Australia’s defence and foreign policy settings are focused on geopolitical rivalry, while far greater systemic risks – especially climate disruption – receive little strategic attention.
Blinded to the greater risks, the Albanese Government and the security commentariat have spent four, unrelenting years making the case that China is the biggest threat to Australia’s future.
Defence and foreign policy, encapsulated in the AUKUS agreement, tie Australia to a nation currently engaged in what the historian Timothy Snyder calls “Superpower Suicide”: “a systematic undoing of American power by Americans” in which “fighting a war for no reason we can name, losing it, and covering our defeat with genocidal and apocalyptic propaganda” had led to ”rapid and catastrophic decline as the result of specific choices in the last year”.
The AUKUS cargo cult – with Labor, the LNP and One Nation marching arm in arm – means the Parliament and the nation have spent little time even considering what may be the greatest threats to our future.
In risk management, there are potential events so destructive that they are termed catastrophic because of their capacity for human death or suffering on a massive scale, such that societies may never fully recover. This may be called existential risk or in actuarial terms, the “risk of ruin”, which colloquially in financial and gambling circles is the risk of “losing everything”. Catastrophic events include nuclear war, climate change, biosecurity threats including pandemics, and disruptive digital technologies.
Every year the World Economic Forum surveys private and public sector global leaders on the big risks. The 2025 WEF Global Risk Report lists the ten most severe risks on a 10-year horizon. The top four, and five of the ten, are related to climate-change and nature degradation: extreme weather, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, critical change to Earth systems, natural resource shortages, and pollution.
Of the other five, three are digital disruption: misinformation and disinformation, adverse outcomes of AI technologies, and cyber espionage and warfare. Rounding out the top ten are inequality and social polarisation. State-based armed conflict and geoeconomic confrontation don’t make the top ten, though they are in short-term (two-year) listing.
So is China or climate disruption the biggest threat? Global leaders understand what the Australian Government denies.
What would climate-disruption look like on a geo-political scale, given the warming is accelerating and is likely to exceed 3 degrees Celsius? Two decades ago, American security analysts noted that “nonlinear climate change will produce nonlinear political events… beyond a certain level climate change becomes a profound challenge to the foundations of the global industrial civilisation that is the mark of our species”.
They produced a 3-degree scenario, in which “the internal cohesion of nations will be under great stress, including in the United States, both as a result of a dramatic rise in migration and changes in agricultural patterns and water availability. The flooding of coastal communities around the world, especially in the Netherlands, the United States, South Asia, and China, has the potential to challenge regional and even national identities. Armed conflict between nations over resources, such as the Nile and its tributaries, is likely and nuclear war is possible.”
In Chatham House’s Climate change risk assessment 2021, the security think-tank found that impacts likely to be locked in for the period 2040–50 unless emissions rapidly decline – which they are not – include a global average 30 per cent drop in crop yields by 2050, and the average proportion of global cropland affected by severe drought exceeding 30 per cent a year. They concluded that cascading climate impacts will “drive political instability and greater national insecurity, fuelling regional and international conflict”.
The consequences of climate disruption will strike everywhere. Last November, Iceland designated the potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) a national security concern and an existential threat, so that it could plan for worst-case scenarios and preventative action.
A disturbing new research paper finds it is likely that AMOC will have slowed by half this century, and scientists fear it is close to a tipping point. Peter Ditlevsen of the University of Copenhagen calls AMOC collapse a going-out-of-business scenario for north-west European agriculture. In addition, the monsoons that typically deliver rain to West Africa and South Asia would become unreliable, and huge swaths of Europe and Russia would plunge into drought.
AMOC collapse would challenge European foundations, including the viability of nations and states, and of the EU and NATO, moving climate from the realm of environmental and culture wars to the heart of the matter: human security, social breakdown, mass displacement and death.
And it is not a security threat par excellence in 50 years time, but right now, as the Icelandic Government has recognised, because systemic changes now under way will make such an outcome inevitable unless the world applies strategic focus, resources and collective political will to trying to avert such a catastrophe right now.
Yet a search of Hansard finds no mention of AMOC in either house of Australia’s Parliament, from any MP or Senator, over the term of the Albanese government. That is depressing, but not unexpected. The government ordered a climate and security risk assessment from the Office of National Intelligence when it came to power, and immediately suppressed the report, refusing to articulate ‘frankly terrifying’ security risks.
And of course AMOC is but one in an array of climate-security risks: the northern quarter of Australia – where the government is spending billions upgrading military bases – will become unliveably hot in three or four decades from now. And declining crop yields: researchers estimate that beyond 2°C warming, which is perhaps only 15 years away, “the declines in suitable areas for the 30 crops [analysed] become more pronounced – in some cases approaching and passing 50 per cent”. That in itself would cause global chaos. There are scores more, including Himalayan water wars, mass people displacement, and drowned states.
A recognition that climate poses an existential – and perhaps the most pressing – risk to Australians’ future would mean that any Australian foreign policy, defence or strategic review would place it at the centre of concern. Instead the government has done the opposite, barely giving climate a token tick in such recent documents.
Epitomised by the tedious performances of the Defence Minister, Australia is doggedly pressing on with its “America first, Earth last” strategy. But this moment requires clarity about the existential nature of the climate threat to humanity’s future; and a collective regional commitment to strategic action.
David Spratt is Research Director for Breakthrough – National Centre for Climate Restoration