Page 63 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

Tackling Environmental Crime throUgh standardized Methodologies

So, certainly, I would estimate that from now to the end of the centu-
ry, or at least for the next 70 years as we go towards the end of the century,
climate change is increasingly going to become a security issue and it’s
going to make some of the things that we are obsessed about today (like
ISIL, or Al Qaeda or even President Putin) seem fairly minor in compari-
son.

In terms of strategic conclusions, the good news is that things like the
IPCC Fifth Report and the excellent G7 report from October 2015 on the link
between security and climate change, have started to generate a common
understanding of the security challenges we face.

What we need now is some kind of forum where, frankly, security policy
people can sit down together with the scientists, the NGOs and the larger com-
munity involved, to try to come to some kind of collective approach in terms
of what we need to do, what ore roles will be and what we need to lobby our
governments to provide.

We have this sort of setting when it comes to other issues, cyber for
instance: we sit down with industry, with the regulatory environment, we have
got the confidence-building measures, we talk to banks about risk assessments;
we have basically got that comprehensive approach well sorted out. The same
could be said about terrorism: we are increasingly getting it with intelligence
cooperating with the police, with border guards and so on.

But we don’t have a forum, in the UN or anywhere else, where we can
gather as a security policy community, to deal with this issue: too many reports,
which are very good, are written by retired US Admirals, it tends to be more of
a job you do in the military once you retire rather than one you do while you’re
serving. So, first thing is that we need to start with some kind of body where
we could have this discussion.

Secondly, we need to develop a narrative. I have spoken a lot on climate
change and I think that, for the sake of our audience’s attention, we need to
balance the alarmism because frankly there is a lot about climate change which
is alarming, such as the details we heard from the two panels earlier this mor-
ning. But if we overegg that particular pudding, we are not going to mobilise
action.

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