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This is the first of many edited extracts from a Coming SoonASPI publication The geopolitics and security of the Indo-Pacific: Geopolitics of Climate and Security.
The impacts of climate change on the Indo-Pacific, already the most exposed region in the world to climate hazards and home to the world’s fastest growing populations, economies and geopolitical rivalries, will be profound. The scenario below is an extrapolation based on current climate science, observations of recent extreme weather-related hazards and their social impacts, and is therefore not a prediction. It isn’t a prediction of the future, but rather a description of a plausible near future for the Indo-Pacific region. The scenario serves as the reference point for each chapter in the forthcoming book.
It’s the year 2035 …
The climate has Warm by more than 1.5°C, the lower target set by countries in the 2015 Paris agreement. Climate hazards are significantly undermining security in many dimensions, including economic, political, and environmental.
For decades, scientists have warned that temperatures will rise faster, more frequently, and for longer periods of time. Heatwaves; Accelerating sea-level rise; torrential downpours intensifying; intensifying storms; altered distributions of pests pathogens; Ocean heating and acidification; hotter; longer Bushfires; longerDryer Drought. However, policymakers underestimated how severe these hazards would become and the speed at which they would spread. They also underestimated the social disruptions that they would cause. That became abundantly clear during the 2032 global food security crisis, triggered by the record-setting El Niño event that brought severe drought to the rice bowls of Vietnam and China, among others.
Despite the fact that global energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables was rapidly moving, the crisis accelerated political action towards reducing greenhouse gases. Not surprisingly, venture capitalists, asset managers and financial regulators were among the first to detect the climate change ‘signal’ in the market. By the mid-2020s they had started redirecting billions in investments away from fossil fuels, infrastructure and other assets that could be affected by climate change to renewable energy and more resilient assets. Many countries are reaping the benefits of energy transformation today, but others have not been able to adapt fast enough.
Global trade has been significantly disrupted by climate change over the past decade. The energy transition has seen trade reduced in relation to fossil fuels and increased in trade linked to new energy products, such as hydrogen, high capacity batteries, and green steel. Climate impacts have disrupted supply chain, markets, customers, and facilities. Global trade is still largely carried by sea and handled at ports. But, due to increasing intensity of storms and sea-level rise, many ports have been closed for months.
Climate hazards have been most severe to less developed countries. Public discontent has grown over growing inequality and entrenched corruption as well as ineffective government responses to natural disasters. Both governments and their detractors use digital disinformation to further their agendas, often leading to further polarisation.
It isn’t surprising that civil society, separatist movements, terrorism and organised crime have increased in less developed nations, as non-state actors move into the spaces abandoned by government. It was amazing, however, to see how rapidly these non-state actors grew a global and regional presence. The 2033 Summer of Terror attacks on Southeast Asia and elsewhere in Asia showed that these groups are now integrated, and operate transnationally.
It’s encouraging that outside powers, when they aren’t internally preoccupied with domestic climate-driven disasters, have continued to provide disaster relief and other humanitarian assistance to countries struggling with climate change. It is less encouraging that there has been great-power competition and intervention due to the instability in these places. This year’s exchange of fire between American and Chinese naval vessels in the South China Sea, the fourth in less than a decade, demonstrated how strategic competition, opportunism, alliance commitments, digital disinformation and miscalculation can contribute to the outbreak of conflict.
The past few years have again confirmed that the Indo-Pacific region, where over half of the earth’s population resides, is highly exposed to climate and other hazards. For decades, the sea levels have risen at a faster rate than any other country in the world. What was in 2020 a 1-in-100-year extreme flood is now an annual event in many parts of the country, regularly forcing large proportions of Indonesia’s 310 million people to move. Most remain within Indonesia’s borders, but some join the tens of millions of similarly displaced people across the region seeking refuge in other countries. One Pacific island country moved its entire population to Australia last January.
Much of South Asia and Southeast Asia is highly exposed to El Niño and La Niña events. Both phenomena are becoming more severe. The current La Niña is intensifying, causing record flooding in places that are still recovering from the extreme heat, drought and food security shocks from last year’s El Niño and the devastating 2032 crisis. It is unlikely that humanitarian aid from outside the region will be available, as another crisis has already occurred. Atmospheric blockingEvent related to the disrupted jet stream has emerged. It’s causing record-setting extreme heat and fires across North America and much of Europe. The same Blocking event is simultaneously affecting the South Asian subtropical monsoon, triggering extreme flooding in parts of the subregion that might otherwise have escaped La Niña–driven inundation.
ASEAN, Pacific Islands Forum, and the multilateral developmental banks have increased their efforts over two decades to meet the diverse economic, political, security, and humanitarian challenges posed by the warming environment. In the Pacific, for example, they’ve been instrumental in building climate resilience and relocating island communities displaced by the rising sea and stronger cyclones. Their efforts are often overwhelmed by the magnitude of climate hazards and their cumulative impacts.
The latest scientific assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests that the rapid transition to renewables and recent more ambitious political action are likely to keep warming below 2.5°C, thereby diminishing the risk of crossing additional dangerous climate thresholds.
