By Abigail Robinson and Mathis Wackernagel
First published on Medium
Climate change is not the problem.
The future has never been more predictable. This is not a statement that national security experts often make, but in this case it’s warranted. No matter what Russia and China do, and regardless of how the crisis in the Middle East evolves, we know that in any imaginable scenario there will be more climate disruption and less resources available. With more conflict and therefore a possible de-prioritization of climate countermeasures, this future comes even faster.
The option of lower climate disruption will come at the cost of more rapidly phasing out fossil fuel; slower decarbonization will lead to more accelerated climate change. Climate disruption and less fossil fuel input will both reduce reliable agricultural and forestry outputs and burden economies, particularly the ones with a high demand for resources.
Climate change is only a symptom of the underlying problem of overuse of the planet’s biological resources (cropland, pastures, fishing grounds, forests, and similar resources which underpin everything from food systems to industry to sequestration of excess greenhouse gases). Other symptoms of overuse include groundwater depletion, soil erosion, fisheries collapse and deforestation. Global biocapacity is largely finite and we are placing competing and increasing demands on biological resources — from producing food, fiber, and timber to accommodating houses and roads to absorbing excess CO2 from burning fossil fuels. These resources can be regenerated, but not as quickly as we are using them.
Today, humans are putting a demand on nature that exceeds by more than 75% what ecosystems can regenerate. How do we know? Because each person, company, city, and country has a demand on nature that can be measured, for instance in biologically productive surfaces of the Earth required to provide for those demands. This resource supply versus demand balance can be performed with ecological footprint accounts which track both the demand on and availability of such surfaces. Essentially, they tell us how much nature we have and how much we use.
Regeneration is the new currency.
The regenerative capacity of the planet, i.e., the living resources including the biomass, can be overused for some time. This overuse is called “ecological overshoot”. Such overshoot will end, like a water reservoir that cannot be emptied forever. The only question is how. It can end by proactive design, or by disaster, imposed by nature’s limitations. Regeneration of ecosystems is ultimately the overarching material factor that limits everything from resource inputs to waste emissions.
Regeneration simultaneously limits:
- fossil fuel use (since the capacity of the biosphereto absorb excess CO2 emissions is more limiting than the remaining stocks underground);
- mineral and ores exploitation (as they are plentiful underground, but bringing the ores and minerals out of the ground damages the biosphere and requires regeneration to compensate for the resources and energy to process and concentrate them); and
- the production of food, fiber, and timber.
Concepts like “ecological overshoot” or “ecological footprint” may not sound like they have much to do with traditional security concerns. But these metrics make visible the physical dependency of economies, highlight countries’ resource insecurities and conflict potential, and make clear that we are entering a world with not only unevenly distributed resources, but where the totality of demand no longer fits within the constraints of the biosphere. Therefore, insights that such resource accounting can provide are relevant for evaluating not only traditional security risks, like the increased likelihood of resource-focused conflicts at the center of much current climate security thinking, but also major economic risks, which are influential in determining security outcomes.
These risks are latent. Consider this: 72% of the world’s population live in countries faced with a precarious situation. These countries both (1) run a biological resource deficit (where demand for biological resources exceeds regeneration) and (2) generate less than world-average income, limiting their ability to purchase resources from elsewhere.
No one would bring their money to a bank that does no bookkeeping or fly in a plane that has no fuel gauge. Yet despite the unavoidable dependence of our economies on the physical material ecosystems produce, most countries do not consistently track how much nature they have and how much they are using. No country yet carefully manages its biocapacity budget. The good news for planners is that it is quite straightforward to identify the main factors that drive overuse of biological resources and deepening ecological debt. These include:
- how we manage our lives in our habitats (for example, through their design cities shape energy, material, and transport demands);
- how we produce, process, and distribute food;
- how we produce energy; and
- how many we are (population size, multiplied by per person consumption, shapes overall demand for biocapacity).
What current approaches to (climate) security are missing
While climate security is broader than national defense or military security, many militaries and governments have now signed up to the idea that climate change is a “threat multiplier” — an accurate characterization, but one that is often accompanied by a mainly reactive stance. Being better prepared to protect infrastructure or respond to future disasters and climate-induced conflicts is necessary and important, but not a game changer.
From a strategic perspective, we’re in an interesting place right now. What some have described as the greatest threat to security of our time is well beyond the capacity of national security establishments to address. An increasing number of armed forces (including the U.S. military) are taking steps to build resilience to climate risks at home as well as abroad, through security cooperation partnerships. Concerns regarding the militarization of climate change notwithstanding, this preparation is constructive for all involved. Globally, we need large, well-resourced, influential organizations to mainstream climate risks and environmental protection in their planning and operations.
But there’s a key problem with where we are today. Many national security institutions, normally highly sophisticated in their approaches to planning, seem not to be taking into consideration some of the basic parameters which will increasingly influence the strategic security context in the years to come. Despite the threat posed by growing biological resource scarcity, we have yet to see a national security strategy that recognizes how these constraints are becoming driving factors for societies, let alone one that indicates a coherent plan for tackling the overuse of regenerative resources, i.e., the ones nature regularly replenishes like food, fiber, water, and timber. (Here we are using national security strategies as a proxy of sorts, as they are a commonly accepted way of identifying and suggesting ways to address critical security risks.)
At most there is an increasing focus on securing access to critical minerals to support the green energy transition, but a broader look at national, regional, and global ecological deficits is absent. In other words, there is a mismatch between the seemingly serious characterization of the threat of climate change and the “ways and means” (in security strategy parlance) envisioned to address the threat, especially its root causes. This is not a gap that would be tolerated when planning responses to more traditional threats.
Most planners agree that the best security strategies are resource informed. Planning for the capabilities required to respond to future threats without considering what the future budget will bear is an exercise likely to lead to poor decisions and, to put it mildly, disappointing results. But while biocapacity is now the most limiting factor for human enterprise, security strategies appear to be either (1) still built on the deeply ingrained assumption that biological resources are unlimited or (2) aware of constraints but choosing to ignore them in favor of addressing what seem to be more pressing threats.
Re-thinking security in an era of ecological deficits
The element of time is a challenge in this context, as it’s often difficult to do anything except prioritize the resources needed to address urgent, near-term traditional security threats — even if we know the more distant (although not all that distant) future is becoming ever more threatening precisely because of the resources we are using. However, national security establishments are paid to look out over the horizon and identify key trends that will shape the future environment. They will therefore appreciate more than most that, given the lag time between adapting physical infrastructure and experiencing any positive impact on climate change or other symptoms of growing resource constraints, we are already running behind.
The map below shows ecological deficits and vulnerabilities by country. While the pattern for many years has been for high-income nations to fill their resource gaps by purchasing from and producing in other countries, this approach is ultimately a “losing last” strategy that assumes that losing later buys sufficient time to win. Such an approach is akin to a global Ponzi scheme but in contrast to financial Ponzi schemes, this one is encouraged or at least tolerated.
Figure 1: Ecological footprint to biocapacity, by country, source: 2023 edition of the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts
There are many planners who justifiably question whether national security strategies and similar policy documents play a useful role in shaping government approaches and spending. The true value of such documents aside, effective strategy development processes force conversations about what matters and encourage the expression of policy priorities. Right now, these expressions fail to engage with a fundamental principle of life on Earth: everything comes from somewhere, and we are running out of the fuel which drives our economic engines and supports life itself.
This is not climate alarmism. It is an invitation to question what current approaches to strategic security planning are missing. In a world in which complexity sells, it can be easy to overlook the simple: governments which fail to address their own biological resource security are increasingly vulnerable to surprises. Conversely, understanding the need to reduce overuse and invest in regeneration is not only a valuable contribution to future resilience but also a means of gaining competitive advantage in a future that will be fundamentally shaped by biological resource constraints.
The Authors
Abigail Robinson is a former U.S. Defense Department official with extensive experience advising governments on planning and resource management. She is currently working as an independent expert in climate and environmental security and public sector reform. Most recently she worked with the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance, leading research on security sector responses to climate change.
Dr. Mathis Wackernagel co-developed the original footprint concept to track human impact on the planet. The carbon portion is now the most popular one (“carbon footprints”). He co-founded the Global Footprint Network, a sustainability think-tank, known for its annual Earth Overshoot Day. His honors include the 2018 World Sustainability Award, the 2015 IAIA Global Environment Award, and the 2012 Blue Planet Prize.