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As NATO Countries Pledge to Up Defense Spending, Will Food and Climate Security Have a Seat at the Table?
By Siena Cicarelli and Tom Ellison
This summer marks a critical juncture for European food and climate security. Before heading off on their summer holidays, leaders will attempt to navigate burgeoning crises in the Middle East, an unpredictable US government, growing defense needs, and an unstable global economy.
Several key political decision points are unfolding this summer, starting with this week’s NATO Summit, where a number of member state leaders committed to a new defense and security spending target of 5 percent of GDP by 2035, which, if implemented by the target date, could entail roughly hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending. However, given that the text of the commitment changed from “all Allies” to just “Allies,” in the final hours of negotiations, commitments will likely vary by member state. Furthermore, given the current combination of budget deficits, national politics, and a collective shift towards “competitiveness,” the European Union risks falling prey to false dichotomies and short-termism, placing climate and food security priorities essential to sustainable security on the back burner in favor of “hard” security goals. While 1.5% GDP of the new spending target can come from non-defense resilience, infrastructure, and civil preparedness spending, food and climate security were not prominent at the NATO Summit.
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Fostering Leadership in NATO on Climate and Women, Peace and Security
On 12 November 2024, CCS hosted a roundtable on NATO’s efforts to tackle non-traditional security threats, including climate change and Women, Peace, and Security (WPS). The following summarizes the key points of the Chatham House Rule discussion.
By Siena Cicarelli and Erin Sikorsky
In 2021, NATO launched its Climate Change and Security Action Plan, which committed the alliance to mainstreaming climate security in its plans, posture, and international engagements. Since then, the Alliance has made notable progress in implementing the Action Plan, recently opening the Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence in Canada (CCASCOE) and building critical internal climate literacy throughout the Alliance.
This mirrors the institutional pathways used by other cross-cutting priorities like the WPS agenda, which has made significant inroads over the past 15+ years by leveraging binding UN Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) commitments and institutions like the Nordic Centre for Gender in Military Operations (NCGM) to elevate gender considerations within the Alliance. As a result, there is more cross-cutting gender and climate policy today than ever before, including the Alliance’s explicit recognition of “the compounding impacts of gender inequality, conflict, and climate change on women and girls, with implications for security.”
However, given the ongoing war in Ukraine and major political shifts amongst leading Allies, both these agendas face the risk of being deprioritized or sidelined. As the Alliance looks to 2025 and beyond, gender and climate advocates must be prepared to overcome the perception that there is a trade-off between tackling climate and WPS issues and more traditional “hard security” issues.
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“Now What?”Addressing the Climate-Gender-Security Nexus at NATO
By Siena Cicarelli and Cori Fleser
Edited by Francesco Femia and Erin Sikorsky
Introduction
At the 2021 Brussels Summit, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) endorsed its first-ever Climate Change and Security Action Plan,1 with the aim to “mainstream climate considerations into NATO’s political and military agenda.”2 The Action Plan focuses on four key areas – (1) awareness to understand the impact of climate change on NATO’s strategic environment, missions, and operations; (2) adaptation by incorporating climate considerations into NATO’s core tasks; (3) mitigation by helping Allies reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from their respective militaries; and (4) outreach with its partner countries, other international organizations, civil society, and industry to enhance the global response to climate change. Notably, NATO calls out the need to include gender perspectives as part of its climate change awareness efforts in the context of NATO’s Women, Peace and Security (WPS) policy.3 NATO began formally recognizing gender issues4 and environmental challenges5 in 1961 and 1969, respectively, but 2021 appears to be the first time NATO has officially acknowledged the intersection of these two global agendas, emphasizing the need for allied militaries to understand the “climate, gender, and security” nexus.
The climate, gender, and security nexus calls attention to “the linkages between climate change and conflict and how gender is a cross-cutting lens through which people experience both issues.”6 This nexus amplifies how the impacts of climate change, either slow-onset events like sea level rise and desertification or sudden-onset events like floods and droughts, have gendered implications for local populations and can also precipitate conflict that exacerbates existing gender inequality.7
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Event Summary: Implications for NATO of Climate Security Scenarios in the Balkans
An exercise conducted with the Halifax Peace with Women Fellowship 2023
By Lily Boland
On October 30, the Center for Climate and Security (CCS) led a scenario exercise on climate security for the new class of the Halifax Peace with Women Fellowship, which convenes senior female military leaders from NATO and partner countries for a 3-week executive tour of the political and technological capitals of the United States and Canada. The exercise sought to socialize a better understanding of how climate change hazards shape security risks in a region of importance to the NATO alliance (in this case, the Balkans) and help identify ways in which NATO, partner countries, and their militaries can better prepare for and prevent these risks. Participants included the fellows class along with officials from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of Force Education & Training and Office of Arctic and Global Resilience.
