Climate Change COP27

Ecological disruption and cooperation

From Dan Smith’ Blog

Researchers, commentators and policy-makers are increasingly aware of the negative effects of climate change for peace and security. Climate change undermines conditions for peace and security for all, while increased conflict, disputation, instability and disorder add to the difficulties of arriving at agreements to slow down global warming. When we think about peace and security and about world order, climate change – and, by extension, the full spectrum of ecological disruption – should be in the centre of our attention.

So far, this series of posts on world order – based on the introductory chapter to the SIPRI Yearbook 2024 – has discussed themes, problems and proposals that were broadly familiar to writers, thinkers and actors in international politics in the 20th century. I’ve reflected a bit on laws and norms, the nature of world order including its origins, violent conflicts and their causes, and the case for and prospects of UN reform. Important but, in broad, familiar stuff.

Climate change and ecological disruption are different. They create genuinely unprecedented challenges for world order and for peace and security. The world has changed and is changing more. World order must change too. Indeed, when we think about climate change and the full spectrum of ecological disruption, problems of world order should be in the centre of our attention.

Climate change

Surveying climate change brings no greater relief than surveying the rest of the international scene. 2023 was the hottest year for at least 174 years for which there are good records, and probably for the 125 000 years since the interglacial period of geological history. Each week brings something new:

The Paris Agreement of 2015 set the goal of limiting global warming to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” while trying to stay below a 1.5°C increase (Article 2.1). Because climate and, therefore, climate change are long-term matters (unlike weather, which can change hourly), a year and a half of temperatures more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial average does not yet mean that that limit has been breached. Temperatures need to be consistently above the mark before we can firmly say the change has happened. There is a discussion about whether to acknowledge it only after two decades of consistently being above the 1.5° limit, or earlier, after just ten years.

The trend line, however, looks perfectly clear and the question about surpassing the 1.5° limit is not if it happens but when it is officially recognised.

And that seems likely to be but a step along the way towards breaching the 2° limit, which was agreed in Paris 2015 to be the essential upper limit. In fact, the current trajectory is towards approximately 3°C above the pre-industrial average before the end of this century. Among the consequences, long before 2100, will be an increase in the frequency of deadly humid heatwaves, and the passing of important global tipping points. These could include the big ice sheets collapsing in Greenland and the West Antarctic, permafrost thawing, the death of coral reefs, and the collapse of the North Atlantic subpolar gyre (a combination of northern currents – not the Gulf Stream). Sharp reductions in greenhouse gas emissions are needed within a few years if there is to be any prospect of getting at all close to the agreed targets, yet the main fossil fuel producers are planning to increase output.

Other ecological disruption

As serious as these consequences of climate change are, the ecological crisis goes beyond the climate issue alone. The 2023 update on the nine planetary boundaries identified in research led over the past decade and a half by the Stockholm Resilience Centre, reported that six of the nine boundaries had been breached. Levels of pollution of the air, soil, sea and freshwater along with loss of biodiversity and biomass are all trending in the wrong directions, just like global warming.

Further to research on the peace and security impact of climate change, we have also begun to identify comparable effects from other aspects ecological disruption. Antimicrobial resistance, the physiological effects of different kinds of pollution, loss of biodiversity and biomass and other ways in which nature contributes to human well-being, the rise of intrusive species and the impact on livelihoods of local tipping points such as the emergence of dead zones in rivers, lakes and coastal waters – all these are unfolding now and all have worrying potential impacts on peace security.

As well as the report on this that I co-wrote with Rod Schoonover, I have covered these issues several times in various blog posts. They are problems that are only slowly being acknowledged as problems for human security, peace and stability. They need more research to get a fuller understanding of them but they also need urgent action.

Environmental impact of war and military preparations

Much research on the links between ecological disruption – climate change included – and the issues of peace and security has traced a causality line in which what happens in the environment interacts with other factors to generate or worsen conflict risk. Decades ago, however, the causal emphasis that attracted research and worry went the other way round – the impact of war and military preparations on the natural environment. Prime examples were the American use of Agent Orange to chemically defoliate swathes of forest in Vietnam1 and radioactive fallout from atmospheric (i.e., above ground) nuclear testing.2 Among the legacies of atmospheric tests is the stash of 111,000 cubic yards (almost 85,000 cubic metres) of radioactive debris under a concrete dome on Runit Island in the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.

A US assessment in 2020 found no immediate likelihood of the dome collapsing or being damaged, though Marshall Islanders aren’t so confident and it is reported to be leaking. One worry is that the low-lying structure could be damaged by the kind of extreme weather and surges in sea-level that ensue from climate change, with catastrophic effects.

There are many ways in which the natural environment is a casualty of armed conflict and of military preparations. Weapons and other military equipment generate a war-legacy of environmental damage.Landmines, cluster munitions and other explosive remnants of war restrict access to agricultural land and continue to pollute soil and groundwater even after they have been cleared. Naval wreckage, meanwhile, causes marine pollution. Beyond direct military destruction, there is the problem of military scrap – equipment of all kinds and sizes that is just abandoned. In addition, some weapons have particularly toxic components, such as depleted uranium, used in some shells and armour plating, with effects that persist long after their use in combat in countries such as Iraq and Kosovo.

The environment is also a casualty because, when the fighting starts, and often before in periods of instability and upheaval, environmental governance gets shot to hell. Implementation of the key agreements on limiting damage to the environment depends on the ability of states to ensure it is effective. Insecurity, instability and open armed conflict disrupt a state’s capacity to respond to environmental challenges and lead to environmental regulations being flouted, often because environmental destruction is used as a weapon, sometimes because there is nobody left who is able to care.

There’s a worrying example of this in the Bab-el-Mandab Strait in the Red Sea, off the coast of Yemen. A supertanker constructed in 1976 was converted in 1988 to be a floating storage and offloading facility (FSO). Containing 1.14 million barrels of crude oil (about 150,000 metric tons), the FSO Safer is moored just under 5 nautical miles outside the port of Hodeidah. Maintenance of the Safer stopped when the war in Yemen escalated with the Saudi-led intervention in 2015. The structural integrity of the vessel started to deteriorate.

Had it started to leak, it would have been the 5th largest ever oil spill. Likely effects were devastating: oil pollution would have ruined fisheries, disrupted ports through which humanitarian aid was delivered, and likely damaged desalination plants, leading to millions of people losing their freshwater. Fortunately, some of the world’s news media was watching, a UN plan was devised, and in August 2023 almost all the oil was successfully offloaded onto the MT Yemen. The UN plan was then to sell off the oil and tow the Safer to safety.

Before you breathe a sigh of relief, however, there’s a twist. The Houthi insurgents in Yemen, against whom Saudi Arabia launched its intervention in 2015, and the internationally recognised government of the country could not agree who should get the money from the potential sale of the crude oil. So neither the FSO Safer nor the MT Yemen moved. And in January 2024 the Houthis started firing missiles at shipping in the region to show their support for Hamas in Gaza; as a result, efforts to move the ships were put on hold. And that is where things now stand.

Opportunities for cooperation

So there is a continued flow of bad news about the ecological crisis. It does, however, offer a sphere of activity in which international cooperation remains possible even if the record is mixed.

The November 2023 climate summit in Dubai (formally, the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) broke new ground for these annual meetings by recognizing the need to ‘transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems’. Those who praised COP28 for that step criticized it for not insisting on the speedy phase-out, or even phase-down, of fossil fuel extraction. Similarly, the conference could be praised for breaking more new ground by recognizing the linkage between climate change and conflict risk for the first time. And it could criticized for not including any binding commitment to take action about the risk.

The previous year, at COP 27 in Sharm el-Shaikh, there was an historic agreement to establish a loss and damage fund to compensate countries for the harm done by global warming and climate change. In June of this year it was announced that the World Bank will be the interim host and trustee for the fund. That all sounds impressive but, of course, the question is, How much? Or perhaps that’s two questions:

  1. How much is needed? In the 20-year period 2000–19, the estimated total economic impact of extreme weather attributed to climate change is US$ 2.86 trillion. That’s two decades of loss and damage with more to come. It’s an average of $143 billion per year. It’s a relatively low estimate of costs compared to the UN Development Programme’s estimate of annual costs of compensation at between US$215 billion and 387 billion and the results of some research that suggest the minimum need is US$400 billion a year.
  2. How much is available? The fund isn’t fully functioning yet but there’s been time since November 2022 for governments to work out what they can contribute. By mid-2024, the fund had generated contributions amounting to US$661 million. That total is less than three tenths of a percent of the low end of the UN’s estimate of the annual costs of compensation.

For a lot of climate activists, the important contrast here is between what is needed and what’s on offer. But there is another contrast – between recognition of the need in principle and the difficulty of acting on it.

The climate crisis is a sphere in which the need for cooperative action is broadly recognized, however hard it remains to act on that recognition. That is some kind of indication of a possible site of progress, not hugely promising but better, surely, than areas where there seems to be no such recognition to start with.

China is the biggest current emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG), while the USA has the biggest cumulative record of GHG emissions. It is a precondition of successful climate negotiations that they are involved and can work together. Their return to climate cooperation was signalled first in July 2023, albeit with political contention still in view. In November 2023, the special climate envoys of the two countries agreed to activate the Working Group on Enhancing Climate Action in the 2020s (the establishment of which was first agreed two years before) and to undertake and accelerate various aspects of climate action. Nothing is settled through this development, but not much that is positive can be done without it.

There are similar possibilities in addressing other ecological challenges. In March 2022, at the resumed fifth session of the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA), it was agreed to develop a legally binding international instrument on plastic pollution by the end of 2024. Whether progress is quick enough for that timetable is one test for international cooperation on the environment in 2024. While the UNEA resolution includes the headline call to end plastic pollution, the text calls in non-specific terms for an agreement ‘on’ plastic pollution; it is the negotiating committee established by the resolution that will specify the agreement’s objectives. Thus, the second part of the test for environmental cooperation is where on a spectrum from ending plastic pollution to merely slowing its increase the eventual treaty will land.

A habit of cooperation

The ecological crisis is the superordinate challenge humankind faces. It will be an extraordinary and unprecedented calamity if it proves impossible to generate action that is adequate to meeting that challenge. And that means, however we go about it, a world order fit for purpose in the Anthropocene epoch.3

There is always the possibility and therefore the hope that cooperation on one set of issues may lead to cooperation on another, through developing the habit of cooperation. This appeared to be part of the approach of John Kerry, the US climate envoy, although China’s position is more reserved on this score, arguing that resolving political disputes is a condition for further cooperation.

It would almost certainly be unrealistic to expect that cooperation on climate change would lead to a change of heart and positions on issues such as Taiwan and freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. It might, however, be possible to develop the habit of cooperation on other questions in which there is a shared not to mention global interest – preparation against the next pandemic, trade, crime, secure use of cyber space, to name a few.

The ecological crisis is a huge challenge. Perhaps, for world order, it is also an opportunity.

Notes

  1. On Agent Orange in Vietnam, the seminal work is a study by Arthur Westing for SIPRI: Ecological Consequences of the Second Indochina War (Almqvist & Wiksell International: Stockholm, 1976).
  2. There were 504 atmospheric (above ground) test explosions from 1945 (the first test, by the USA) until 1980 (the last in the atmosphere, by China). The results include a lasting impact on health, with an increase in the incidence and risk of many kinds of cancer as a result. Leaks from underground tests have also occurred, however, including two known incidents in 1969 and 1987 at the Soviet Novaya Zemlya sites in the Arctic Ocean and a US test in Nevada in 1970.
  3. In March 2024, a committee of geologists rejected the term Anthropocene as a unit of geological time. That does not change the reality that the term captures better than any other, that the greatest impact on the natural environment today and into the future is human. Because of that, the term is almost certainly going to remain in widespread use.

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