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