In this Climate.Genn episode I am speaking with Erin Sikorsky, Director at The Center for Climate and Security and also the Security Director at the The International Military Council on Climate and Security. We are discussing issues that Erin covers in her new book, Climate Change on the Battlefield.
With so much focus on national defence spending, while fires and floods are tearing through nations around the world, this is a timely subject. Here, Erin guides us in untangling the contradictions of investing in modern warfare, while simultaneously struggling to keep citizens safe from the extreme impacts of fire and floods that are worsening in intensity and frequency.
In Spain in recent days there has been 199 wild fires counted with more across the northern hemisphere, whilst floods across countries like Pakistan and China, and across S America and beyond, are taking lives and costing billions in infrastructure damage.
Yet, countries are being coerced into spending hundreds of billions on defence that excludes protecting against the raging climate. How we proceed from here has consequences and Erin, with her book ‘Climate Change on the Battlefield’ offers many essential insights.
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Full Transcript
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
So Erin, thank you very much for taking the time to speak to me. It’s great to see you. I just want to start really with, as we speak, there are literally wars raging around the world and we see this huge drive in defence spending across, you know, across many nations.
Europe is a great focus. At the same time, we see great sways of the Northern Hemisphere on fire. Can you talk to us a little bit about the complexity of how extreme climate impacts are becoming interwoven with military objectives, with budgets and the overall effectiveness of military planning?
[Erin Sikorsky – Author, Climate change on the battlefield]
Sure. Thanks so much for having me, Nick. You know, as you said, countries don’t have the luxury of only focussing on one threat at a time right now, right?
You have traditional wars going on in Ukraine and across Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, right? But you also have these extreme weather events. I was just reading yesterday about France and the unprecedented wildfires they’re seeing there.
And so, you know, militaries are involved in both. They’re involved in these hot conflicts and Europe especially is very keen to prepare in case Russia’s continued aggression spreads outside of Ukraine. They realise they need to modernise and update their militaries.
But they’re also deploying militaries to fight these wildfires. And so, you know, governments are trying to think through how do we build resilience to multiple threats and how might these threats layer on top of and exacerbate one another? One example I can give you is, you know, Russia frequently takes advantage of extreme weather events that happen in Western Europe, right?
With last year in Poland, there was extreme precipitation and flooding and the military there deployed in huge numbers, something like 20,000 Polish soldiers were out helping with the response. Well, Russia at the same time launched a social media disinformation campaign blaming the Polish government for the floods, you know, encouraging the local population to protest and complain about the government, right? And so, they tried to create internal instability in the wake of this event.
So, you know, sometimes you see, I think, what’s a false choice between either we prepare for extreme weather or we have to prepare for traditional conflict in militaries. But I think the only way that countries will really be safe in this future world is if they can figure out how to do both. And certainly, there are investments you can make in your budget that can help you do both.
But it requires, you know, a commitment and smart thinking about how to approach that.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
You just mentioned these disinformation campaigns. I mean, this is this sort of hybrid war thing. How effective are governments dealing with that?
I mean, that seems to sort of come in from a left field, but these are real issues.
[Erin Sikorsky – Author, Climate change on the battlefield]
Yeah, I mean, it’s a huge challenge. And I think, you know, I was at the NATO summit in The Hague in June, and I was struck in listening to defence ministers at the public forum there talking all about hybrid warfare threats, talking about that being the number one threat facing Europe. But then at the same time, or in the next breath, talking about the importance of investing in military equipment, like tanks and aeroplanes and things like that.
And I think there’s a little bit of a disconnect, right, when we’re talking about hybrid warfare being the main threat, which is things like disinformation going against critical infrastructure, right, cyber attacks, and then this more traditional warfare concept. Not to say that countries in Europe don’t need fighter jets and tactical vehicles for the battlefield. I mean, we’ve seen in Ukraine the value of those.
But at the same time, you can’t forget about the other investments to manage hybrid warfare. And I think that’s where investments in resilience and adaptation to climate threats can really help. Because you build resilience in your infrastructure, you build resilience in your electrical grid, you diversify your energy sources.
That all helps in the hybrid warfare front. And I think countries recognise this. Europe’s got a great hybrid warfare centre of excellence based in Finland that NATO uses, and they’ve really become more sophisticated in responding and pushing back against disinformation.
But I think there’s still more to do, clearly.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
Okay. You just mentioned this sort of disconnect. On the one hand, you’re talking about infrastructure and the sort of first responder challenges.
And then on the flip side, you’re talking about fighter jets and tanks. How intrinsically prepared are the army or military forces and navy or whatever for these kinds of vast wildfires you might see in Canada or Spain or France, for example?
[Erin Sikorsky – Author, Climate change on the battlefield]
Yeah, I mean, I think the challenge that militaries are facing is they’re pretty reactive to these moments, right? They are not, by and large, proactively planning for them, because they see that these duties, fighting wildfires, responding to flooding, as kind of extra, right, on top of their real job, which is going to fight and win wars. Which is fair, to a certain extent, except that they’re really only, in many countries, the only institution with the capacity and the logistics capabilities to really move out quickly and deploy to protect communities and to protect countries.
So, you know, often you see, I think, militaries somewhat on the back foot in response, and a lot of complaints. You’ve seen this in Canada. You’ve seen it in Australia, where military leaders say, like, this shouldn’t be our job.
You know, we don’t want to do this. But yet the governments don’t have other alternatives, so they keep turning back to militaries. One thing I was just reading yesterday, the U.S. Senate, in its annual defence authorisation bill, actually tackled this very issue regarding wildfires in the U.S., and includes a bunch of provisions in the bill, with bipartisan support, for the Army to better prepare and strategise around fighting wildfires, to make sure it has the right equipment, that soldiers have the right training, that they understand how they might be used in these circumstances. And I think that’s really important, and I think, you know, I’d like to see more of that from other militaries.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
Interesting, especially coming from the U.S. at a time like now. Yeah, one thing I was interested in in your book, I mean, you talk about so many different aspects, but was also the threat to the military itself, its own bases, its own infrastructure, its own equipment. Can you just sort of give an example of how climate impacts can interfere with sort of infrastructure, all those things?
[Erin Sikorsky – Author, Climate change on the battlefield]
Sure, absolutely. I mean, there’s many examples here in the United States where extreme weather events have forced the evacuation of bases, have interrupted training missions. One of the marquee examples that’s referred to frequently is Hurricane Michael, which hit Tyndall Air Force Base on the Gulf Coast of Florida a few years ago, causing billions of dollars of damage, destroying some of the most expensive and exquisite aeroplanes the U.S. military operates, and requiring a lot of training missions to move elsewhere outside of the base as it got rebuilt. And it’s just now, really in the past year, five years after the hurricane, reopening, coming back online, rebuilding at a huge cost. And so that example gets repeated over and over again, both in the United States, but also in the Pacific Islands where the U.S. has military bases. And also at smaller scales, too.
I’ve talked to officials in the U.S. military talking about bases in California where extreme precipitation might flood a certain road in a very large military base. So it doesn’t destroy the base, but it interrupts your ability to get from point A to point B at that base, meaning that your training missions take longer, your troops are annoyed because they spend a lot more time in the car in this big desert base, right? So it just undermines readiness, both at the kind of big level with the big marquee events, but also on an everyday level.
One other thing I’ll say about that, that I think there hasn’t been quite enough attention to, is it’s not just about the infrastructure and equipment. It’s also about the people who serve in the military. And when I was researching Tyndall for the book, what I found were reports of separations from service in the Air Force of airmen because after the flood and the hurricane, they got moved to a different base.
They had to move their whole families. They weren’t told how long they would be away. They were told different information at how permanent the move would be.
And they got pretty frustrated and couldn’t keep their families and kids in school, and they decided to leave the military. So as we think about the impact these extreme weather events have, it’s not just about the planes and the hangars, but it’s also about the people.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
We call this in the book as well, you take the sort of the communities because the soldiers have families and their schools and so on and so forth. And they might be relocated. The costs were absolutely enormous for all of these from just I think, two hurricanes, there were just billions and billions.
Is there a threshold for these kinds of costs? Because how do you maintain effectiveness, keep spending all this money, and yet, we know that more is on the way? And how do you keep the costs down?
How do you plan through that?
[Erin Sikorsky – Author, Climate change on the battlefield]
Yeah, I mean, it’s a really it’s a good question. And I think there’s a couple elements of it, right? There’s the adaptation piece and making sure that your infrastructure, your bases are resilient to future climate hazards, which means you need to have information and data and analysis about what those future climate hazards will be, and that you’re planning to those specs, if you will.
And this is something you see not just in the military, but across communities where you’ve got outdated flood plans, where you’ve got outdated building codes, right, that were based on information from 20 years ago, as opposed to what things are going to look like in the future. So that’s a piece of it. And, you know, it’s really interesting, even in this current Trump administration, where climate change is a word that is not allowed in documents, and there’s been a real attack on climate science, the Defence Department continues and has put out policy guidance to this effect that extreme weather events, that’s what they call it, are something that the military still needs to be prepared for and addressing in its infrastructure. So they recognise, the military is very pragmatic, right? They recognise the costs, members of Congress recognise the costs, they don’t like spending that money.
And so making those investments is important. I will say, though, because the Trump administration is attacking so much climate science, it makes it really hard for the Defence Department to make smart decisions about infrastructure resilience if they don’t have good data and information from say, NOAA, or NASA. But adaptation, the challenge is adaptation will only get you so far.
I mean, as you know, with climate change, we also have to cut emissions and mitigate and bend that curve down, so temperatures don’t keep going up. So in the long run, you know, for military bases to have resilience, for the military to be able to operate, we also need to find ways to cut emissions so that temperatures don’t rise as much as they’re currently projected to because at a certain level, right, there’s no adaptation that’s possible. So you gotta be able to do both, right?
But it’s really important.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
There’s a new term that sort of I discovered in the last day or so, which is defence washing.
[Erin Sikorsky – Author, Climate change on the battlefield]
Oh, interesting.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
Yeah, in relation to mainly the sort of US pressure on Europe to spend more on defence and Spain saying, hey, you know, we’ve got some real problems here. Can we include what we’re using our special, you know, our army forces, our military forces, for, you know, the first responders to these fires and things, and being laughed at and being sort of scoffed at. And you covered this in your substat letter, and I just want to, it seems to be exactly what you’re talking about, is that where’s this line between what is planning for defence as in military defence, and what is planning for in climate defence, which equally, you could say are threats to citizens?
[Erin Sikorsky – Author, Climate change on the battlefield]
Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, I mean, this has been a big debate with NATO this year, and the commitment that NATO has made to increase defence spending to 5% of GDP for all its countries by 2030, I believe. Within that 5%, you know, three and a half is supposed to be, you know, quote, unquote, real military spending, and 1.5 can be for societal resilience, things like bridges and roads. And in some cases, countries are arguing it should be for climate adaptation and resilience. I think that’s very important. I actually think the percentages perhaps should be switched.
Because at the end of the day, if you don’t have resilient communities, right, you aren’t resilient to military threats. If you don’t have the ability, you know, in the Danube, or the other rivers of Europe, which have been running dry this summer due to heat waves, right, if you don’t have the ability to move military equipment along those rivers, you’re going to be at risk. So it’s not, again, back to our earlier conversation, it’s not either or, it should be both, but it’s been challenging.
I think, you know, what I’ve heard some folks say in Europe is that Spain’s just saying out loud, what other countries are thinking behind the scenes, right? And you see right now, I mean, Spain’s got its military deployed fighting the wildfires there that they’ve had to evacuate 1000s of people for. It’s, it’s a real, it’s a real challenge.
And I think, you know, this will only become more acute as time goes on. And it’ll be interesting to see how countries, you know, when the time comes to explain what they’ve spent that 5% on what what it really includes. At the same time, too, I mean, even just the buying of the military equipment, that’s another place where you want to think about what, where will that military equipment be deployed in the future?
How hot will it be? Is this equipment resilient to heat stress? What kind of energy does it use?
Does it use fossil fuel energy that you need to get from natural gas pipelines from Russia or shipped over from the United States, and that both of those countries, frankly, are much more unreliable than than ever before? Or are you using, is it hybrid? Are you able to leverage clean energy for those vehicles, and then give yourself a little more flexibility on the battlefield?
So that’s another place where I think the climate and environment considerations should come in as as European countries are thinking about military spending.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
You use a very good example in the book about I was shaking my head because it was a British example about the using the Land Rovers in Afghanistan. Yeah, yeah, they were very sensitive to IEDs, these sort of explosive devices. And then they switched them out for these, these other ones, which weren’t, weren’t heat protected.
So they stopped. So that was a very, I’d say, potentially typically British thing. No, but it does seem in a previous interview, there was someone warning that if we’re not careful, we could be spending all of our GDP on relocating citizens and cities and infrastructure.
And it sounds like that it’s kind of started and the as the army have fallen into this role, or the military has fallen into this role of, you know, first responders, that we’re kind of trying to figure out where to put it on the on the balance sheet in terms of cost. And it’s probably something that is going to rage on for quite a while. Do you think that, I think you do reference this as well in the book is that this idea of when we’re analysing all the different various scenarios between nations, you know, every country has its challenges.
The climate change, I think there’s somewhat there’s a quote that climate change ceases to be this sort of individual issues that is a sort of background component of every scenario. How does this is do you think this is adequately seen in this way, right now when we’re when we’re reading about future outcomes, maybe threats from China, US clash or Russia?
[Erin Sikorsky – Author, Climate change on the battlefield]
Yeah, no, I don’t think it’s adequately integrated, or what we would call mainstreamed, across understandings of different countries and threats. Again, you know, it’s very typical in the national security community to kind of rack and stack threats, right? What are my top 10 threats that I’m facing?
And so is China a bigger threat than climate change, right? Terrorism, a bigger threat than climate change, when really is you’re alluding to the question is how does climate shape competition with China? How does it shape Chinese national interests, right?
We see China being more assertive in the Arctic region, for example, if climate change didn’t exist, if the ice wasn’t melting up there, China probably wouldn’t be particularly interested in in that region. So you have to understand those two things together. Similarly, I mean, in the past couple of weeks, Beijing has flooded, they’ve had to move thousands of people out of the city, when we’re analysing, you know, as a former intelligence analyst, so if you’re analysing future stability in China, and how well the government is managing to keep its thumb on the population, understanding how communities are reacting to these extreme weather events, you know, how well the government is managing those, those are all really important questions that again, if you’re not bringing a climate lens in, you might miss or get things wrong.
And so I think it’s really important that across governments, you don’t just keep climate off in its own office by itself, right, siloed apart from from other things, you know, the real threats of of China and Russia, for example, or Iran, but instead, bringing those two, two things together. Unfortunately, I think in the US, we’re probably further away from doing that than we were just a couple years ago. But that said, you know, countries around the world have released climate security action plans for their militaries and security services over the past five, six years, there’s a lot of countries thinking about this.
And so I, you know, I think on the whole progress is being made, but there’s a lot more that can be done.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
I just want to concentrate on one topic that I’ve interviewed quite a few researchers on this collapsing AMOC scenario, and you do mention it in the book. And when we talk about it, we’re talking from a very scientific perspective in terms of what’s actually going on. And then we quickly jump and we said, well, the outcome is going to be chaos, it’s going to be a massive food security problem.
How are you able to pick that apart that chaos? How might a military respond to this sort of, let’s say there’s a collapse of food supply chains in these sort of worsening scenarios? How might the military then be involved?
[Erin Sikorsky – Author, Climate change on the battlefield]
Yeah, it’s a really, it’s a really good question. And I’m glad to see there are more conversations about these bigger tipping points amongst a broader community more and more. I mean, I think there’s a couple of really interesting things about the AMOC.
I mean, one is, and again, I’m not a scientist, but my understanding, right, is that its impact is geographically scoped. So a country like China would not be affected by it in the same way that Europe and the United States would. So I think right there, you see in the geopolitical environment we’re operating in, where you’ve got the West in chaos and at high risk of food security crisis, and you might have China sitting pretty, right?
So that is one dynamic that I think militaries and security institutions should be thinking about and understanding and planning for. And then I think more immediately in a major food security crisis like that, and you see previews of this in certain parts of the world already, but I think you see a lot more activity from the military in terms of the humanitarian response piece, distributing food, maybe even in the growing of food or managing of agricultural resources, right, as more of a security, high security need. I mean, that’s not something we’ve seen in the United States or Europe for a long time, right?
But there are parts of the world, I mean, you look at Indonesia and Pakistan right now, as they’ve faced flooding and extreme weather, both countries have deployed their militaries to conduct agricultural planting and work and manage it because they see it as such a high priority and such a challenge in an extreme weather world. And so there would be a lot happening in that AMOC scenario and lots of things to think about, but it is the kind of, you know, what we would have called, I think, maybe 10, 15 years ago, a low probability, high impact scenario. Maybe now we’re edging toward a high probability, high impact scenario.
And that’s the kind of thing that security actors need to prepare for and need to understand and build scenarios around the same way that the US military, you know, war games out what a war over Taiwan would look like with China. They don’t necessarily expect that to happen soon. They don’t want it to happen soon, but they want to be prepared in case it does happen.
I think similarly, they should be gaming out, what does it mean for a tipping point like the AMOC to, and so that means, you know, bringing in different people to talk to, building strong relationships with climate scientists, being able to engage in across different sectors to talk about these issues, to get the right answers and to be prepared.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
Leading on from that a bit with the hotter Atlantic, we’ve all, you know, we have this sort of retreating Arctic sea ice and this emerging, I don’t know what you want to call it, if you like, for increased geopolitical activity. And we have this Atlantification of the Arctic, where a lot of the fisheries are moving north, and you talk about this in the book as well, in marine ecosystems. In this scenario, Arctic dominance translates into very real, tangible benefits, it seems.
How does this play out from a sort of military point of view for nations like any of Canada, Denmark, Norway, the US, Russia?
[Erin Sikorsky – Author, Climate change on the battlefield]
Yeah, no, there’s a lot going on in the Arctic and a lot of different aspects of the security challenge there. I think one at a very basic level, right, a warmer Arctic is a busier Arctic. So you have more countries with more activity there, both military and commercial activity, and a busier Arctic is a more dangerous Arctic, because it’s still, it’s not turning into the Caribbean Sea, right?
It’s still a very dangerous and challenging place to operate. And so I think, especially with commercial activity, commercial actors that are not prepared, right, the risk of accident, the risk of misperception of activities, because we know both Russia and China use commercial activity as cover. And then you don’t have a lot of good venues for having frank conversations anymore, either.
The Arctic Council, because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s been challenged in its ability to engage with Russia. But the Arctic Council was never supposed to be the place where security conversations happened anyway. They’ve explicitly kept security out of it to preserve a place for collaboration.
But I think, given the increased security activity in the region, there needs to be some venues for deconfliction, for talking, right, amongst the key players up there to move that forward. I think, you know, certainly in the near term, Russia sees advantages to a melting Arctic because they have the largest Arctic territory of any country. They have the most capacity and the kind of sea route that you would take would go through some of their territorial waters for now.
But that doesn’t mean a melting Arctic is all upside for Russia either. They see it also as a threat. The ice has been a very nice, natural deterrent and barrier for decades for them as that melts.
They could feel more vulnerable also and feel the need to further militarise the region to defend themselves. Also, in their Arctic territories, you know, the permafrost melt has destroyed a lot of infrastructure, including military airfields there. They’ve got a lot of wildfires they have to deal with, zombie fires in the Arctic that never stop burning, right, under the ice.
So, it’s a really risky environment. And I think maybe one of the silver linings is that at some level, all countries face risks there. And so collaborating to manage those risks together, there may be some shared interests and opportunities to manage, especially if commercial interests are what is really driving, say, China’s activity there.
Stability, security is important for commercial activity to thrive. And there may be some ways to manage the more challenging security aspects because it’s in everyone’s interest to do so.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
We see, you know, China has declared itself, I can’t remember if it’s exactly in the near Arctic or interested part or something. And, you know, the Trump administration has made a play for Greenland, which is, you know, causing a lot of discussion around this sort of hard power, sort of politics of all of this. Do we have this?
Is this what we have to look forward to in terms of sort of hard power dictating how these emerging areas are going to shape? Or is there still a good chance that, you know, a sort of a reborn NATO, a stronger Europe or a more collaborative force could actually resurface again and actually be a better way to tackle this?
[Erin Sikorsky – Author, Climate change on the battlefield]
I mean, look, I think the future is not preordained, right? I think the hard power kind of competition zero sum approach is one path. And I think, unfortunately, under the current Trump administration, that’s more likely than it was a few years ago.
But at the same time, you know, you see NATO and European countries kind of coming together more in reaction to that and doubling down on their collaboration and cooperation. I think the fact that, you know, Finland and Sweden have joined NATO, so you have two more Arctic nations there. I think there’s an opportunity through that to manage more cooperatively in the Arctic as well.
But it’s risky. And I think, you know, I think we can’t, the US, well, excuse me, the West can’t control what Russia does. Europe can’t control what the United States does.
But they control what they do, right? And they can think carefully about military exercises in the Arctic and how to manage those. I mean, I do worry sometimes when we talk about the kind of geopolitical or hard power risks in the Arctic, we almost risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy, right?
If we’re constantly up there exercising and sending military ships and, you know, we just, like I said, increase the risk of accident and things spiralling out of control with escalation dynamics we don’t fully understand. But that’s not inevitable. And, you know, my understanding was with Norway leading the Arctic Council last year, they were able to make some overtures to Russia and continue some collaboration and discussion, which I think is important.
So I think, like I said, I think there are some shared interests among multiple countries up there that could be used as opportunities to move things towards a more peaceful approach.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
Just to end on really, I wanted to just ask, when you’re in your various roles, and you’re talking to people and, you know, offering advice, what’s the sort of the main thing that you’re saying, no, you need to be looking at this? What’s the this that you’re advising everyone to be focussing on?
[Erin Sikorsky – Author, Climate change on the battlefield]
The this that I’m advising everyone to be focused on, I think is, you know, something I mentioned earlier is making sure that when you’re making decisions, right, because I come out of the intelligence community, where our job was to provide policymakers, quote, unquote, decision advantage, right? And early warning. And the only way you’re going to do that well, in today’s world is if you bring a climate lens to what you’re doing, right?
If you have good climate data, you have a good understanding of what to expect in terms of extreme weather, because otherwise, you’re going to miss things or get things wrong. And so countries and governments that do that, militaries that do that will be better prepared for the threats we face. And it’s just a pragmatic approach to the world as it is.
[Nick Breeze – Climate Genn Podcast]
Well, look, thank you very much. And I really enjoyed the book. So I do advise people to get it and considering these these issues.
So thank you very much.
[Erin Sikorsky – Author, Climate change on the battlefield]
Yeah, thank you, Nick. I appreciate it.