In addition to creating an existential threat to the planet and its people, rapidly accelerating climate change is a security challenge. The US military now views the massive disruptions that will result from climate change as a major likely precipitant of increased violent conflict around the world. However, under the Bush administration only one federal dollar was devoted to climate change in contrast to $88 dollars spent on the US’s military forces.
Public interest would be served by closing the enormous gap between federal expenditures on military as opposed to climate security and the report "Military vs. Climate Security: Mapping the Shift from the Bush Years to the Obama Era" released recently by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington evaluates the progress made by the Obama administration in narrowing this gap.
Despite its conviction that climate change represents a serious threat to national and global security, the administration of President Barack Obama still proposes spending one dollar on addressing the challenge for every nine dollars it intends to spend on running the US’s war machine. While this ratio represents a huge improvement on the 1:88 dollar ratio allocated by the Bush administration, it may be difficult to sustain, according to the report, because most of the increase in climate-related spending is included in the new administration's stimulus package, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
The report highlights that $68 billion of the estimated total of almost $79 billion that will be spent by the Obama administration on climate-related initiatives is included in the 2009 Reinvestment Act, “a one-time appropriation to help the US economy recover from the global financial crisis that broke out last September”. The "base" budget for addressing climate change, it said, amounts to just $10.6 billion; a tiny fraction of the Pentagon's proposed base budget of $534 billion for 2010. Moreover, the Pentagon figure does not include the costs of ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are expected to exceed $150 billion.
Work still to be done
"Obama has called climate change 'the defining challenge of our time,' and he has begun to invest the resources to match the rhetoric," said Miriam Pemberton, the report's author. "But sustained investment in this security challenge will be hard, given the budgetary hole we are in," she added. "Paring back spending on weapons systems we don't need will be one important way to get the money, and it will bring our security spending portfolio more in line with the relative magnitude of the threats we face."
The 65-page report, the latest in a series on national security budgets produced by IPS's "Foreign Policy in Focus" project and Pemberton over the last several years, argues that the Obama administration should move aggressively to incorporate the kind of climate-related spending included in the Reinvestment Act into future base budgets in order to ensure that the security challenges posed by climate change can be adequately addressed.
Climate security in the spotlight
Those challenges have gained increased attention here. Two years ago, a group of retired generals and admirals issued a report, "National Security and the Threat of Climate Change", which found, among other things, that the consequences of warming were likely to promote inter-state conflicts over vital resources, such as fresh water; political turmoil and extremism within nations; food shortages and mass migrations. "Climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in the most volatile regions of the world," said Pemberton.
The following autumn, two key think tanks, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Centre for a New American Security (CNAS), released a 119-page study, entitled "The Age of Consequences", on the subject, predicating that rising temperatures and sea levels caused by climate change are likely to set off mass migrations involving "perhaps billions of people" over the next century if some of the more severe predictions by scientists about changes in Earth's climate were to materialise.
Six months later, a special report by the National Intelligence Council echoed those dire conclusions, emphasising that climate change could "seriously affect US national security interests" and "threaten domestic stability in some states, potentially contribute to intra- or, less likely, interstate conflict, particularly over access to increasingly scarce water resources."
The IPS report praises Obama for understanding the need to address climate security and for closing the budget gap between military and climate security. “The Obama administration has made substancial investments in the main tools of climate security: clean energy, energy efficiency, and clean transportation,” says Pemberton, although it still has a lot of work to do. “The great majority of these investments have come in the one-time economic recovery package. If these are truly to lay the groundwork for climate security, such investments will in future need to be built into the regular budget”, otherwise the gap between military and climate-related spending will widen again.
Added benefits
The report also argues that investing in climate security has the added benefit of creating more jobs than in the military sector. While military forces are wholly sustained by public money, climate change prevention measures are used more to stimulate private sector spending. Moreover, greater investment in green technologies at the expense of military spending would not necessarily result in major job losses in the defence sector, as the kinds of high-technology skills use in military programmes are easily transferable to the green sector.
On accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore called on the nations of the world to mobilise to avert climate disaster "with a sense of urgency and shared resolve that has previously been seen only when nations have mobilised for war." It is clearly time for Obama to follow Gore’s advice and build climate-related spending into the national budget.
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