by David Spratt
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Climate disruption, not China, is the key security threat facing Australia is the main message in the Safe Climate Australia submission to the AUKUS Public Inquiry. This is the text.
Summary
- Climate disruption presents Australia’s greatest long-term security threat.
- AUKUS risks over-prioritising military competition over systemic climate risks.
- Climate impacts threaten food, water, infrastructure, health and regional stability.
- Security spending should better reflect the scale and certainty of climate risks.
- Australia needs a climate-first national security framework focused on resilience and prevention.
The first duty of any government is to “protect the people”: their collective and individual safety, their health and well-being, their property and livelihoods, and their civil and democratic rights.
This should be the starting point for any government’s security policy: human security, including national, regional and global security.
But this has not been the case in Australia. Security policy has been generally constructed as a national defence and border security issue with an emphasis on the state-security institutions: police, customs, military and intelligence services. Even from this narrow perspective, Australia has not released a national security strategy since 2013, nor has security responsibility been integrated across government.
As a result there has been a de facto privileging of defence policy as a substitute for a broad approach to “protecting the people”. The National Defence Strategy has become a military-focussed stand-in for a security policy, and even the defence policy seems in practical terms to be often reduced to an acquisitions plan. It has become a shopping list as a substitute for a policy, and AUKUS sits atop the list.
The AUKUS plan arrived without sufficient consideration of the biggest threats to Australia and Australians’ future safety.
To start at the beginning, the greatest threats are those that may be termed existential or catastrophic risks, that is, those that have the capacity to so disrupt human society from its present structures and course of development that it is unable to (fully) recover. In general, these risks include climate and Earth system disruption, pandemics, weapons of mass destruction, near-Earth asteroid collisions and the impacts of digital technology and artificial intelligence (including disinformation).
Each year, the World Economic Forum (WEF) surveys global leaders in the public and private spheres on their risk perceptions, and from that data compiles an annual report. This year, over the longer term (ten years), respondents rated climate disruption and Earth system degradation as the top four risks, and five of the top 10 (see Figure 1). Misinformation, AI and cyber espionage account for another three places and the remaining two were inequality and social polarisation. State-based conflict and geopolitical confrontation (such as war involving China) didn’t make the long-term list.
Figure 1: Global risks ranked by severity, World Economic Forum, 2026
AUKUS only makes sense if siding with the USA in a war with China is identified as the security priority in the medium term. However, many expert voices, including those of the Australian Security Leaders Climate Group, have repeatedly made the point that climate, not China, is the biggest threat.
Security assessment
In a way, some of the Australian Government’s own actions support this view. In 2022, shortly after coming to power, the Albanese government commissioned the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) to prepare Australia’s first climate and security risk assessment, with an emphasis on the Indo-Pacific region, and as an input into the Defence Strategic Review. It was delivered to the Government’s National Security Committee of Cabinet in December 2022, where it was met with shock and awe, with ministers saying they had not heard anything like it before. The ONI report was immediately securitised and not even members of relevant parliamentary policy committees were briefed, nor was a declassified version made public. This was the opposite of the practice for the Defence Strategic Review, where a declassified version was available immediately.
For the past three years, the government has barely spoken about climate–security threats. Consideration of these threats in both the Defence Security Review and the subsequent 2024 National Defence Strategy and 2026 National Defence Strategy was cursory at best, more accurately tokenistic. The 2026 document contains no strategy in response to systemic climate–security risks.
The reasons for this secrecy seem obvious: the ONI report said things so drastic about the likely climate impacts on Australian and regional security that its narrative would have exposed Australia’s decisions to support and license new coal and gas exports as an act of gross climate vandalism that would undermine Australia’s future security.
This was made clear when the Government decided, for reasons that were not publicly explained, to brief a small number of independent members of the Parliament in late 2024. One of those briefed, Senator David Pocock, called the ONI report “frankly terrifying”. “We’re woefully underprepared for what’s coming,” Pocock told The Saturday Paper, “It’s no surprise that the government has been sitting on this report from the Office of National Intelligence.” Others in attendance have made similar comments, and he and progressive independents in the House of Representatives say it is “recklessly negligent” not to let Australians know as well.
Global security risk assessment
It is reasonable to assume that the ONI report was consistent with a similar piece of work issued two years earlier in the UK by that country’s premier security think tank, Chatham House. That report, Climate change risk assessment 2021, found that without a sharp emissions decline before 2030 (which current trajectories suggest is increasingly unlikely), impacts likely to be locked in for the period 2040–50 include:
- A 30% drop in crop yields by 2050;
- Food demand will be 50% higher; and
- One-third of cropland will be affected by severe drought each year.
The assessment warned that the world is “dangerously off track” to meet the Paris Agreement goals, that the risks are compounding, and that “without immediate action the impacts will be devastating” in the coming decades, especially for food security. It concluded that the drop in crop yields and more severe and extensive droughts would contribute to cascading climate impacts and “drive political instability and greater national insecurity, and fuel regional and international conflict”.
Twenty years ago, Kurt Campbell, who was United States Deputy Secretary of State and National Security Council coordinator for the Indo-Pacific in the Biden administration, led a group of security analysts in producing a groundbreaking report on climate and security, The Age of Consequences. In it, they described a scenario in which the world had warmed by 3°C:
“Massive nonlinear events in the global environment give rise to massive nonlinear societal events. In this scenario, nations around the world will be overwhelmed by the scale of change and pernicious challenges, such as pandemic disease. The internal cohesion of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise in migration and changes in agricultural patterns and water availability. The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible. The social consequences range from increased religious fervour to outright chaos. In this scenario, climate change provokes a permanent shift in the relationship of humankind to nature’ (emphasis added).”
This is the future Australia will face, but in our parliament it has not been a topic of serious conversation since a Senate inquiry on the topic eight years ago, despite growing evidence regarding escalating climate-related security risks.
It is no longer controversial that climate disruption is an existential threat. Pacific leaders, the UN Secretary-General, the former US Defence Secretary, and the current Australian climate minister have said it. Nobody says that China is an existential risk, and that represents the great inversion in Australian security policy: a secondary issue becomes primary policy, and the greatest threat is simply not spoken about.
Like the WEF, the Global Challenges Foundation (GCF) also releases an annual report on the big risks to humanity. Their Global Catastrophic Risks 2026 report identified the key issues as:
- Catastrophic climate change and responsibility in the age of Earth system tipping points;
- Ecological collapse and nature in global governance;
- Weapons of mass destruction and multi-domain escalation risk;
- AI in military decision-making and the global governance challenge; and
- Near-Earth asteroids and how to protect Earth from the asteroid impact hazard
Regional impacts
Catastrophic climate change is coming to our region, given the present failure to rapidly reduce climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions. The world has reached 1.5°C of warming, the rate is accelerating, and Earth will hit 2°C in around fifteen years on current trajectories. A survey of climate scientists found that a majority think warming will exceed 3°C given the current level of global climate action.
Scientists have described a zone of “near-unliveable” heat at 2.7°C of global average warming, which will exhibit levels of heat beyond that ever experienced by humans, currently only found on 0.8% of the world’s surface, and that would affect 22–39% of the global population, mainly in Asia (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: Projected zone of heat of “near-unliveable conditions” at 2.7°C global average warming.
It is difficult to imagine the consequences of such a world, but these impacts will become perhaps the greatest security challenge to Australia. Part of the risk is northern Australia, which will also become practically unliveable for part of the year.
This has direct implications for AUKUS, because Australia is already spending billions upgrading facilities in northern Australia, mainly for the purpose of making them de facto US bases (Figure 3). How these bases would operate in such conditions of extreme heat seems not to have been fully considered by the government in its security planning and spending. It is another example of how climate and security risks may collide.
Figure 3: Zone of extreme heat and defence bases in northern Australia at 2.7°C global average warming (ASLCG)
This reinforces the need for a comprehensive Australian security strategy, not an acquisitions shopping list with an eye-watering price tag that will do very little to protect Australia from the biggest threats.
Security policy has to be built on solid ground, not on the shifting sands of the AUKUS.
Rebuilding security policy
If security policy is to be truly taken seriously, here are some initial steps:
Regular government catastrophic risk assessments. An initial step would be a comprehensive assessment by ONI, drawing on agencies across government and more broadly, of the catastrophic risks Australia faces, including those identified by global leaders in the 2026 risk reports of the WEF and GCF. Such an assessment could draw upon the valuable work done by ONI in the still-classified 2022 climate and security risk assessment. The new work on the ecology of catastrophic risks Australia faces should include a declassified public version. A forward-thinking and security-aware parliament would legislate a Catastrophic Risks Assessment Bill mandating such regular work as part of ongoing security policy review and development.
A commitment to regular climate risk assessments that are comprehensive and integrated in looking at systemic risks. They need to avoid the pitfalls that have befallen the ONI report and the domestically-focussed National Climate Risk Assessment: siloed analysis, bottom-up methodologies, narrow terms of reference and secrecy.
Rebuilding Australia’s climate science capacity, which has been so run down that scientists are in despair that Australia’s climate model, the only one in the Southern Hemisphere, is now so lacking in staff and resources that it will cease to function properly in helping understand what climate warming and the security risks will look and feel like in the future.
Based on these three actions, the production and regular updating of a National Security Strategy would reflect the commitment of a government which genuinely seeks to protect the people, their safety and well-being.
