2023 for climate security
The importance of policy progress, ground truth and aquatic notes from California
Happy new(ish) year! I was thinking about how to kick off this newsletter in 2023 after saying I wasn’t going to do forecasts in the last post. So rather I’ll just lay out some things that I’m keeping top of mind this year.
El Niño: we are still in the throes of La Niña, but the US NOAA currently forecasts us beginning to enter El Niño by northern hemisphere late summer. The most obvious impact is global average temperature due to changes in sea surface temperatures’ impacts on weather patterns. As El Niño tends to transfer more oceanic heat along the equator into the atmosphere, there are concerns that we’ll break the Paris 1.5C threshold this year. Expect a drier than usual Australia with higher risk of wildfires, as well as in the Amazon and India. A much colder winter in Europe than at present presents energy security risks to the EU and UK from Russia should the Ukraine war persist into 2024 without resolution or at least a sustained ceasefire. While the phenomenon is nothing new - El Niño/La Niña shifts every 3-5 years - climate change means the swings in temperature and weather impacts are greater, with more devastating harm to life safety, food security, environmentally-vulnerable communities, disruptions to supply chains and non-hardened infrastructure. Incident and crisis management teams will stay busy this year, and security teams should consider beefing up their meteorological knowledge. Still skeptical why?
Water - see my December post and the “Time capsule” section below. Remember we can’t really live more than a week without water!
Policy: highlights last year included a G7 declaration in May 2022 highlighting the linkage between climate and security, further dialogue within the UN on better alignment between policy, research and on-the-ground activities such as peacekeeping and humanitarian aid, and an annual policy x research conference in Berlin. What will be an important next step this year, I suspect, would be for the policy world to start moving forward with frameworks which link up 1) security and resilience 2) climate risk and 3) public and private funding vehicles - including those like Just Energy Transition Investment Plan and “debt for nature” swaps under the G20 Common Framework with World Wildlife Fund engagement. Would love to see this topic taken up further by the G(insert number), NATO, and the UNFCC (the COP people). One of the most potentially promising ways to get folks to “invest in security” is to insert criteria that investments achieve a security and peace “co-benefit” for a project or investment' platform’s area of impact. This won’t happen though, if policymakers don’t lead. I’ll delve more into this in a later post.
Adaptation innovation: it’s a such a big space because “climate tech” itself is such a heterogenous community. This is another area I’m excited to hear, learn and apply more about, for instance in crisis management and emergency preparedness. Growing up in California, wildfires were an annual reality. Fire seasons - which used to be the summer and early autumn, are now a reality 7-8 months of the year in some parts of the state. That strains people and resources, so any solutions which leads to smarter community planning and preparation, faster and smarter response, and shorter/less painful recovery, will improve the resilience of residents, critical workers, communities and the natural environment. Sensor and drone technology, satellite imagery x ML-enabled software, and new insurance-tech solutions can all play a part.
Ground truth: this is part of the bread and butter of many practitioners - our insights come from our experience working and operating on the ground, building up expertise that is impossible to get from a Bloomberg feed or the Economist alone. The recent furore in the climate tech space over the quality and integrity of certified carbon credits, and pushback from validation and voluntary markets platforms highlight the major growing pains to monetise and scale nature-based solutions that are meant to keep carbon out of the atmosphere.
OK, so a reframing of what ground truth means may be in order.
Identifying and mitigating community local disputes. Many projects cite biodiversity, empowering locals / indigenous peoples, gender equity and other community benefits as “co-benefits” or dividends, which in turn lead to the carbon credits or offsets generated as higher quality with a higher price. But is that generally the case? A popular form of generating carbon credits, REDD+, has a mixed track record when it comes to achieving the carbon capture side of things while sustaining promised benefits and continued alignment with local community wishes. These concerns have already been expressed among communities in places like Brazil and Peru. The value and perception of these nature-based solutions are inherently linked to the history and politics of the land and peoples it relies on, with all the baggage that comes with it - legacies of deforestation, power inequalities, discrimination, forced movement of peoples. It’s not hard to see when things go wrong - be it poor project design, lack of consultation, or bad luck - that protests and blockades may follow. Security folks whose roles are to know the lay of the land may benefit in being assessors of whether “a project is doing what it says on the tin,” and escalate breaches.
Bad stuff: When there are new products out on the market, issues around integrity and fraud often arise soon after - things don’t work out they way they’re meant to be designed, and bad actors exploit vulnerabilities in new frameworks and value chains.
Threat monitoring - Many of the new tools out there leverage remote sensing - particularly satellite and drone-derived data - and AI/machine learning models to build a baseline of “business as usual” in order to measure changes - and thus the valuation - of a project. A whole industry along this climate risk intelligence value chain has sprung up - from remote observation to analytics to project evaluation. Rick Jarrell’s newsletter does a nice overview of some of these tools. I would add to Rick’s comments, that we’ll see greater uptake of these solutions when paired with adaptation financing, and more “conventional” risk management needs packaged as a “one stop shop” - including crisis management and physical infrastructure resilience.
Time capsule
This week I was back visiting family in California. I found myself, at my parents’ insistence, to go through some boxes in the closet and clear out old documents and paperwork from days gone by. I’m a bit torn about saving versus disposing things - on the one hand they physically tie us to memories, or though on the other hand 99% of the time, our old stamps, postcards, Master’s thesis drafts and photos lie unseen and practically forgotten. Among the gems I found were my old course notes for a California history course.
While my first thought upon rediscovering my notes was that my scribbling has deteriorated since when I was 17, it evoked memories of me being in class, wired up from coffee (yes, that’s it) and being fascinated by the state’s history and the centrality of water in the formation of the state’s politics and how it (doesn’t) work for so many people today. I’ve been thinking about water in California a lot, especially with atmospheric rivers amid the worst mega-drought for over a millennium, so let’s take a brief walk through how one place’s water dispute .
Source: California State University, Chico; DataBasin.org
The Central Valley was a mix of wetland and grassland - the Sacramento River was described as as an “inland sea” by early white arrivals, before flood controls works commenced in the 1850s. Political worries in this era about swamp land being bought out by large companies and Democratic opposition to central planning led to a hodgepodge of local management. Riparian rights rooted in English common law principles meant practically that if you had property next to water, then you have an inherent right - as an extension of land ownership - to use that water as you see fit.
The state’s first “water war” pitted miners and farmers, an iteration of the age-old upstream/downstream use competition. Miners need water for extraction and processing, yet debris polluted water downstream while raising water levels.
This was the way until 1886, when a California supreme court ruling defined irrigation as a public use - that the public can appropriate water over the rights of those who owned land next to water. It was deemed a win for major corporates and later political wrangling led to a compromise: local irrigation districts were formed and given rights to sell bonds for rights and infrastructure construction. Each district was given significant autonomy so over the coming decades water use was politically local and personal, making large scale coordination difficult despite later laws like the Federal Reclamation Act.
To this day the state and federal government have to work with individual local water districts to implement major policy and works, but going is very slow. A third major water-transfer project between north and south - marketed as a climate adaptation solution! - has stalled for years. Meanwhile, today’s cycle of water use is unsustainable and insecure for both the resource and the wealth and stability it has generated. Rainfall cycles are becoming more erratic. Cities purchase water at many multiples of that of farmers, yet the poorest communities, like Coalinga, run risk having the taps going dry. Conservationists and fisheries compete with big agriculture. Underground aquifers are depleted, sinking the land, which lead to even deeper wells bored. Unabated consumer demand for water-intense foods like almonds, avocados and strawberries further drive this vicious cycle of water use. What’s that saying about cooks in the kitchen?
This political and institutional foundation, combined with other factors such as the unequal distribution of water across the state, rivalry with neighbours such as Arizona, and intense competition between cities and farmers, have created a water ecosystem which is at best slow-moving and at worst ungovernable. To the point that it is the sole holdout among 7 Western US states on a plan to reduce use by 15-20% this year and save the Colorado River from becoming deadpools in many stretches. California has thrown down and proposed a new plan, asserting it has senior water rights. And this is in a democracy.
If the federal government and the 7 states can reach a new agreement to reset policy - that word again - around the Colorado River Basin, it would be groundbreaking and would be shouted from the rooftops.
The implications of failure - and this includes not reaching a quick resolution - are enormous - taps risk running dry as summer approaches in parts of the southwest despite record snowpack; homes, offices and data centres overheat; crops wither; fiscal jeopardy for towns forced to buy top-dollar water elsewhere; “black market water” emerges as they have already in many parts of Mexico.
All this to highlight one well-chronicled example of water disputes - they don’t appear overnight and are generations in the making. And fights over water don’t “only” flare up in emerging markets or less-developed countries. Solutions are hard, and failure - see West Bank/Palestine, Kyrgyzstan-Tajikistan, the Indus and its tributaries, the Upper Nile between Ethiopia and Egypt - could intensify existing political tensions and tip over into armed conflict. The Pacific Institute’s Water Conflict Chronology highlighted over 200 water conflict-related events alone, the bulk of which water was a trigger for violent activity. Policy, peacekeeping, security mitigation, and investment need to work hand-in-hand to reduce the risk of instability from not having enough water (and ultimately food) on communities. Security professionals have a potentially big role to play, not just as crisis responders, but putting in place tactical solutions for threat reduction, driving risk-based decision-making, and advocating for broader alignment of policy, key stakeholders and risk.
What else caught my eye this month?
This fantastic video from Science Moms, an advocacy group of female climate scientists and environmental experts, does a great job knocking down climate denialism and skepticism. Also I love the animation.
At the annual US-Africa leaders summit in December, the Biden administration announced a $2.5billion food assistance programme. Beyond humanitarian aid, the funding aims to help recipient nations source more drought and pest-resilient grains, thus improving food security that has been severely eroded by drought conditions and the impact of global inflation and the Russian invasion of Ukraine on commodities prices. On the back of US treasury secretary Janet Yellen’s visit to Zambia last month, promoting the Green Climate Fund’s funded projects.
Book club update: I finally finished Disaster by Choice, and just started Dreamt Land by Mark Arax, a journalist who grew up in the heart of the Central Valley chronicling how the legacy of water and agriculture is the soft underbelly of California’s wealth. It feels like picking up where I left off from geography class at Berkeley.
That’s it. Until next time!