Every tenth of a degree in global warming matters for international security - German foreign min
Clean Energy Wire
The climate crisis is “the biggest security crisis of our time,” said German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock at the Berlin Climate and Security Conference 2024 (BCSC). “It is worthwhile fighting for every tenth of a degree of minimising global warming, especially in terms of global security,” she added. The German government regards climate action not as a matter of environmental protection and the technologies needed to move to climate neutrality but as one that is also about challenges to security. The minister said projections showed that a global temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius could push almost 190 million additional people into hunger. “Not a small number, but to a certain extent manageable in light of the total population,” she said. In a world with 4 degrees of warming, this figure would increase to 1.8 billion people.
The conference, organised by the foreign office and think tank Adelphi, brought together climate and security experts from across the globe. Baerbock also presented a new Climate—Conflict—Vulnerability Index, which maps current global risks by integrating climate and conflict hazards with local vulnerabilities. Ole Diehl, vice president of the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND), said analysts at the service have “for a long time” focused on the “huge impact” that climate change has on conflicts in the world, for instance on migration, poverty, stability and energy security. Two years ago, the BND established its own team to organise the work on climate. “In the past, when I talked to intelligence services around the world, there was one giant common enemy we could talk about, which was terrorism,” said Diehl. “I am trying more and more to now talk about climate as a security issue with partners around the world.” Diehl said Germany was lagging far behind the U.S. intelligence services on this issue.
The nexus of climate change and security policy has been a focus of the German government already for several years. The country’s first-ever National Security Strategy, presented in 2023, said that exceeding the 1.5 degrees temperature limit of the Paris Climate Agreement globally would jeopardise the prospect of living in security and prosperity. In its Climate Foreign Policy Strategy, the government said it aims to strengthen the climate and security nexus, for example through pushing the topic in the UN and other organisations.
