A Joint Letter

As ex-Service members and experienced security and emergency services practitioners whose life’s work has been dedicated to protecting Australians, we have witnessed up-close the devastating impacts of war and worsening emergencies. In our considered view, while great power contestation and a range of governance related challenges demand attention, climate change now represents the greatest threat to the future security of the Australian people.

The Australian Government has initiated an urgent climate–security risk assessment in line with its pre-election climate policy commitment. This is a necessary, positive and long-overdue step.

It presents a unique opportunity to understand the full range of climate change threats that Australia, and our near region, will face. These have the capacity to overwhelm our capacity to respond and to ravage our way of life and our livelihoods. Getting this risk assessment right is crucial to getting Australia’s response to climate change right. In particular, we emphasise the following key requirements:

1. Holistic Approach. The risk assessment must be holistic and address the broad risks to human, national and regional security; avoiding siloed, departmental-specific analysis or producing a narrowly-defined defence-oriented national-security analysis.
2. Local Focus, Global Context. It should address climate threats domestic to Australia as well as those in our region, placed within a global context.
3. Broad Expertise and Input. It should be guided by a well-resourced, independent expert panel, drawing upon the best expertise from relevant fields within and external to government, not just within government.
4. Don’t ‘Sugar Coat’. The risk analysis must account for system complexity and deep uncertainty and adopt an existential risk-management framework where attention is given to the question: what are the feasible, worse-case scenarios that might occur and what actions are required to prevent, prepare and protect against the worst outcomes?
5. Leverage Existing Work. To avoid duplication and thus reduce the analytical workload, the assessment should draw on valuable international work. For example the 2021 UK Government’s risk assessment prepared by Chatham House and its high-quality scenario as a foundation on which to build a regional and Australian assessment. – Regular coordinated climate science and impact assessments,  similar to the practice in the US, overseen by the Climate Change Authority; The development of full-spectrum climate security intelligence capacity.
6. Must be transparent. Most importantly, the process should not be secret — but instead fully engage the public, relevant experts, and stakeholders in both the assessment itself, and in the outcomes, so as to build community understanding and support for the difficult decisions which lay ahead.

We stand willing to share our expertise, experiences and insights with the assessment team.