Driving A Tank Through Our Climate Budget
We shoot ourselves in the foot in cutting climate spending to boost defence budgets
People have long raised a quizzical eyebrow when they learn of my interest in the role of the armed forces in relation to the climate emergency and wider sustainability agenda. But that interest is long-standing, genuine and, I think, well-founded. The complex interplay between these different aspects of our civilisation was underscored today by this article in the Financial Times on the EU’s shifting of funding from climate to defence.
I used the AI-generated image above for the first time yesterday during a 90-minute seminar I did for the International Centre on Corporate Social Responsibility (ICCSR) at Nottingham University’s business school. Wrestling with ‘flu, I was nonetheless able to engage this academic audience thanks to Microsoft Teams. And, despite various options open to the, as in chat channels, no-one challenged me on the military front—which would have unthinkable when I was first at university, back in the late Sixties.
In contrast to people like Stephen Pinker, who has argued that the world is getting ever-less violent, I have long worried about the prospects for new levels of murder and mayhem caused by asymmetric tactics, including cyberwarfare and genetic weapons. Now, with the different types of security agendas increasingly blurring together, we must work harder to engage the military and intelligence worlds.
In 2021, in that spirit, I spoke at an invitation-only UK Ministry of Defence seminar on societal resilience in the face of global heating, or “global boiling” as UN Secretary-General António Guterres has taken to calling it.
During the seminar, Jeremy Quin, Minister for Defence Procurement, noted, “The threats of our modern world, made worse by rising seas, extreme weather, and creeping desertification, will almost certainly lead to more conflict.” That has long been my view. And one area of real concern must be that future conflicts will both damage the planet directly and divert attention away from efforts to turn the corner on the climate and biodiversity emergencies.
Some will view Putin’s war as further confirmation that we are headed into a Hobbesian century, red in tooth and cyber-claw. Overnight, ESG analysts were forced to reconsider their handling of defense issues—and investors their investments in companies linked to weapons. More positively, perhaps, you might choose to see such conflicts as the death throes of an old order built around violence against people and nature.
Again, some people may see all this as a long way from the sort of work Volans does day-to-day, but part of what we offer is a wider perspective—among other things covering developments and trends that could impact the ability or willingness of business and governments to address the world’s sustainability challenges.
As I mention in a footnote in my forthcoming book, Tickling Sharks, I have explored related themes in essays for Limits to Growth co-author Jørgen Randers in his landmark book 2052, and with Thammy Evans, whom I met during the Ministry of Defence process. The second project was for the European end of the Carnegie Institute in its 2021 report The EU and Climate Security: Toward Ecological Diplomacy.
Then, late last year, I chaired a session on peace, security and conflict at Anthropy 2023. With help from Thammy and Victoria Morton, I pulled together a panel featuring Scilla Elworthy (nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize), Lt-General Richard Nugee (a pioneer in climate solutions and sustainability at the UK Ministry of Defence, who convened the MOD seminar mentioned above) and Colonel Rosie Stone (a pioneer in human security at the MOD).
My sense is that these are themes whose importance can only grow—and I intend to continue to devote both time and effort to understanding them.