Govt urged to consider climate change as national security issue

ABC Online
Reporter: Eleanor Hall
June 15, 2006

ELEANOR HALL: A former government scientist has issued an urgent call to the Federal Government to begin considering global warming as a national security issue.

The former chief of Atmospheric Research at the CSIRO, Dr Graeme Pearman, says that far from being exaggerated, the future impact of climate change has in fact been underestimated.

And in a collaborative research paper for the Lowy Institute, Dr Pearman warns that in neglecting the security impact of global warming, the Federal Government is failing to prepare for potential catastrophes in Australia and the region.

GRAEME PEARMAN: It simply means that the kinds of things we've been anticipating, that is a greater aridity of the country, more intense storms, influence on sea level and coastal erosion and inundation of salt water - these things would happen just much more quickly than we had anticipated in the past.

ELEANOR HALL: Why do you say this is an issue of national security?

GRAEME PEARMAN: It's an issue of national security because these days, national security is regarded not just simply as military threat but, you know, things like whether we actually have enough water, enough energy, whether we're protected, in a sense, from health issues, pandemics and so on.

These are all national security issues in the modern way of looking at it. And climate change has the potential to influence all of these things. Climate change, for example, warming of the nation exposes us to diseases that in fact otherwise were often restricted to our northern neighbours and they can move further into the country.

ELEANOR HALL: What sort of diseases are you talking about?

GRAEME PEARMAN: I'm talking about here, I mean, just simple things that people would understand is the distribution of fruit fly down the eastern coast of Australia, is very likely to move further south.

But things like Ross River Virus, the prevalence of those sorts of diseases are also likely to change. But there is another aspect to this, and those are the sorts of internal security risks.

But the other risks that we press quite strongly in the document are those that... because we understand Australia is in fact relatively wealthy, relatively well able to adapt to many of these changes, that doesn't necessarily apply to all of our neighbours and if not, does that lead to instabilities in those countries?

You know, a classic example we see when there are major issues of earthquakes or tsunamis and those sorts of things that the Australian military and Australia is expected and does, rightfully, go in and spend quite a lot of effort in assisting those neighbours. The question is whether these sorts of events will demand more of our security forces into the future?

ELEANOR HALL: Well, you say that Australia is already responding to some of these events in the region. I mean, how should the Government be responding better? You say they're not factoring in the wild cards. Well, how do they do that?

GRAEME PEARMAN: What we've argued in the document is that the issue of security, national security in the climate change debate has been neglected, by and large.

We would suggest that the Office of National Assessment needs to include this and have staff that are actually dedicated to looking at these security issues associated with climate change, which they've not had in the past.

ELEANOR HALL: All right, let's look at a worst-case scenario. What are the specific security threats that Australia would face if one of the worst of these wild cards were to come about?

GRAEME PEARMAN: I think the main one would be we would find that there would be a lot of displaced people, both on the Pacific Islands and in the South East Asian region, that would have to move.

We would see much more frequent events such as major tropical storms influencing millions of people within this region, and our responsibility for the region would grow.

ELEANOR HALL: And you say there could be some sort of sudden turning points - how soon could we see one of these?

GRAEME PEARMAN: It's just impossible to really say. I mean, in the case of the deglaciation or the loss of permafrost, that could happen quite suddenly, and I would say that, to my way of thinking, is the most scariest potential wild cards, because the estimates are that there is about as much carbon dioxide and methane underneath that ice as there is currently in the atmosphere.

So if we were to release significant amounts of that over the first part of this century, then that would mean that we would move about twice as fast through the climate change that we've been projected.

Once we've started to release those gases, it's not like slowing down our combustion technologies - we can't do anything about it.

So I think that that's an extreme event and for Australia, the manifestation will be simply that the things that we have been concerned about - that is loss of rainfall for much of the country, lower soil moisture availability, lower water resources, higher sea level and coastal inundation, more intense storms - will simply happen a lot faster and earlier than we thought.

ELEANOR HALL: And that's Dr Graeme Pearman, the former Chief of Atmospheric Research at the CSIRO and the author of a new paper for the Lowy Institute on the national security threat posed by global warming.