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Leadership in the Polycrisis: How UK Defense Training Can Help Us Navigate a Future of Unprecedented Environmental Disruption
By Laurie Laybourn and Matt Ince
Edited by Erin Sikorsky and Francesco Femia
Introduction
The global scale, systemic interconnection, and severity of today’s climate and ecological crises has led researchers to conclude that the world has entered a new era—or overall state—of complex, cascading, and compounding risk.1 Some have labelled this the ‘polycrisis.’2 Approaches to leadership development in a defense context—which commonly focus on the ability to operate effectively under intense conditions—might have increasing relevance for civilian leaders wanting to enhance their capacity to respond to this emergent polycrisis era. We undertook research exploring these approaches, utilizing structured workshops and interviews with around thirty senior officers and personnel across the United Kingdom (UK) Defense enterprise. We found that the strong emphasis placed on physical and mental resilience, situational rehearsal, and an initiative mindset grounded in organizational structure and team ethos will increasingly have a broader leadership applicability as the destabilizing consequences of the climate and ecological crisis grow. This briefer explores our findings.
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CCS Releases New Tool: Military Responses to Climate Hazards Tracker
By Tom Ellison and Erin Sikorsky
As temperatures continue to rise and drive extreme weather events that draw in militaries worldwide, the Center for Climate and Security (CCS) is launching a new effort to monitor military actions in response to climate hazards: the Military Responses to Climate Hazards (MiRCH) Tracker. Militaries are increasingly called upon to assist with wildfires, flood response, and other extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change. According to our tracker, since summer 2022, militaries in dozens of countries have responded nearly one hundred times to such hazards.
Ongoing climate change and weather patterns will only increase this demand, starting this summer with the expected arrival of the El Niño climate pattern, which scientists warn will result in significant temperature increases. This tracking effort will help analytic efforts to identify the temporal and geographic patterns in military deployments to climate hazards, the effectiveness of such deployments, and their implications for geopolitics, governance, and civil-military relations.
The tracker will be updated monthly. In addition to our own research at CCS, we are also calling for public input to identify incidents of military deployments in response to climate hazards. To do so, you can enter data into this Google Form. You can also download the up-to-date dataset on the MiRCH landing page.
Caveats: This project began as an informal tracking effort. The data is not comprehensive and relies heavily on English language press, and government social media posts. While we do not have confirmed climate change attribution for every hazard listed, authoritative climate science products such as the IPCC report indicate that events such as heatwaves, wildfires, floods, storms, and droughts are statistically more likely or intense in a warming world.
Please cite this project as The Center for Climate and Security’s Military Responses to Climate Hazards (MiRCH) Tracker.
Please direct media inquiries to Andrew Facini, CSR Communications Director
Briefer: One Year Later: Unraveling Climate and Ecological Security in Ukraine
By Elsa Barron, Brigitte Hugh, and Michael R. Zarfos
Edited by Tom Ellison
On February 24, 2022, the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine irrevocably altered the geopolitical landscape. The year since has witnessed a devastating humanitarian catastrophe in the country, and also a complex and systemic interplay of climate change, environmental degradation, and conflict.
In the wake of the initial invasion, the Center for Climate and Security published a briefer overviewing challenges and concerns regarding climate and ecological security in the midst of the conflict. One year after the invasion, this briefer reassesses the war’s implications for the energy transition, as well as global climate, ecological and food security.
New Report: Climate Security Scenarios for Sweden
By Erin Sikorsky and Brigitte Hugh | Edited by Francesco Femia
A new event report from the Center for Climate and Security (CCS), sponsored by Försvarshögskolan (Swedish Defence University), Climate Security Scenarios for Sweden explores Sweden’s security risks in the midst of external climate hazards exacerbated by warming temperatures and intense precipitation.
To assess these risks, the Center for Climate and Security and the Swedish Defence University convened leaders from across sectors of military, academia, civil society and the private sector to explore whole-of-society approaches that can be implemented throughout Sweden over the next five years.
From the Introduction:
In the coming decades, Sweden will face increasing security risks due to climate change. These risks stem primarily from climate hazards outside Sweden’s borders, though warming temperatures and increasingly erratic and intense precipitation may strain the country’s domestic military, energy, and economic infrastructure. External climate security game changers for Sweden include the potential for aggressive Russian and Chinese behavior in a more navigable Arctic, strains on the European Union (EU) and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) due to increasing humanitarian assistance and disaster relief (HA/DR) demands, and the potential for reactionary European political responses to climate-related migration from the Middle East and North Africa. These threats are unlikely to develop on straightforward linear pathways, as climate change intersects with other developments to cause cascading or complex risks. Tipping points – whether from climate change or from societal developments – could amplify these risks on a shorter timeline than expected.
Navigating these risks requires a whole-of-society approach across Sweden that breaks down planning and programmatic siloes among government ministries, civil society and the private sector. To that end, in October 2022, the Swedish Defence University and the Center for Climate and Security convened a cross section of leaders from the military, academia, civil society and the private sector to explore potential future climate security scenarios for Sweden over the next five years. This paper provides an overview of the key findings of the scenarios discussion, including a discussion of drivers of climate security risk, and entry points for action and further research going forward.
Direct inquiries to: Andrew Facini, afacini [at] csrisks.org
Cover image: A satellite image of the Fennoscandian Peninsula, Denmark, and other areas surrounding the Baltic Sea covered in snow. Image courtesy Jacques Descloitres/ NASA GSFC.