematic agents, asking states to be key
agents of human security but at the same time recognising that there's always a possibility
that states will co-opt this discourse of human security and many have been highly critical
of human security on that basis.
There's also this ongoing issue at least from my perspective in terms of the extent
to which such a discourse really allows us to come to terms with the nature of our obligations
to future generations or indeed other living beings.
So all of these discourses are I think at some level problematic in terms of the ethical
foundations upon which they're built and problematic in terms of the ethical implications
of the practices that they encourage.
Can we then imagine one with more defenceable ethics, a better set of practices and any
prospect at all of implementation?
In a piece I published a couple of years ago in Political Geography, Discourses of Climate
Security I kind of mapped some of these different discourses in terms of how they respond to
referent object, threat, agent's response and sort of talk through the range of ways
in which actually these discourses encourage different sets of responses.
Some focused on adaptation, some focused on mitigation, some focused on the preservation
of the nation state or indeed key institutions of the international system, others more focused
on people themselves.
And while that mapping exercise is kind of important in the sense of recognising that
there are multiple ways of dealing with the relationship between climate change and security,
ways that we see in political practice articulated by often key actors in the international system,
it is important to move beyond that and sort of say, well, if that is the case, then what
constitutes a progressive way of linking these two?
And it's here that I make a case for ecological security as a way of more ethically defenceable
basis upon which to link climate change and security.
Some I would say in the literature get to the point of articulating or advancing specifically
an ecological security discourse and kind of stop.
John Dolby's work, for example, stands out as a really powerful critique of the ways
in which different approaches conceptualise the environment security relationship, but
he doesn't take it a step further in sort of saying, well, this is the basis upon which
it should be made.
Others get to this point and dismiss it as being politically naive.
So John Barnett's work, for example, is excellent on environmental change in general and security.
And in some of his earlier work, he does explicitly outline what ecological security
means and focus on ecosystems and for their own sake and their preservation, but essentially
dismisses it on the basis that actually it's got no political traction as a discourse.
It's hard enough to get states to act according to their long term interests, much less the
interests of other humans in vulnerable places in the world, much less other living beings.
For this reason, he's sort of very sceptical of the extent to which an ecological security
discourse is worth endorsing and it's significant in this context that he has ultimately become
one of the leading theorists linking human security and climate change and is indeed
one of the leading authors of the most recent chapter of the IPCC on human security.
Some get to this point and, for want of a better phrase, ultimately do it badly.
So Dennis Parages' work on ecological security was important in sort of raising the profile
of the prospect of linking security and ecosystems, but in the process, he did one of the things
that others, like people like Bookchin and others, accuse any approach that attempts
to extend boundaries of moral concern beyond humans and attempts to make a case for obligations
towards other living beings are often accused of being inherently misanthropic, so basically
anti-human.
And Parages doesn't help this by making a case that actually we should focus on ecosystems
for their own sake, maybe population control might be an appropriate mechanism to deal
with this.
So this plays into, I think, some of those stereotypes.
One of the other limitations of his work is the focus that he has on balance and ecosystem
preservation, which to me doesn't come to terms with the contemporary anthropocene with
the context in which we now find ourselves, where actually some form of change associated
with climate change is inevitable, and therefore the language of preservation or conservation
doesn't quite get us to where we need to go in terms of making sense of what it is we're
trying to do through existing, through key responses to a problem like climate change.
So there is, I think, an idea of the need to push in this direction and revisit some
of the binaries furthered by the realities of the anthropocene.
So Simon Dolby's work on the anthropocene, some of the arguments of new materialists
like Jane Bennet and second wave green political theorists like Robin Eckersley, I think in
different ways are all pushing in this direction that actually we need to revisit the idea
of limiting the way we link climate change and security or indeed the way we think about
ethics and climate change.
We need to revisit that traditional focus on humanist approaches ultimately.
So what is ecological security?
An ecological security approach is one oriented towards ecosystem resilience and with it the
rights of the most vulnerable across time, space and species, and I'll talk through each
of these points in more detail.
There's a need to focus here on functionality of ecosystems in the context of change rather
than necessarily on the preservation of ecosystems in their current form.
There's a need to focus on urgent mitigation action but also with recognition that in the
context of ongoing climate change there's a need to focus on some adaptation as well.
All actors with a capacity to generate avoidable harm have some degree of responsibility with
this being contingent to some degree on the scale of that responsibility or scale of contribution
as well as capacity and crucially dialogue, humility becomes central given the complexity
of thinking about security in terms of ecosystems, the complexity of thinking in terms of local
context and the need to prevent universal principles becoming a new repressive or misanthropic
orthodoxy.
I'll walk through each of those points in turn.
In the context of ecological security what I really want to focus on is resilience.
So in the context of the Anthropocene where humans now have the capacity to alter the
earth system upon which humans depend, I suggest this implies the need for at least
two things when it comes to linking climate change and security.
One is to address the separation of humans and nature and the broader anthropocentrism
of existing approaches to international actions and security.
The second is to recognise that we can no longer preserve balance or indeed stop climate
change but try to retain some degree of ecosystem functionality.
And it's here that resilience for me plays a significant role with resilience defined
in terms of the capacity of ecosystems to sustain life across time and space, retain
organisational structure following peturbation or change and absorb change while retaining
their essential function.
So here there's more of a recognition that actually what we're trying to protect isn't
necessarily ecosystems as we currently find them because some degree of change is indeed
locked in associated with climate change but rather we need to focus our attention on how
it is that we can ensure that ecosystems continue to function in ways that best preserve the
lives of as many species as possible.
In terms of whose security becomes a focus, the focus here is on dynamic complex and interrelated
ecosystems in the context of climate change and the ethical foundations here are holistic
that draw on ecological perspectives as well as critical political ecology.
But the idea ultimately is the need to extend the scope of our moral universe beyond contemporary
human populations and in this sense there's a range of theorists who are talking about
post-humanism in international relations, people like Cudworth and Hobden for example,
Audra Mitchell who push in this direction.
But of course extending our scope beyond contemporary human populations is almost inevitably challenging.
It's challenging in terms of questions of how we account for so-called people who aren't
yet born for example or how we think about obligations to other living beings.
But with climate change we do have a fundamental crisis that necessitates new ways of conceiving
and realising security in international relations and the ecosystem resilience is viewed here
as the best means of realising security for vulnerable populations, future generations,
other living beings and contemporary vulnerable human populations.
The means of security envisaged in this discourse, the question, there are a series of dilemmas
around the ecological security discourse so there's absolutely no question of that and
the question of how security is to be realised here is among others acutely difficult.
This is related to of course something that many of you would be intimately familiar with,
the profound complexity of interrelationships and uncertainty when it comes to ecology.
Now it's fairly clear that it's difficult to make definitive arguments about how it
is that ecosystems will respond to the loss of individual species or indeed to the change
of X or Y levels of degrees of the Earth's temperature, it's very difficult even for
those who really understand the science to make those types of claims.
There are also profoundly difficult choices about prioritising different sets of responses,
different ethical choices about where we should place resources, what we should focus on and
focus our attention on.
And in the past for example one interesting illustration of this is in the past those
who had advanced any case for adaptation were widely seen as, were widely derided as
people who were drawing attention away from what we should be doing in terms of addressing
the causes of climate change itself through mitigation action.
Increasingly though what we've seen is that actually those articulating advancing adaptation
have been seen as having a perfectly legitimate position within the debate as long as they're
not doing it at the expense of mitigation.
In the sense that we know that some form of climate change will happen and that it will
disproportionately influence or affect vulnerable populations particularly in the developing
world.
In this case saying there's no room for adaptation for example of the response is akin to sort
of leaving those populations in their current state of vulnerability.
So we do see changes over time and changes related in the language that's used in some
of these debates.
Changes that are related to changing dynamics in the international system.
Precaution becomes particularly important in the context of the scale of uncertainty
we're dealing with here.
Mitigation is clearly central including a rapid shift to no or low carbon economies
to deal with the worst successes of climate change.
Dialogue is central helping to facilitate an understanding and the match up between
principles and local practices and there has been a range of work pointing to the ways
in which actually localised understanding of climate functionality and appropriate
responses to manifestations of climate change are often very familiar I guess with the dynamics
within those local contexts and should be part of a conversation as sort of criticisms
on the IPCC about the exclusion of say indigenous knowledges when it comes to questions of how
to respond to climate change for example.
Adaptation to climate change and the focus on resilience also suggests a need for potentially
quite controversial dynamics like geoengineering.
Geoengineering is clearly controversial in the sense that there is so much uncertainty
about whether these projects, these types of projects will actually be successful.
They do seem to be about the search for a silver bullet when it comes to climate change.
It doesn't help that some who are making the case for geoengineering like my former
Prime Minister Tony Abbott were also at the same time making a case for the expansion
of the fossil fuel economy.
That doesn't help sort of disrupt this idea that actually geoengineering isn't necessarily
about addressing the problem of climate change.
But arguably and if we are focused on ecosystem resilience there might be a case that geoengineering
needs to be part of a conversation even if and probably we should view it necessarily
as a short term or stop gap mechanism to address the problem of climate change and this is
something that Simon Dolby has talked about.
Finally questions about the agents of security are another really significant dilemma when
it comes to ecological security.
Something identified as I've noted by people like John Barnett when talking about actually
the limits of this discourse saying basically it's a sympathetic bystander on the sidelines
of the substantive contest over climate change and security and actually it's just too radical
and different to be taken up by key institutions.
In terms of agents of security I make the case that all in a position to create avoidable
harms for ecosystems have some degree of responsibility with this differentiated based on the scale
of contribution to the problem and capacity of those actors.
But ethics here are simply too challenging for some and this fails the political relevance
test for others so ethics in terms of things like how do we think about future generations
when it comes to ethical responsibility, how do we make decisions based on resource allocation
to different sets of populations or indeed over time.
And as I've noted this approach fails the political relevance test for others.
But like other challenges this is applicable I think in some ways to other controversial
ideas that ideas about the responsibility to that ideas about sovereignty for example
was seen as you know sovereignty was seen as basically the exclusive right of states
to do what they want within their within their own territorial space and yet we've seen over
time that ultimately states have been in a position to endorse a radically different
view of sovereignty one associated with the response with responsibility to protect for
example so we do see changes applying to different issue areas.
Dilemmas of interpretation and application that are clearly the case with a complex discourse
like this also apply to all other security discourses even if we think of security in
terms of the preservation of the nation state in which a central role exists for militaries
to or for the state to develop military capacity to respond to external threat there are still
massive dilemmas there about you know how a state in particular sees potential future
threats to its security about what resources it should place on things like surveillance
and what limits exist to that to try to work out where future militarized threats might
come from and even what sort of military equipment do does a state commit to.
So in this case dilemmas of interpretation and application apply to other approaches
as well we can't it also seems to me rejects an imperative for change on the basis of the
existing difficulties of achieving it and we can I think see movement in this direction
in some cases we might even say something as limited as the endorsement of the precautionary
principle endorsement of notions of common but differentiated responsibility for example
at the UN level some of the ways in which civil society forces and mobilizing does seem
to create some basis for hope that we can move further in this in this direction. Essentially
my approach is one in which I've attempted to outline what I think is the most ethically
defensible linkage between climate change and security and then ask what possibilities
actually exist how can this be realized in practice or at least advanced in political
practice that's quite different I think from Barnett's approach which is about saying well
the existing political system doesn't allow for this discourse therefore we should limit
our suggestions of change to that. So in conclusion ultimately the contemporary challenge of climate
change I think requires us to rethink the way we think of security of linking the two
and I think compels us to orient towards the resilience of ecosystems. There are massive
dilemmas and challenges associated with this discourse obviously in terms of moving beyond
existing narratives of anthropocentrism that are central to the social sciences dealing
with uncertainty and complexity when it comes to the way ecosystems themselves function
prioritizing different sets of threats and responses the politics of actually getting
there advancing this approach and its applicability beyond climate change that's at least some
of the massive dilemmas I've encountered in trying to outline the contours of this discourse
I'm sure hopefully you have solutions to all of those dilemmas but if not I welcome also
suggestions of some massive dilemmas that I have overlooked. Thanks very much I look forward to
your questions.