Security leaders respond to the climate threat to our food system
The world of the late-Twentieth century is history. It took a mere 20 years for the world to lurch from the semi-stable state it inherited from the years of the Cold War and the period that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union to the instability and uncertainty of the present time. As the politically bipolar world of last century collapsed into the emerging multipolar world we see coming into being around us, attention started to focus on the new threat environment of global heating and its potential impacts on the security of global food supplies. This received attention in Australia too, where it joins concerns over the nation’s oil supply vulnerability.
In this story we look at global heating and its potential for disrupting the security of our food supply and that of households, and what they can do about it.
What is happening?
THE POTENTIAL for disruption of our food supply chain and of its travelling companion, Australia’s oil supply vulnerability, receives little attention from a media that is largely reactive to events rather than projective in discussing them. In as much as the traditional role of the media is to report the daily news, that makes sense, however what coverage there is becomes submerged below the weight of the day-to-day turmoil of politics, economics and the frivolous world of entertainment. This is a pity because the lack of reporting and analysis in mainstream media of the big-picture changes in the world that have potential and sometimes actual impact on how we live in this country means that they take us by surprise.
It came as a weird sense of deja vu a couple years ago when I read that the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group had positioned global warming as a critical food security as well as a national security issue. I had been saying that ever since I was one of four who started the Australian Food Sovereignty Alliance over a decade ago. Then, the link between a warming climate and global food production was less prominent. Sure, it was heard, mostly from the science community, but it didn’t have the prominence it has recently gained.
This was the first time former Australian military leaders had taken up the call for climate action. The chapters of Issue Report 2022 — Food Fight: climate change, food crisis & regional security, summarise their argument: The climate-food-security nexus; Prevent-Prepare-Protect; Ukraine and food security; Drought & water stress in a hotter world; Crops yield and heat; Act now to mitigate the looming food & security crisis.
The report makes recommendations. As well as retired army, naval and air force leaders, the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group includes Cheryl Durrant, a former director of preparedness and mobilisation at the Australian Department of Defence. In the years before the report’s release, Durrant was associated with the assessment of Australia’s liquid fuels vulnerability.
Issue Report 2022 emphasises how simultaneous crises — a warming climate, a consequent food crisis — and their influence on regional political stability could affect the future of our region.
…a rapidly heating planet “fundamentally threatens our ability to secure our food and water supplies… it is clear that a lack of food — driven by war, climate change or a combination of both — can destabilise and lead to even more conflict”
Simultaneous crises like the impacts of a warming climate and how nations and populations respond to them are more complicated and difficult to deal with than single crises.
What do the climate leaders say about our present situation?
Former Australian defence force chief Chris Barrie said a rapidly heating planet “fundamentally threatens our ability to secure our food and water supplies… it is clear that a lack of food — driven by war, climate change or a combination of both — can destabilise and lead to even more conflict”.
The report goes on to say that food insecurity in our region has the potential to become a threat that would “drive political instability, conflict and people displacement in ways that will significantly impact on Australia and the security of its people.”
We have already sees the reality of how these things are closely coupled as a consequential series of political and military events in West Asia (ie. the Middle East as named from a European perspective) that have had an impact on European attitudes to immigration and the politics around it.
The report says that the first duty of government is the safety and protection of the people… Australia has failed when it comes to climate change threats…
Australia is ill-prepared for the implications of a climate-change-enhanced global food crises and its systemic, cascading risks to human and global security. A lack of action in developing credible climate change policy leaves our nation unprepared for increasingly harsh climate impacts. The heating climate requires Australia to be able to clearly assess our national and regional vulnerabilities and to understand the consequences. It is time to act with clarity and urgency, the report states.
The report says that the first duty of government is the safety and protection of the people, but Australia has failed when it comes to climate change threats.
Why does it matter?
Farmers for Climate Action: empty supermarket shelves will become a more frequent sight for Australians as the climate crisis heightens the risk of food shortages after extreme weather events.
In calling for preparedness to deal with the impacts of a changing climate, the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group Issues Report matters because food insecurity would impact Australians as well as our neighbours in the wider Asia-Pacific. It reports that extreme weather events and unpredictable impacts on food production will lead to more price and supply volatility. It is given added credibility by a Farmers for Climate Action report which warned that “empty supermarket shelves will become a more frequent sight for Australians as the climate crisis heightens the risk of food shortages after extreme weather events”.
What could happen were a warming climate to affect Australian farm productivity through drought, flooding, increased pest damage to crops and increased incidence of plant disease? Food shortages are what could happen. It is here that the market system’s cost/supply mechanism kicks in as shortage forces up prices and brings the reintroduction of purchase limits for foods and goods — rationing, in other words. People might find this hard to imagine at a time when supermarket shelves are laden with a bewildering range of products, however we have to look back only a couple years and recall how supermarkets introduced the rationing of some food and other products during the pandemic.
Looking for evidence? We have a taster in the smaller-scale glimpses of how a scarcity of food and goods triggered by weather events disrupted supply chains to trigger the supply/demand mechanism that boosted price rises for everyday foods, as well as rationing:
- Cyclone Yasi’s destruction of the Queensland banana crop in 2011 that destroyed an estimated 75 percent of the crop, valued at around AU$350 million, and about 20 percent of the sugar crop; this led to a shortage until supply increased over following cropping seasons; in 2006, Cyclone Larry had brought similar damage
- the mid-2022 price rise for iceberg lettuce to around $10 a head in some supermarkets was due to crop loss caused by extreme rainfall and flooding in eastern Australia
- in early 2022 supermarket shelves emptied as heavy rains disrupted both the east–west and north–south railway and road networks
- the impact of the pandemic on national food supply chains through large-scale absenteeism in production and transportation industries that brought shortages and empty supermarket shelves; as a consequence, flour, pasta and other foods were rationed by the supermarkets, with limited quantities available per customer; the rush on toilet paper at the start of the pandemic led to it, too, being rationed through purchase limits
- the 2023 attempt to blockade the Ukrainian wheat export crop when Russia ended the grain export agreement clearly demonstrated how food can be weaponised by belligerents intent on creating shortages; Ukrainian resistance to the Russians saw the resumption of grain exports.
These events were temporary and resupply ended the crises. However, looked at from the perspective of an increasingly hotter climate, we see how it unfolds into a long term crisis during which impacts come as more-frequent and more-devastating steps that recover temporarily but whose overall, longer term trend is to food and goods shortages and a partial food systems collapse.
Personal and public health could be impacted as a climate-caused food crisis becomes a vicious cascade:
- climate impacts such as drought, a lack of irrigation water, flooding or heat affecting seed propagation trigger a shortfall in grain and other food production
- falling supply acts through capitalism’s demand/supply/price mechanism to trigger increases in food prices; grain is traded on the global market at prices set by that market, so it flows to nations with greater financial reserves that can afford to pay the higher price
- as global demand increases to exceed supply, international competition for food commodities such as grains and cooking oils increases, pushing up food prices (remembering that domestic prices are influenced by global commodity prices) and depriving lesser-developed nations and their peoples of affordable, basic foods
- declining food affordability in both the lesser-and-more-developed nations stimulates poverty as an increased portion of peoples’ income is spent on food
- political turmoil emerges as opportunistic populist and fringe political movements and the spread of disinformation designed to sow distrust of social institutions and fellow citizens bring conflict and political instability.
Now, one of two things happens. Perhaps both happen simultaneously. Basic foods like grains become unaffordable to people of limited financial means. Human nutrition goes into decline. Personal wealth becomes the arbiter of who has adequate food. Where government or international emergency food relief is insufficient or unavailable, social unrest arises. In states with unstable political systems this grows into internal conflict that threatens to destabilise governments. States start to fail.
The example of Europe
An alternative scenario sees the social unrest due to food shortages triggering refugee flows into wealthier and politically more-stable nations. This stimulates fear for their own food and resources supply and for their national cultures and demographic makeup (the latter two already play a role in anti-immigration politics in Europe, the US and—to a small extent—in Australia). The political fringe popularises ideas like the Great Replacement which claims that large scale immigration is a scheme to replace populations with people from another culture. Anti-refugee sentiment and support for anti-immigration political parties grows (this is already evident in Europe). This is nothing less than the weaponisation of refugees and culture that, unless contained, has potential to destabilise the societies of host countries.
We see a precedent in the 2014 refugee flow into Europe when 1.3 million people, mainly Syrians fleeing the civil war in their country, as well as Afghhans, Iraquis, Pakistanis and Eritreans and some from the Balkans came to the continent to request asylum. The sudden refugee flow has been partially linked with the wars in the Middle East and ISIL’s military dominance of the region at the time and to Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt denying access to Syrian asylum seekers.
A contributing factor was the severe drought in Syria between 2006 and 2010, aggravated by climate change, that led to crop failure and the loss of livelihoods for many farmers. The resulting food insecurity and socio-economic unrest are believed to have played a role in sparking the Syrian civil war, causing millions to flee the country as refugees.
African countries like Sudan, Somalia and Nigeria have suffered climate change-induced droughts which, coupled with weak governance and existing conflicts, have resulted in food crises, political instability, and large-scale displacement of peoples. Food crises often exacerbate existing tensions, contribute to social unrest and create conditions that force people to seek refuge in neighboring countries or other regions.
The 2015 refugee crisis in Europe brought the renationalisation of border control with a number of EU states responding by closing their borders, although Germany accepted most of the refugees. Countries along the Balkan refugee route began to build and extend border barriers. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic closed their borders to refugees.
Public anxiety over the sudden influx focused on the danger to European values. The scale of refugee flow triggered a polarisation in public attitudes that provided the opportunity for right-wing parties to capitalise on the anxiety to increase their popularity and public support. Protests occurred and Europe saw an increase in anti-immigration sentiment as white nationalist forces promoted the Great Replacement theory.
See timeline of European refugee crisis here
How a warming climate can affect food production and food security
The 2015 EU refugee crisis demonstrates how climate change, political instability and refugee flows are closely coupled and how agricultural and geopolitical impacts have the potential to affect the political economy of even financially-better-off and food secure nations and their people.
The 2022 IPCC impacts report discloses other possible climate-change-induced threats that could disrupt agriculture and food supply:
- the geographic variability in impact would be mostly negative for agriculture as higher temperatures increase in the intensity and frequency of hot days and heatwaves
- increased evaporation due to higher temperatures has a direct effect on local climates and agriculture
- more intense bushfires
- a reduction in broadacre livestock production in southern Australia with livestock carrying capacity decreasing across the northern rangelands
- shorter growing seasons for cool season crops
- changed agricultural pest and disease regimes
- loss of pollinators from a combination of toxins in the environment, climate disruption and changing land use practices
- higher level of photosynthesis and plant growth (including agricultural and environmental weeds) due to the CO2 ‘fertilisation effect’
- reduced fish stocks
- rainfall — mean rainfall will continue to decrease in the southwest; changes over northern and eastern Australia remain uncertain
- increase in severity of droughts and the time spent in extreme drought conditions in southern Australia; a shift towards drier conditions across southwest and southeast Australia
- heat stress reduces milk yield by 10–25% and up to 40% in extreme heatwave conditions; the yields of many important crop species such as wheat, rice and maize are likely reduced at temperatures more than 30°C by 2050
- climate change is projected to halve the irrigated agricultural output of the Murray-Darling Basin region, which currently accounts for 50% of Australia’s irrigated agricultural output by value (about $7.2 billion per year).
A sudden food security crisis coming from abrupt climatic, political or economic events or a combination of them in our region or beyond would present Australians with significant challenges, as would a cut-off or reduction in the liquid fuel supply (especially diesel fuel) that is critical to the transportation of food and other goods. Less-abrupt changes stemming from the agricultural or distributional impacts of a warming climate might give us time to respond, however that would have to be an emergency response with all the government intervention it would require.
The food security problem is made worse by current food systems which have contributed to environmental degradation and inequitable food distribution, overconsumption of foods in general (especially energy-dense nutrient-poor foods) and food waste… Food Fight, climate change, food crisis & regional security
Driving the issue
A consequence of serial failure
The Australian Security Leaders group report highlights a serial failure in federal policy regarding our changing climate. An increase in greenhouse gas emissions equivalent of 4.1m tonnes of carbon dioxide during the previous federal Liberal-National Party government’s final year in office is evidence of this failure.
The report is timely in linking food insecurity to global heating and the potential for conflict, refugee flows and in emphasising the risks it brings to both human nutrition and political stability.
The danger of simultaneous failure
Simultaneous failures in social/ecological/economic systems… are much harder to deal with than a failure in one single part of a system—disruption in one part of the system can cascade to produce a domino effect across the system as a whole
Drought and flood, agricultural disruption, food shortages, hunger, refugee flows, social unrest — these would be the simultaneous failures brought by an increasingly hot climate that cascades into a food and national security crisis. Thomas Homer-Dixon, author of The Upside of Down, years ago warned of the risk of simultaneous failure. Simultaneous failures in social/ecological/economic systems, he wrote, are much harder to deal with than a failure in one single part of a system.
Homer-Dixon’s was a systems thinking appreciation of the challenges we face. It reflected the reality known in systems dynamics — change one part of a system and expect changes in other parts of the system to follow. The Food Fight issue paper comes to the same conclusion: “As with the physical world of climate change, disruption in one part of the system can cascade to produce a domino effect across the system as a whole, producing systemic risks.”
Cascading disruptions flow on into other parts of a system. The Food Fight issues paper reinforces what Homer-Dixon wrote about simultaneous failure — in this instance, cascading disruptions in the climate system flowing into farming systems and shortfalls in food production, faltering supply chains and on into reduced food affordability, increased food insecurity, civil unrest and refugee flows that have potential to trigger social unrest. The issues paper cites an example of concurrent climate-related wheat harvest failures in Ukraine, Russia and China in driving the Arab Spring, and names Syria, where civil war currently rages, as an example.
Failure to understand how complexity works will lead to an underestimation of the threat, says the Australian Security Policy Institute’s Dr Robert Glasser: “Most analyses of climate impacts treat climate hazards as independent variables rather than considering the wider context in which they interact with each other and with human systems. For example, a study of the impact that rising temperatures will have on agricultural productivity will overlook the compounding impacts of other hazards (flooding, drought, fires, increases of pests, saltwater inundation, cyclones, migrations of people and so on), which will be occurring simultaneously.”
Politicising what is an issue supported by scientific evidence and requiring scientific as well as political, economic and popular intervention are some governments and their politicians, some industries and an assortment of climate change disinformationists. All that these have succeeded in doing is delaying responses to our warming climate, confusing people, sowing discord and polarisation in society, discrediting science and increasing the food security and associated risks of a warming climate. It happened during the pandemic. It is happening again.
Any lesson from history?
Does the global food crisis of 2007–2010 hold any lessons for us were the impact of climate change to be as severe as is predicted?
That crisis was the result of simultaneous threats brought by drought and oil price rises. Oil fuels are a critical resource for industrial scale agriculture as well as for smaller scale farming systems and the distribution of food. Simultaneous crises are more difficult to fix than single crises because of their interactions and because a remedy for one could be a problem for others.
The flow-on effect of the oil price rise was an increase in the price of other agricultural resources such as fertiliser and food transportation. These exacerbated food prices as did futures trading that boosted demand in the global wheat market. At the same time, grains continued to flow to biofuel production that benefited from government subsidies in the EU and US. National food stockpiles were already depleted because participation in the global food market discouraged national self-reliance through setting aside food in case of need. It was an example how, in a system, a change to one part results in subsequent changes elsewhere in the system.
The food security crisis brought economic, political instability and social unrest in both less-developed and more-developed countries. There were demonstrations and riots in some North and West African nations as well as in parts of Asia and Southeast Asia. Some nations stopped grain exports so as to bolster domestic supply.
How would we cope in future? Australia’s food production and storage capacity suggests the wisdom of maintaining a high level of food security in staple foods were climate change to impact the food supply system. There may be enough productive capacity to supply nations in our region that could be struggling. Much would depend on the scope of government intervention in the food market.
What can we do?
How do the climate leaders propose we change our situation?
The report says that the first duty of government is the safety and protection of the people, but Australia has failed when it comes to climate change threats.
The climate leaders report covers the intelligence, clear intent and appropriate means components of the five-point planning methodology. It carries a sense of urgency that would be viewed positively by climate change adaption and amelioration advocates in recommending that the Australian government:
- develop a Climate-Security Action Plan
- establish an Office of Climate Threat Intelligence as the foundation for a “Prevent. Prepare. Protect.” climate action security plan
- implement a whole-of-nation Climate and Security Risk Assessment — an urgent review should be undertaken of Australia’s food production and supply chain resilience in a hotter climate
- build an Australian National Prevention and Resilience Framework with coherent processes across critical areas including energy and water, logistics, health, industry and agriculture, research and environment
- Australia should contribute to deploying a monitoring system to identify potential food insecurity hotspots, and commit to a programme to enhance food production capacity and resilience in the region
- mobilise all the resources necessary to reach zero emissions as fast as possible; cooperate to develop the global capacity to prevent irreversible tipping points and bring greenhouse gases back to a safer situation in the long term; Australia should assist and enhance the capacity of neighbours to withstand climate-change-driven food shocks and their security consequences
- to mitigate the risks, Australia should commit to strong emission reductions and as a high per-capita emitter aim to achieve zero emissions as close to 2030 as possible
- protect the most vulnerable communities, nations and ecological systems
- climate change should be a primary focus of both economics and politics in Australia, with clear commitments to mobilise the resources necessary to address this “clear and present danger”.
Preparation a priority
The report highlights how Australia and the Asia-Pacific are a “disaster alley” for climate change. A 2°C warming may see south-east Asia’s crop production decline by one-third per capita by 2040. Failure to address the root causes of climate warming will result in great pressure on the Australian defence force and emergency and disaster relief agencies to pick up the pieces in the face of accelerating climate impacts.
Neil Greet, a former colonel in the Australian Army, said Australia needed to prepare for “big consequences” from climate change. These would include disruptions to Australia’s own food growing systems. Food scarcity has already become a contributing factor to major conflicts around the world.
Because governments in Canberra have not properly planned for the impact of “cascading and compound events”, Australia should adopt an accelerated path to net zero emissions while also pushing for greater global ambition to tackle the climate crisis.
In a quoted paragraph in the Australian Security Policy Institute’s The Strategist, Australian Army capability chief, Brigadier Ian Langford, was quoted as confirming that the military regards global heating as a national security threat: “Langford noted that while the army had to prepare for such contingencies, its wide range of duties included responding at home to pandemics and disasters such as fires and floods flowing from climate change — a demand we can expect to increase over time, especially within our region,” reports the author of the article, Brendan Nicholson. The article was about lessons for the Australian military being drawn from the Russian war in Ukraine.
A lesson from fiction and the past
Let me briefly digress into fiction. As I read the Security Leaders Climate Group proposals my mind leapt to a book and to something that could be a precedent.
The book. It is speculative fiction/cli-fi (climate change fiction) writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent novel, The Ministry for the Future. The book describes the doings of the people and a UN agency set up to advocate for future generations in a world beset by an increasingly hot climate and for ways to ameliorate the worst of the heating. It is an inspiring book with innovative solutions. The security leaders were not recommending a global agency to cool our changing climate, however their proposal to establish an Office of Climate Threat Intelligence and to develop an Australian National Prevention and Resilience Framework were reminiscent of the approach in Kim Stanley Robinson’s book.
For another precedent for the Security Leaders Climate Group’s recommendations, let’s step back into the 1980s, a time when the Minister for Science in the Hawke government was the polymath and science advocate, Barry Jones. It was in that role that he supported Australia’s science and research agency, the CSIRO, to set up something innovative for government — the Commission for the Future. Established in January 1985, the Commission adopted a future-focus that included sustainable development, the development of an information-economy society, biotechnology, global warming, population, trends in the labour market, international affairs and technology. The Commission closed in 1998.
Barry Jones was an early advocate for action on climate change, in 1984 advocating that his cabinet colleagues should take action. Jones put down his ideas in his book, Sleepers, Wake!, an assessment of the future impact of the information and technological revolution then underway. His later book, What is to be Done? Political Engagement and Saving the Planet, revisits the challenges Australia and the world faces.
Can we look to the Commission for the Future as inspiration and precedent for the Security Leaders Climate Group’s proposals for federal initiatives on climate change? The commission was much-criticised by the knockers in our society whose prime skill was criticism rather than constructive action, and, sure, it appeared at a time when environmental issues were only starting to be seen as worthy of federal attention, however its came at a critical juncture of technology and society. It was only a decade earlier that the Australian economy had started on its road to technological transformation through computerisation. In the eighties, that technological transformation was gaining momentum. It ever there was a time to think deeply about our technological future, it was the time of the Commission when that future was opening up. Now, in a world beset by a changing climate when the science championed by Barry Jones is being called upon to provide solutions, the Commission offers a valuable model for the proposals of the Security Leaders Climate Group.
How vulnerable are Australian households?
How vulnerable are Australian households to a food crisis induced by climate-related or other events? Consider these realities:
- 4–13% of the Australian population are food insecure, and 22–32% of the Indigenous population, depending on location (Bowden, M. 2020, Understanding food security in Australia, CFCA Paper No 55, Australian Institute of Family Studies)
- there is typically less than 30 days supply of non-perishable food in the supply chain at any one time
- there is typically less than five days supply of perishable food in the supply chain at any one time
- Australian households generally hold only about a 3–5 day supply of food in the home, such low reserves making them vulnerable to natural disasters and disruption to transport by extreme weather events and unpredictable climatic impacts on food production would lead to more price and supply volatility
- Australia is a geographically distant island whose imports and liquid fuel supply chains are precarious and susceptible to disruption by conflict, the unavailability of shipping and countries hoarding supplies for their domestic use in a climate or other crisis.
Any potential in DIY food security?
Encouragement of small scale and home food production could boost supply to households during a crisis, perhaps in a government supported scheme as was Australia’s World War Two Gardens for Victory campaign. This would work primarily for vegetables, domestic poultry and honey, assuming a warming climate does not bring a growth in bird-spread contagious poultry disease and similar infestations in bee hives affecting commercial and domestic honey producers (the recent verona mite infestation in eastern Australia provides us with a sample of the impact of contagious diseases).
Home-scale food production would offer only a limited solution because, unlike the times of the Gardens for Victory campaign, a growing portion of the population do not live in homes with gardens and because home gardens are too small for grain or root crop production at the scale needed for a staple food supply. Household production would not provide a nutritionally complete diet unless cropping space and gardener knowledge and skill were present.
Other than home food gardens, what about community gardens, the shared places where people come together to grow food? Could they play a role in public health and nutrition in a climate-induced food crisis?
My long-term involvement with community gardens while working in local government and as a policy consultant on community garden development to local government suggests that they have potential as a household food-lifeboat strategy, however the size of the allotments in community gardens is generally too small to support a family in anything other than a limited supply of seasonal vegetables and grain such as corn. Community gardens are too few and often too distant from where people live to become major household food production nodes in our cities unless government makes land available for their multiplication. They could, however, become sites for food exchanges where people swap their excess foods grown within and outside the community garden, although care would need be taken not to overload gardeners with responsibilities other than their own food production.
Community gardens have potential for the limited supply of vegetables, culinary herbs and fruit during an ongoing food crisis if gardener skills and knowledge can be boosted and additional land made available for new gardens. Were land available, a larger area could be cultivated to shared grain and root crops, however limited space in built-up urban areas limits the potential.
When I became a consultant to local government and an adviser to new community garden startups in the 1990s, part of my motivation was establishing a cadre of trained, experienced community gardeners who in a crisis could go out to assist new community gardeners who were getting started. I still think this a valid strategy for community gardeners and it could be assisted by local government.
Food would have to be imported to town and city for those lacking a home or nearby community garden, and it is here that government has a role in ensuring urban fringe market gardening, orcharding and poultry production takes priority over suburban expansion. Government has the option now of ensuring urban fringe farmland remains as that rather than being paved by suburban expansion.
On to autarky
The Security Leaders Climate Group’s report might be interpreted to suggest that autarky is the best course for Australia to follow. Among other needs, this would include an assessment of the potential for:
- national food self-provision
- possible and actual climatic warming impacts and their consequences
- medical and public health self-reliance; the evidence supporting this comes from shortfalls in the availability of personal protective equipment for medical staff and in having little vaccine research and medical production capacity during the Covid 19 pandemic
- energy self-reliance; this is more-difficult as Australia’s Bass Strait oilfields passed peak production capacity around 2005–2006 and now account for around 17–19 percent of Australia’s oil and 42 percent of LPG production; a Sydney Morning Herald article of 2008 reported the NRMA funded Jamison Group’s report, A Roadmap for Alternative Fuels in Australia, as claiming that oil production had peaked; that Australia is a net importer of the liquid fuels which are critical to the transportation of food and other goods and that this creates a vulnerability highlighted in the NRMA report and by the Department of Defence; a move to energy self-reliance would necessitate increased investment in renewable energy systems, an assessment of the potential for geothermal energy and government support for the electrification of Australia’s vehicle fleet and rail network.
I omit water, another critical resource, from this list because we have the technical capacity to harvest, store and manage its use.
Australians have a tradition of cooperating in response to emergencies, such as with our bushfire brigades and emergency services. Can that spirit be extended to dealing with food, water and other shortfalls of a climate crisis?
The Australian Security Leaders Climate Group’s report demonstrates two trends that have been building:
- global heating is a national security as well as a food security issue
- the military are part of our response to a heating climate and its impacts, whether in its conventional defence role of national security or in civil defence and emergency service provision as the military provided during the East Coast bushfires of 2020.
That the report comes from a military source is fitting as it is the body charged with responding to a range of crisis situations. It has the analytical capacity and the physical organisation and resources needed for an effective response in collaboration with civilian organisations.
The report and similar warnings over recent years are arguments against reliance on imported staple foods, although not for a cessation of imports, and an argument for greater autarky in basic human needs. Food joins water, energy and public healthcare as the critical, basic resources for national self-reliance and wellbeing. This is not an argument for ceasing imports and exports, but it is an argument for ensuring we have stockpiles of basic needs onshore and the productive capacity to sustain their supply.
Here are links mentioned above:
DOWNLOAD (pdf): Food fight — climate change, food crises and regional instability
Climate threat to food supply chains creates ‘domino effect’
The Upside of Down — catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilisation; 2006, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Random House Canada. ISBN 978–0–676–97722–6.
Sleepers, Wake! Technology and the Future of Work; 1982, Barry Jones; Oxford University Press.
What Is To Be Done. Political Engagement and Saving the Planet; 2020, Barry Jones; Scribe, Melbourne. Audio report ABC Radio — Phillip Adams on Late Night Live: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/barry-jones---what-is-to-be-done/12852072
The Ministry for the Future; 2020, Kim Stanley Robinson; Orbit, USA. ISBN 0316300136.
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