The International Military Council on Climate and Security is pleased to welcome the Australian Security Policy Institute’s Climate and Security Policy Centre as an institutional partner. Led by Dr. Robert Glasser, the objectives of the ASPI Climate and Security Policy Centre include: evaluating the impact climate change will have on security in the Indo-Pacific region; developing practical, evidence-based policy recommendations and interventions to reduce climate change risks; increasing Australian and regional expertise, understanding and public awareness of the links between climate change and national security, and identifying the implications of these links for key Australian government stakeholders.
The Centre joins 16 other institutions who partner with IMCCS in a similar capacity.
Dr. Glasser and IMCCS Director Erin Sikorsky recently argued for a strong US-Australian partnership in this realm, in an article for The Strategist, “US and Australia Must Deepen Defence Cooperation on Climate Security.” An excerpt is included below:
“Though thousands of miles apart, Australia and the United States have shared unenviable climate-change-driven devastation in the past two years. The unprecedented drought, heatwaves and fires currently affecting the US and the 2019–20 Australian bushfires, which laid waste to an area larger than the State of Washington, are an indication of the challenges ahead in a warming climate.
As traumatic and deadly as these events have been for people in both countries, the impact of climate-driven disasters in the broader Indo-Pacific—a region at the core of both countries’ military planning and strategies—is likely to be even more devastating, with spillover effects on the security of both nations and their partners and allies.
Canberra and Washington have recently reaffirmed the importance of their defence cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, and while China certainly looms large in their thinking, it is increasingly clear that climate change, a threat that will ultimately amplify and eclipse all others on their risk horizons, must feature prominently in the bilateral defence relationship.”Read the full article here.