Our failure to imagine Planetary Security threats

one of my

earliest childhood memories is a reading

in my illustrated book of fairy tales

you may remember the story of the sweet

little girl

dressed in a red hooded cloak who brings

food to her grandmother

in the forest and when little red riding

hood

arrives she doesn’t find the grandmother

in bed with a wolf

disguised as the grandmother that it had

just eaten

the story fascinated me i often looked

at all the colorful pictures in the book

but i knew exactly where to stop i could

never turn

to the next page when the wolf jumps out

of bed

as well as the little girl as well i

knew what was coming

i’d seen all the warnings in the

previous pages the girl had already

noted that the grandmother had quite a

deep voice and rather big hairy hands

and a fast mouse

but by then i reached the point that i

couldn’t face all the implications of

all those scary facts that were

presented to me and that was half a

century ago

and i am must admit that i’m still not

very good

at facing all the scary facts

that are piling up now to warn for our

future

and you may recognize this too we

shouldn’t be

ashamed of failing to perceive what

climate change

really means for us and for our children

and for our grandchildren

denial is a very well-known

first line of defense when you receive

bad news but don’t stay there too long

we have no time

to lose to avoid the worst climate

change impact

and the other priority is to adapt

to our changing planet which includes

preparing for the security aspects

of climate change and of environmental

degradation

so my talk today is about

two themes first of all about bravely

turning that page in your fairy tale

book

deal with that scary wolf that is

waiting for us about daring to imagine

and why we as individuals but also our

governments are not

really very good at that and that brings

me to the other scene

how climate change and our changing

environment will impact

security and for that you need a lot of

imagination

trying to imagine what our world will

look like at the end of this century if

we just continue to emit greenhouse

gases like we’ve been doing in the past

decades

that is like asking to picture a

nightmare

i do not believe that our planet can

sustain

say 11 billion people at the end of this

century

at a warming of about four degrees

celsius

and if this assumption is right it could

well be that we don’t live

peacefully through this chapter of human

history

in some countries we already see that

climate change-related disasters

increase the risk

of armed conflicts especially in large

countries with ethnic tensions and a low

development level

imagine a world where many areas of our

planet will become

uninhabitable because of heat stress and

then combine this

with the predictions of fresh water

shortages and increasing

demands for few for food and

the impact of extreme weather and

all of these trends will impact the

economy and migration

and injustice do you dare to think about

a world

where your child or grandchild will have

to live in the second half of this

century and then try to imagine

their despair about their children’s

future

many of us are reluctant to picture such

a world

a hot planet where each of these

problems makes

the other crisis even worse it may be

challenging but we

have to turn this page and imagine what

all of this will mean for security

it will motivate us to change this

future into a beautiful next page

one that can be green and peaceful but

to do so

we have to face one of our biggest

challenges and this is one of

imagination

so let’s start there can you think of

experiences where you felt that you just

couldn’t imagine what you just saw or

heard

i have that for instance when thinking

on a really massive scale so for

instance

if you could reduce the size of our

planet and we would make the earth as

small as a grain of sand on a beach

somewhere

then on that scale crossing our galaxy

the milky way

would still require covering a distance

of about 200 times around our planet

now you can imagine if you’d be sitting

on that flight you wouldn’t pay any

attention

to that small grain of sand on the beach

somewhere that represents our planet

and i’m mentioning this for two reasons

first of all

to show you how utterly insignificant we

are we’re just a speck of dust in this

universe

if we wipe out a million species if we

ruin the climate

on this tiny grain of sand you know the

universe just keeps calm and carries on

and it also shows how we often fail to

imagine things or events that are too

far away from our daily lives

events that are just too large or too

terrible to imagine

and unfortunately climate change falls

precisely into that category it’s a

predicted disaster but in slow motion

and it’s

tough to imagine the scale of the

destruction

of our world’s ecosystems and it’s

difficult to fail the future

consequences and you just feel

too small to stop events at such an

unimaginable scale

so a reaction that’s easy to understand

is one of denial doubting the science

becomes a safe haven to escape

reality imagining the future

gets easier if you have experienced the

sudden awareness that our planet is

changing and i collect stories

of people that tell me when and where

they were

when they experienced that our planet is

changing

for instance i remember that i was no

longer

scraping hundreds of bugs from my car’s

windshield

such a memory makes it easier to accept

the scientific research that tells us

that

the insects global decline is about two

and a half percent every year

would you have imagined only a year ago

that anybody would be doing a tedx from

their living room

boy here i am you know in my living room

and that is partly a result of

biodiversity loss

because it brings species together they

would normally not not meet and that

makes pandemics more likely to occur

but the fact that tedx talks continue

is also a testimony to our

remarkable resilience

and our our capability to adapt to

changing circumstances

now adapting after a disaster strikes is

one way of

of of dealing with the changing planet

but it would be so much better to

predict

and to prevent and to prepare and for

that you need to perceive you need to

perceive

the bigger picture of our changing

planet and you have to see how rapidly

our

world is changing now we’ve all made

mistakes in our lives and perceived risk

many years ago in my backpacking days i

once left a train that hadn’t moved for

an hour

and when i stepped out it suddenly drove

off so i was running and i tried to jump

back on board

it was very slippery and and and it was

too dangerous

i didn’t make it and then while the

train drove off in the

dark night with my passport and my coat

i

realized that my risk

assessment had not been entirely

adequate especially since this was in

siberia

and this was also late january so

not perceiving risk correctly doesn’t

only happen as individuals governments

have the same problem the 9 11

commission concluded

that the most important failure was one

of imagination

they did not believe that our leaders

understood the gravity of the threat

and it’s also concluded that the

government structures have been set up

in a different era

to confront different sorts of dangers

now

zoom out to the bigger scale and

you can see some very clear parallels

with the world’s

slower response to the emerging climate

crisis

systems of government in all their

different forms and levels

often don’t reward imagination so for

every disaster that took place there’s

always the story of the expert that had

been warning but was not

not listened to and someday the kids at

school

will learn that for this colossal

disaster what is now happening at

our planet we didn’t have just one

expert that was warning we had thousands

of climate experts

and that have been they’ve been warning

for decades

and they have just mostly been

ignored so in 2014

i started to use the phrase planetary

security to discuss

the security risks in the future of our

changing planet

and that’s not just climate change

there’s also pollution

biodiversity and resources

and a year later environmental experts

and military and security experts and

diplomats from all over the world

came together in the peace palace in the

hague for the first in a series of

annual planetary security conferences

but will we see climate wars and water

wars sometimes that is mentioned

as a kind of dark future that is bound

to happen but the weakest part in those

predictions

is often not so much the science but

it’s much more the human factor

for instance science predicts that

yields of crops

like maize and rice and wheat will be

smaller at a warming of two degrees

celsius

than at one and a half degrees

especially in sub-saharan africa and

southeast asia and

central and and south america but then

the question of the human factor in

decision-making comes up which is

so much harder to predict for instance

will young men join a local rebel group

if the harvests fail

and will they fight for their survival

or will they choose to cooperate with

other groups

and find peaceful solutions like sharing

water resources

or grow more resilient crops or will

they maybe migrate to

a city or overseas to another country

we’ve seen that the spike in food prices

were one of the many triggers of the

arab spring

prolonged droughts in the region played

a role but also failed harvest in

countries as far away as

russia or australia and they drove up

the cost of wheat

and in that sense the arab spring was a

reflection of

how internationally connected we are you

know in trade flowers but also in social

media or in migration

and this year the kovitt crisis has also

shown us how vulnerable international

supply chains are

this morning i woke up with the alarm on

my smartphone that was produced in

america

and then i ate a kiwi that came

literally from the other side of the

world

and then i brushed my teeth with the

toothbrush that was produced in china

just in the first five minutes of my day

a climate change related disaster on the

other side of the world

can cause shortages for the industry or

for the military

that rely on contractors from all over

the world for essential components

and while this year’s trade flows got

disrupted

in the co-fit times it becomes

increasingly clear

that the real champions of globalization

are nowadays environmental and health

threats so for instance the corona virus

is traveling around the world

without a visa or a passport

and the greenhouse gases emitted in one

country they ruined the climate in

another country

far away on another continent and your

plastic waste

you know it gets a free holiday to some

pacific beach where it can stay like

forever we saw

this year how fast the worldwide

pandemic has hit us

we also saw the importance of prevention

of preparedness

of listening to scientists and of

international cooperation

and we also learned the importance of

preparing for a predicted risk

and of acting fast and decisively and of

involving all stakeholders these are

useful lessons when looking at planetary

security threats

in south asia climate change may worsen

complex political situations and it may

contribute to

livelihoods insecurity in many regions

tensions can increase about trans

boundary rivers

especially if there’s no agreement where

the border is

and keep in mind that the demand for

water is increasing

and we will also have to deal with sea

level rise that will cause

massive unprecedented migration within

countries but also across border

and take a moment to imagine the

consequences of the

melting of two thirds of all the

glaciers in the himalaya by the end of

this century if we continue to emit

greenhouse gases like we’ve been doing

now

on which two billion people depend for

its water and add to that

the combination of you know changing

monsoon patterns heat waves

desertification the lack of water

increasing demand for food and all of

these things together

we may get tensions about water and food

resources

we may see conflicts we have to imagine

a future where climate change is a new

enemy not in the classic

sense you know one that you could fight

in military operations but

climate change we have to recognize

there’s no flag there’s no combatants it

has no

revolutionary manifesto but it is a

killer of people it is operating

worldwide to destabilize societies

and it’s gaining strength climate change

is hitting the most vulnerable people

first in the most vulnerable countries

and that’s even more unfair if you

realize that

it is hitting on those people and

countries that contributed

least to the problem and they’re also

the ones that are least able to adapt

so what needs to be done like turning

you know the page in our fairy tale book

where we started we should recognize

the threat of that you know the hairy

grand grandmother in in the bat with the

big hairy hands

climate change can increase tensions

between countries and it should

therefore

be seen as a security issue it should be

integrated in strategic concepts

that include responses to

new conditions created by planetary

change countries should

cooperate on developing joint strategies

to deal with shared waters with food

security

and strengthening resilience or friends

on climate refugees policies

and the coordination between countries

should also improve when natural

disasters strike there could be

more cooperation for instance on early

warning and on the exchange of data and

experience and for instance on

trans boundary rivers or transboundary

aquifers

groundwater is also a huge problem we

therefore need

to work out scenarios to maintain peace

in

a dramatically changed environment and

that requires training it requires new

equipment and new technology

it also requires the

combining the knowledge from a wide

range of experts

and many of them without even previous

security involvement

to predict planetary security conflicts

we should also make use of big data and

ai

so solving the security threats of the

future requires

a very complex approach and above all it

requires

a lot of imagination this is the kind of

security environment

we have to face if we don’t rapidly

change our cause

and the better we can imagine what the

planetary security threats really mean

the more we should be convinced to stop

climate change in its tracks

increasingly military experts from all

over the world

are becoming also are also becoming a

vocal voice

for climate action it is their specific

expertise to assess

risks even if not all the information is

available

military experts recognize an urgency

and they call on governments to prevent

further climate change and they call for

preparing for the impacts

on the human and international security

and perhaps the best reason why i want

you

and especially your government to

imagine this all

is that it should be clear that this is

not the future we want

and i can imagine that the girl in our

fairy tale little red riding hood had

similar thoughts about the future that

she didn’t want when she was in the

belly of the scary wolf

well as fairy tales go the story ended

happily you know a hunter came

and killed the wolf it cut the belly

open and the girl and the grandmother

stepped out and lifts happily ever after

but luckily for us we don’t have to wait

for some

hunter to rescue us we are still to a

very large extent

capable of shaping our future we can

significantly

reduce the loss of biodiversity and it’s

not too late to avoid the worst of

climate change we know how to do it with

readily available technology and the

better you can imagine what can go wrong

the easier it becomes to change our

goals

and my hope is that you will think about

the risks

of an ever hotter planet perceive

predict

prepare but above all prevent we can do

it

ask your leaders to face the next carry

page that’s soon coming up in our

history an urgent

to save our planet and our future

because i can imagine a beautiful future

every day

i see children playing and growing up

and i see the spectacular

beauty of our planet and every day that

just

reminds me of how much is at stake

thank you