I recently gave my "National Security and Counterterrorism" Masters students a syndicate exercise at the end of their course requiring them to prioritise the most serious threats to Australia's national security (with national security being defined as safeguarding the "wellbeing" rather than "survival" of Australia – "survival" being more relevant to the Cold War era).
They were given 13 threats or potential threats to consider: adverse global trends and challenges to the international system; terrorism and piracy; instability and failed or failing states; poverty, inequality, and poor governance; serious and organised crime; WMD proliferation; climate change; civil emergencies, including natural disasters and pandemics; state-led threats (such as rising powers and balance of power issues); competition for energy and resources; social cohesion; sovereignty issues (including illegal fishing and illegal entry to Australian waters and airspace) and; cyber threats.
They then had to rank them by scale of impact, geographic proximity and urgency in time, and come up with a 1-13 list in order of priority.
For the complete article, please see the Canberra Times.
“I want you to panic”. This was the message that 16 year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg gave to the World Economic Forum in Davos on 25 January, and in it she struck right to the intergenerational justice issue at the heart of the sustainability project.
The Hague Declaration on Planetary Security signed in 2017 outlines six action areas that require special attention, necessitating “concrete steps” at both global and local levels.
At COP24, India-based Sheela Patel from SPARC talked to Lou del Bello about how climate change affects people in informal settlements the most – and about strategies to address their special needs.
Climate change has been identified and recognized as a security issue and a threat multiplier by the international community, and climate security is now an integral part of security agendas in key international fora from New York to The Hague and Munich. As 2019 kicks off, action and implementation on climate security take centre stage.