Das Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), ist eine altehrwürdige britische Institution. Schon 1831wurde sie auf Initiative des Duke of Wellington gegründet, zum Studium der Kriegskunst. Heute versteht sie sich als „leading forum in the UK for national and international Defence and Security“.
Nick Mabey, ehemaliger britischer Diplomat und nun Vorsitzender der kleinen aber feinen Umweltorganisation E3G, hat nun für RUSI ein neues Papier geschrieben: „Delivering Climate Security: International Security Responses to a Climate Changed World“. Sie finden eine Zusammenfassung hier, das ganze Papier kann man hier bestellen.
Das Papier ist Teil einer rasch anwachsenden Literatur aus aussen- und sicherheitspolitischen Kreisen zum Klimawandel. Auch auf diesem Blog habe ich schon verschiedentlich diese Entwicklung kommentiert (hier und hier und hier).
Aber dieses Papier bringt manches besser und entschiedener auf den Punkt. Einige Kernsätze als „Appetitanreger“:
Climate change is already creating hard security threats, but it has no hard security solutions.
Preventing catastrophic and runaway climate change will require a global mobilisation of effort and co-operation seldom seen in peacetime.
If uncontrolled, climate change will have security implications of similar magnitude to the World Wars, but which will last for centuries. The past will provide no guide to this coming future;
There is a need for more direct and interventionist action to prevent climate risks. One reason for this is that economic analysis has systematically undervalued the potential extreme impacts of climate change, underplaying the implication of the most severe risks to policy makers.
Unless achieving climate security is seen as a vital and existential national interest, it will be too easy to delay action on the basis of avoiding immediate costs and perceived threats to economic competitiveness.
The security sector has the vital – and expensively acquired – experience of how government can drive technological development and infrastructure deployment at a similar scale to that needed to respond to climate change. Security actors should promote dramatically increased investment in the development and deployment of technologies critical for energy and climate security. This will be expensive, but is achievable. Recent estimates suggest this would require investment commensurate with current spending on the War on Terror, and if a crash response is needed in response to extreme climate change, investment at levels similar to the Apollo programme.
To date climate adaptation has mainly been framed as a technical development activity, but in reality it will involve complex political and diplomatic interventions in difficult and highly charged internal resource management issues. The political economy of resource management must lie at the heart of all adaptation measures as they deal with the resources of subsistence and identity: land, water and security. More controversially, access to international adaptation finance may need to be made conditional on countries implementing reforms to internal resource management policies to improve social resilience and prevent conflict and marginalisation of vulnerable groups.
Spannende Pflichtlektüre für Kanzlerin Merkel. Wieviele Kohlekraftwerke will sie danach noch bauen lassen? Wird RWE ein Sicherheitsrisiko?