2026: The Impact of Climate Change and Demography

P6 Transcript

Kate Guy:
All right. Hello, everyone. We get to start fresh this morning with some nice, sunny, happy news about climate change.

So, we were hearing about the simulation that you've run the past few days, and foolishly, I assumed you had solved the conflict and saved the world and, you know, done everything you need to do to get us on track. Certainly, what we're about to talk about now will not add to the happy outlook ahead, but we're very excited to be here with you, particularly as practitioners, particularly as people who deal much more on the side of conflict resolution. Very often, I would say probably all of us are in the sort of climate realm, talking with climate folks, negotiating on climate things, but increasingly, those issues are bleeding out of the cop rooms and the spaces where it's just, you know, people arguing over commas and into the real world, which is where you are.

And so, very, very excited to talk with these experts about that, but then also hear from you about what you see, how you're seeing climate impacts and climate issues come up in your work, and just learn back and forth from each other. So, we're going to try to make this very interactive and really, I don't know, spicy. We'll see.

Okay. So, as was said, I'm Kate Guy. I'm here at SIPA relatively newly, coming out of the Biden administration, where I was working on these issues at the State Department.

I now research, basically, the intersection of climate conflict geopolitics between the Institute of Global Politics, which is here on 15th floor, and the Center on Global Energy Policy. So, very happy to talk about a whole range of issues in that. And the three experts here with me are really some of the top folks in this field.

It is a growing field, I would say, bigger than it used to be. But Scott, Erin, and Ulrich have all been working on these topics for years, and so we're not coming to this fresh and new, but really have a depth and breadth on the intersection of these issues that few do. So, really, really privileged and honored to be here with each of them.

I'll let them introduce themselves as we go down the line and start, Ulrich, with you down at the end. So, feel free to introduce yourself, where you're coming from, a little bit. But thought you might start with the basics, the 101.

How do we see climate, climate impacts, increasing severe weather, everything that's bundled up into the massive issues that is climate change, interacting with conflict increasingly across the world?

Ulrich Eberle:
Wonderful. Thank you, Kate. Good morning, everyone.

I'm Ulrich. I recently made the transition from the policy space. I was with the International Crisis Group, working on climate security issues.

Now I'm in the private sector, so all my views are my own, not the ones of my employer. And I hope to provide you an overview of these different fields. I also worked on this issue academically, so give you a flavor of it.

And hopefully you get a sense of what climate security is, what the problems are, and what the policy responses look like. To start with, climate security is essentially situations in which climate versus security, and that can happen through multiple pathways, multiple channels. Before we get into the detail, usually the way climate is considered, it's a threat multiplier.

It worsens the existing security threat. And on the climate side, we usually talk about that from a hazard perspective. So the drought impact in Somalia on local resource competition or the flooding in South Sudan over the last five years that flooded good amounts of the country, displaced hundreds of thousands of people, also including herding communities that went from the country's north to the south where they got caught up in pre-existing tensions.

And here I think in this example, it also becomes clear that it's not just climate, right? There's a lot of other things going on. Politics matter.

Local and national and also regional economic incentives do matter. And in this example from South Sudan, if you would just look at the conflict incident, just look at some conflict data, it looks like, oh, there's local resource competition, right? But it goes much deeper.

In South Sudan, we don't have time to cover all of it, but the short version is that there is elite incentives. There is ethnic division between farming and herding communities. The conflict goes a long time back.

And partly also some elites are parking money into cattle ranging. It's a country that has a high degree of insecurity already. And climate and often through the lens of resources, natural resources like water, livestock, land, is interacting with those existing tensions and problems.

And so that's just to say also maybe think about the solutions. A lot of the programming, peace building has been done at the local level. But obviously in this example, it's clear that it goes much deeper, right?

And I think we'll hear about this later, I think as well. There have been more regional initiatives. Also a lot of discussion globally at the UN Security Council and at the COP conferences.

With that, maybe just one more point to mention. I already said that climate can affect conflict through different pathways. I won't go into the detail of all of it.

But I think one last point is that we shouldn't just narrowly think about this as a drought versus a conflict. It's much more nuanced. There's much more detail to it.

One example from Latin America and also parts of Central America where gangs are jumping in in poorly governed regions, providing aid after flooding, after disaster relief essentially. And that's to win hearts and minds. It doesn't look like a security threat in the first place, but it has something to do with the shifting set of power sharing in the region nationally as well.

And so we need to think about this a little bit broader. And also when looking at the COP, the climate financing discussion, it's less about how climate affects conflict, but rather how we deal with climate change in fragile settings. So as you can imagine, it's a very diverse discussion.

Many different policy spaces. Also in part, I think that's what complicates the policy responses because so many different incentives are involved.

Kate Guy:
Thank you. One question back to you on that already to sort of follow up. So you're saying it's more nuanced and more multivariate than just climate influencing conflict.

Do you also see the inverse relationship, which is conflict exacerbating the climate impacts themselves, making what people feel in a disaster moment more acute because of existing tensions and conflict?

Ulrich Eberle:
I mean, definitely. I think just looking at climate financing numbers in fragile states, the amount of financing available per capita is about only a third compared to less fragile countries. That means there is simply less money to prepare for climate change and react to it.

And what that means is that we have places like in South Sudan where we did our research where there's very little financing entering, has a host of reasons. In part, it is because there are no institutions or very little institutions that can absorb these multi-year funding cycles. There is not the technical skill often there or not the governance there to do so.

And also from a climate financing point of view, there is more risk involved. You could put money on something that gets used for that, used for negatively. It could exacerbate an issue.

There's much more hesitation to put money there, but I think a lot has been achieved in the last couple of years to make the case that this is exactly the right investment that you should be doing because you're not just addressing climate change. You also address or can address, if it's done the right way, some of the local tensions and build more capacity, especially locally.

Kate Guy:
I think we'll come back to the working in fragile settings aspect of this because it's so much of the conversation. But Erin, I wanted to turn to you. Erin, you come from a more, I don't know, we can say traditional security background working in the intelligence sector and you spend so much of your days now really engaging with the defense military intelligence side of the equation, not just the humanitarian sort of diplomatic that you were just talking about.

How does that community see these issues and what is increasingly the priorities for the hard security folks?

Erin Sikorsky:
Yeah. Thanks, Kate. And thanks all of you for being here.

It's nice memories for me. I graduated from SIPA many years ago and I always love coming up here because of the view. I lead the Center for Climate and Security, which is a research institute of the Council on Strategic Risks based in Washington, D.C. And we're a security organization that looks at how climate is reshaping the national security landscape. And as Kate mentioned, I worked in the U.S. intelligence community for a long time, initially not on these issues at all. I worked on counterterrorism, but as Ulrich was just describing, I saw time and again how climate environment issues intersected with things like Al-Shabaab in Somalia, for example, and got more interested in it and ended up here. But to your question, Kate, I mean, I think, look, there's a few different ways that military and security actors experience and understand climate threats.

One is just the very direct impacts of extreme weather and climate hazards themselves on critical infrastructure, on military operations, on bases. You know, naval bases are on coasts, obviously, as sea levels rise and you have things like sunny day flooding, right, with tide patterns and whatnot. That affects costs.

It affects ability to deploy. It affects infrastructure. It affects the ability of your soldiers to get to base, for example.

If you're in a community with a lot of wildfires, right, the soldiers can't get to base. That also affects militaries in that they're the ones often being deployed to respond to these hazards increasingly, right? We run something at the center called the Military Response to Climate Hazards Tracker or MiRCH.

It has an acronym like everything in Washington. And I think we're at about, over the past couple years, 500 instances of military deployments in nearly 200 countries around the world, right, looking to respond to wildfires, to floods, to droughts, all the time, to the point where the National Guard in the United States has said, we don't have a fire season. We have fire years, right?

And even the National Defense Authorization Bill, which is a must-pass piece of legislation in the United States every year, it's actually one piece of legislation that actually passes Congress regularly, even in this political environment, included language around preparing the National Guard and the Army to be more proactive in their wildfire response. So that's something that's on the front of mind for militaries. And some militaries are starting to change how they think about these things.

Spain, for example, starting in 2005, created a new division within its military for disaster response. That's their entire job. It's not an extra duty on top of everything else that they do.

It's core mission for their military. And I bring up Spain because I think right now one thing to think about a lot is within Europe and within NATO especially, there's a lot of discussion about defense spending, right? They've all committed to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP.

And a key part of that conversation and debate within the alliance has been how much of that can be toward resilience, toward investments in climate adaptation that enables defense and security, right? 1.5% of that's supposed to be toward resilience generally, but some countries have argued it should be even higher than that because how can you deploy new equipment? How can you send troops into battle if your roads are washed out after an extreme storm or your trucks fail because they're not prepared to deal with high temperatures?

And so I think that conversation is really live right now amongst NATO countries. And I think something we'll see growing as countries experience more extreme weather events and populations expect their governments to be able to respond and manage it. And at the same time, countries face increasing conflict threats and geopolitical competition and fracturing of the international environment.

So navigating that will be challenging. The last thing I'll say for now is that one thing I'm increasingly focused on is how countries are leveraging extreme weather and climate against their adversaries and competitors. Because I think you're seeing more and more taking advantage, if you will, of this.

And I'll give you a couple examples. Russia, for example, in Ukraine has leveraged drones to start wildfires many places across the country and leveraging extreme dryness, heat, and then after the wildfires start targeting emergency responders. So using that extreme weather as an opportunity on the battlefield to go after their adversary.

Similarly, in the disinformation space, you see bad actors leveraging extreme weather events to try and undermine democratic governance, to try to sow instability and conflict. Russia, again, in Poland a few years ago after Storm Boris, which was extreme precipitation, Russia launched a disinformation campaign that was blaming the government, the Polish government, for the crisis trying to undermine relationships there. Then the same thing in the United States after Hurricane Helene a few years ago, Russia launched a disinformation campaign blaming all the spending the US had been doing in Ukraine.

This was why communities in the Carolinas weren't getting the resources they needed because the government had been spending all their money on Ukrainian weapons. And then you have other actors too, extreme right groups and others that pick up those messages and run with it. And I think you're going to see more and more of that, and it will affect militaries and security actors and their ability to operate on the battlefield.

There are opportunities there too, I think, for the good guys, and we can talk about that later, but I'll pause there.

Kate Guy:
We can come back to that. One thing that I want to just sort of bring back to you is essentially what you're describing from a military perspective is just increased vulnerability, increased space for things to go wrong, for attack, for coercion, for everything that militaries normally deal with, just more of it, and everywhere all at once. So do you see those security actors, obviously the response and the need for immediately responding to the events is there.

And I really encourage you all to look at the merge platform that she talked about. It's a terrifying map of just a recent few years in time, looking at all of the deployments that have been necessary to respond to those events is, even for me who works in this, I was looking at the other day, quite stunning. But do you see that same sort of stunning level of deployment in preparedness, in advance of these new vulnerabilities and understanding them and responding to them in order to sort of prevent or lessen the need for response?

Erin Sikorsky:
Yeah. Alas, no. I think there's a recognition and there are like baby steps happening towards some of that preparedness.

And that's, I mean, the example I brought up from the National Defense Authorization Bill was trying to get it exactly that, you know, tasking the military to be better prepared to be proactive in planning and all of that. But look, I mean, militaries themselves are not the ones that are going to do all of the adaptation necessary to manage this as well, just because you identify it as a security threat for militaries. We're not making it the military's problem to solve climate adaptation and resilience.

Right. So you need to think about it as a whole of government approach. What are the investments that need to be made?

Which is why I think this conversation about the defense spending piece and NATO is so important. And there really need to be strong advocates for thinking about defense more holistically and thinking about how resilience fits into that. And I do think there are some movements in that direction, but it's hard.

And I think there's still too much kind of siloed thinking where it's like, well, either we deal with what we need to do to manage the Ukraine crisis or we deal with climate change and not seeing how to bridge that gap. Which I think will be an ongoing challenge.

Kate Guy:
Thanks. So, Scott, Erin brought us to this fun, difficult layer of great power competition. Right.

Or just power competition broadly, because it might not just look among the greats and be among many states. You are an expert on that. As well as being an expert on climate and climate policy, you also have for many years studied China and studied their system and their influence and reputation and how they interact with many other states.

So how do you see that system level interaction among states in the age of climate change? How do you see that now? And how do you see that going forward?

Scott Moore:
Well, thanks, Kate. I acknowledge that would also be a great question to ask all of you in this room, because many of you will have, I think, very well-informed answers to versions of that question. And I should also just say, having looked at the program for your week here, it looks fantastic, the range of issues that you all have covered.

Are you jealous? Do you want to join? A little bit.

If we could actually switch, anybody volunteer, switch places, especially ahead of the receptions, the dinners. But in some seriousness, I recognize that you all have a ton of experience with certainly geopolitics, as well as aspects of the climate equation. And I hope our conversation can bring in your backgrounds, as well as some of the things you've heard about in other sessions this week.

Okay, so China and climate change. And I actually want to kind of start in that conversation by offering a tiny bit of good news when it comes to climate change, or maybe a better way of putting it is a more optimistic than average framing of some things related to climate change. The news is generally bad.

However, if you go back a decade or so ago, one really striking thing about our climate and energy pathway that the world has been on over the last decade is that clean energy technology, especially wind and solar have scaled way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way faster than any kind of sober minded person would have thought possible a decade ago. Which is to say that the proportion of energy that we're getting from renewable, usually either very low or no carbon sources is a lot higher than a lot of people thought was possible a decade or so ago, with generally beneficial implications for our emissions. Now, that doesn't change the fact that we're still in a really bad way when it comes to the impacts of climate change, and we can talk about that.

But viewed from that perspective, you know, there's sort of some good news. Why did that happen? Well, there are several reasons, but I would argue that the biggest one are the economies of scale in clean energy production that resulted from the concentration of manufacturing in key clean energy technologies in China, especially starting around 2010 or so and extending into the present.

And basically, if you take any really significant clean energy technology, Chinese firms are the dominant producers, 60% of electric vehicles, 80% of wind turbines, 90 plus percent of solar panels. So, if you kind of look at the ecosystem of things that we need to reduce emissions, or at least the best available ways that we have to reduce emissions right now, China is the key producer. And what that reflects is a very, very deliberate decision starting in around 2007 to use industrial policy tools to prioritize the development of those sectors in China.

And again, simply because of the scale of both those industrial policy supports and the economies of scale that China was able to realize because of its concentration of the downstream parts of manufacturing in those sectors, we got those technologies to be available both for domestic deployment as well as export at considerably lower price points than people anticipated. There are a whole bunch of buts which we can get to, and I think should, including the fact that obviously, as all of this was occurring, China's overall energy system is generally about 60% coal-fired power generation. So, it's not the case that this concentration of manufacturing capacity resulted in a sudden displacement of coal.

That has happened, but much more slowly than was the case. Also true that a lot of that industrial policy is extremely controversial, and I'll come back to that on sort of economic trade practice, fairness, intellectual property, and other grounds. So, there are lots of reasons to sort of complicate the picture, but if we're just thinking about what's happened with our emissions pathways and particularly the relationship of that to where we're getting our energy, China's decision starting in around 2007 to prioritize these sectors played a really important role.

Now, the other thing, of course, to be said, and this was really the premise of Kate's question, is that as all of this has unfolded over the last 15 or so years, the world has changed a lot. We used to be in a position where large trade balances, and in particular, large trade surpluses with China were relatively uncontroversial, as was some degree of policy cooperation and coordination. That has dramatically changed, especially for the United States, to some degree, also the European Union and a few other countries, primarily in the global north.

I think there are three kind of questions related to China and climate that will determine a lot of where we head from here, and I won't answer these questions. I'll just briefly state them. I think, first of all, is China willing or able to significantly increase the ambition of its emissions reduction commitments?

So, China has committed to achieving net zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2060, but the scale of China's emissions are so great that the speed of how quickly, basically the slope of the curve between now and 2060 matters a lot. Lately, China's commitments have disappointed most analysts on the ambition of the slope of that curve, due in no small part, by the way, to the U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Second, will China be willing to assume a larger share of climate finance?

Historically, the answer has been no, but I think there are some reasons to think it to this. If we want a decade from now, the answer may be different, and I can explain why I think that particular timeframe is significant. The third and final thing, which comes back to the industrial policy model that supported these economies of scale and clean energy technology, will other, particularly industrialized countries, essentially tolerate the fact that Chinese firms control the vast majority of the value chain for these clean energy technologies.

So, it's the case that for electric vehicles, Chinese firms are pretty vertically integrated across the supply chain, and basically what that means is it doesn't leave a lot of room under the current model for other countries to grab parts of that value chain. So, are other countries going to be content to be importing large quantities of Chinese manufactured clean energy technologies, whether it's EVs or solar panels or wind turbines or electrolyzers for hydrogen production, for example, while not really being able to have a good way to grab some of that value for their own economic reasons? So, in other words, is there a big political economic backlash coming in the emerging markets similar to what we've seen here in the U.S. and other places, and how would that affect the speed and scale of clean energy diffusion around the world? The last thing just to add to that is the Hormuz crisis has obviously complicated all of this, too. I don't think we know exactly how things will shake out. There's a lot of reason to think that this will actually, at least in the short run, significantly increase the uptake of Chinese manufactured clean energy technology.

But again, over the medium and long run, I think there are reasons to think that the picture may be more complicated.

Kate Guy:
So on that last point, Naren and I were in a meeting yesterday that included the top sort of scenario planning lead for Shell, a big oil and gas company. And he said, looking at the preliminary data these last three months post or during, I guess, Hormuz crisis, the data has worn out really only good for clean energy technologies and manufacturing and purchasing and like more of a wash when it comes to the fossil fuel side. So I thought that was very interesting.

There's a big debate sort of going on right now of like, is this going to be good for clean energy transition or bad because, you know, build out of pipelines and alternate routes for some of these fossil fuels, at least now, at least as of where we sit a couple months in, the oil and gas guys are saying, yes, they're making a ton of money, but they also are seeing that transition accelerate. So it's an interesting thing. But I want to sit in that tension a little bit with all of you.

Erin, much of that sort of supply chain domination that Scott just described is like a red flaring security risk for some of the defense actors. And that certainly from a U.S. perspective, but in Europe, increasingly in many middle power and developing country, actors are like, do we want to trade one dependency on the Gulf, on Russia, on whatever for energy sources to another dependency on China? And what technological risk is coming along with that?

What potential coercive risk is coming along with that? So how do we can go to all three of you, maybe starting with Erin. Like, how do you see that tension?

Is it better to go to renewable sources that potentially you control, don't have to go through choke points, don't whatever, but take on that risk of Chinese sort of ownership of the supply chain? Or is it better to sort of find energy security through a variety of other reasons or ways, sources, even if that is like potentially fossil fuel mix?

Erin Sikorsky:
Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, my answer to your question is, yes, it's better to go to renewables and figure out ways to manage the risks vis-a-vis China and their control of certain parts of the supply chain. I think it's important to distinguish that there are two different types of risk, right?

It's a stock versus a flow, first of all. You know, oil and gas is a flow. Clean energy inputs are stock.

So it's different. And I think you need to disaggregate the different pieces of the puzzle. I mean, are we really worried about Chinese manufacture of solar panels or is it more particular pieces of the clean energy supply chain?

And I would argue that not a lot of, frankly, good analysis has been done yet on some of those different risks and how to manage them. There are definitely security challenges of moving away from fossil fuels, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. It just means we need to understand and identify and manage them.

I think too often that like, well, it's the China risk is so big we can't possibly do it is used as an excuse. And I don't want to dismiss it completely, but also, you know, everyone has a cell phone here, but like everyone in the Pentagon has a cell phone, right? Everyone has a laptop.

Those all include things that are manufactured in China. And we have accepted that level of risk. And so I think you need to be sophisticated in how you compare the two.

But I also think that's a reason to accelerate, you know, domestic development of some of these technologies and why in the United States, the rollback of a lot of the Inflation Reduction Act provisions is such a geopolitical, I don't know, own goal is my 13 year old who's sitting outside this room would say, right, that that you need to be able to make those big investments. And some of the things the last thing I'll say is some of the things I think we're currently worried about around battery technology, for example. I mean, things are developing so fast and they could develop so fast with new technologies.

If we put money into these investments, maybe we don't care about lithium, you know, five years from now. I don't know. Or we could make it so we don't have to care about lithium.

And that's another way to manage this. So I don't want to dismiss the concerns. But I also think we can't just throw up our hands and say, well, we can't do it because China controls it.

Like, come on, we can figure it out.

Kate Guy:
Ulrich, Scott, do you agree? Do you agree that it's a manageable risk? Manageable risk?

Domination of the clean energy supply chain?

Ulrich Eberle:
Do you have anything to offer? You want to go first?

Scott Moore:
Well, it's boring to say I agree, but so maybe I should try to find something to really disagree with.

Kate Guy:
That's not your case.

Scott Moore:
So I actually sort of think so. You know, it's interesting, at least in the US, but I think to some degree, like Europe as well, like the definition of security has like just ballooned over, you know, I don't know how you would define it, but let's say like the last 10 years. And, you know, historically, and this matters a lot for technology, because for like particularly things like export controls, historically, security had a very specific kind of definition and way that, you know, thing that that meant, and it was national security, it was military use.

In contemporary, you know, parlance, and especially with regard to clean energy, like the definition of security has like, vastly expanded, where oftentimes when we're talking about even national security, what we really mean is economic security. And I would argue that the big part of the China clean energy security risk is economic security, not national security. So it's true, for example, that, you know, solar panels and things like that, could have some cybersecurity vulnerabilities, but, you know, ask yourself, if you really wanted to, like, you know, start a war, would you start by hacking solar panels like there are so many, like better ways to gain an advantage over an adversary.

So I think stuff like that is just really silly. I do think though, there is a there is an economic, you know, kind of security argument. And there is sort of a related supply chain vulnerability argument to say, well, if you do move to an energy system that is, you know, much more reliant on, let's say, solar panels, for example, and your suppliers are all based in China, it is a vulnerability to then say, like, if there's a conflict or a dispute or whatever, then, you know, theoretically, you lose your entire source of supply, which you do need over long timescales, you need to, you know, replace solar panels, for example, even though they're fairly, they're not that maintenance intensive.

So it's not totally, you know, ridiculous, I think, to say that there are security vulnerabilities around it. But I think the strongest argument for not relying on particularly China or any other, you know, supplier for that matter, is economic and sort of supply chain based rather than like, national security in a more conventional sense.

Kate Guy:
All right, as a resident economist, what do you think about all this?

Ulrich Eberle:
So I think there is often the argument to say, well, you know, we don't really have time and money for reducing emissions, we need to make sure that, you know, energy is secure. And I think in Europe, that was very visible. My home country, Germany, switching to, not switching, but adding LNG to the mix, which is sort of not really fitting into the longer term ambition.

And there's all good reasons for it. And I think the language has also softened around, you know, that certain places that have coal, maybe rely on it more. I just want to anchor, and I'm not saying that this is my position, but I just want to anchor this in the current context, we have the War in the Gulf and the Persian Gulf, we have the Strait of Hormuz, pretty effectively still more or less closed, a lot of energy not coming out of it, talking all the total gas, we're talking a lot of other products like fertilizers that, you know, affect agriculture around the world. At the same time, we do have an El Nino, and I won't talk about this, if that's the only climate thing you take away from today, that's something to watch out when you read the news. There's a good likelihood, a good chance that an El Nino will form.

And what that means is that some places will see more rainfall, some places will see less rainfall. It will get definitely hot towards the end of this year and next year, if that El Nino should happen. And so we have, anchoring this back into the climate security discussion, these conflicts often play out, we have this overlapping and partly interacting crisis happening, more important, you know, fuel prices, you know, puts pressure on farming, higher diesel prices, etc.

higher fertilizer prices at the same time, climate pressure, you know, with me, which means like in some parts of the world, we'll see more drought over the next year, probably. And that puts a lot of pressure on the local economies, national economies. And that is all sort of on the happening on top of the funding cuts that we saw over the last two years.

And so just want to highlight, even though there's still, you know, could not be an El Nino, it still could be all relatively fine. I think in this moment where a lot of things could go wrong. And the result will be potentially, you know, some places will see more conflict will make the argument for, you know, focusing more on security and energy security, because you can then probably even less rely on trade if another strike is shut down, for whatever reason, I'm just rambling a little bit.

But if you play this route, that's sort of what we saw over the last couple years. And the fact is, climate change is still going to be around these El Nino, La Nina phenomena that affect different parts of the world and other hazards, such as, you know, it's not just droughts and floods, also the wildfire season that is affected by that. They will still continue happening, they're not happening tomorrow, they already happened today.

And the cases that I mentioned earlier, the Afghanistan's and the South Sudan's, they're already sort of living a future that we will to some extent, we have different adaptation technologies, but to some extent, we'll see these extremes in many other places. So I think for me, it's not really a question. And often it's a timeline argument.

It's not really about like, oh, we can't really, we don't have the time to do emissions now. It needs to be done now as well, because technology, it seems like everyone relies on that as an answer. It's an important piece of the puzzle, but everything that is baked in and emissions will affect us over the next 5, 10, 15 years, before you see that impact of technology kicking in.

So that's just one point on the reality.

Erin Sikorsky:
No, I'm glad you brought that up, Ulrich, because I think it's important in the context of competition with China, too, to not only talk about clean energy and mitigation, but also the adaptation piece. And I think this is something I think about in the security realm a lot is, right, countries that understand what trajectory we're on, and recognize that even if you cut all emissions tomorrow, we've got warming baked in because of the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, that you need to be able to be prepared for that. And you see, I think right now, China on a much more realistic understanding of the trajectory we're going and making adaptation and resilience investments that are attuned to that.

Whereas now you have in the United States, for example, a Secretary of Defense who says we don't do climate change crap, excuse my language. And we just, you know, what was it, just yesterday or two days ago, we dismantled a key ocean monitoring system, you know, all the cuts to science you see in the US. All of that, to me, is creating a huge security vulnerability and blinding us to the risks that we face.

And so I think, you know, again, when you think about competition, I mean, Kate, you worked on a great report at the State Department when you were there, that had a really interesting case study about how climate change might affect a contingency, a conflict contingency over Taiwan between the US and China, and how it might blind if you had extreme storms, right, might blind communication of one side or the other, right, might lead to different escalation dynamics, right, countries that are gaming that out, thinking about how these extreme weather and and climate impacts will affect conflict, I think we'll be in a much, much better place. And again, from a geopolitical point, I see the US definitely on its back foot.

Scott Moore:
I really need to find something to like really disagree with. I have some ideas. Okay, good.

But I just wanted to like say one more thing, like a yes and, and I thought this would be maybe particularly of interest to many of you as diplomats. So one thing that I think is pretty clear, like, you know, if you spend time in government is that most countries care about climate change. They do see it as a threat.

And, you know, a kind of key factor shaping economic and political strategy, which is another way of saying they want to talk about it. And that is particularly true for a really key set of countries for the United States, the Pacific Island states. I've been doing a lot of work looking at China's climate diplomatic engagements across a long period of time.

And one thing that is pretty apparent is that the degree of engagement with the Pacific Island countries has increased very dramatically over time, for reasons that I don't think have to do with climate change, they have much more to do with diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. But what is I certainly to some degree, but I think what is also clear is that China is very deliberate about always talking about climate change in its engagements with the Pacific Island countries, which is I would note quite different from its diplomatic engagements with other country groups. It is a specific kind of audience segmentation strategy, and one which makes a lot of sense.

But, you know, to Erin's point, like the United States has, you know, totally lost the ability to accomplish audience segmentation with respect to climate content. And I do think that creates a very significant diplomatic disadvantage, particularly in certain regions of the world.

Kate Guy:
Super interesting. I'm really interested to see that that research when it comes out, because it is hard always to like sort of look into the Chinese system and say, this is what they care about, this is what they don't, this is what they're prioritizing, this is what you don't. But in their interactions with other countries, you can increasingly see that you can see what they're planning ahead for to Erin's point, what they are, what, you know, the diplomatic sort of narratives they are using to advance their priorities, all the rest.

So I wanted one more sort of lightning round down here, and then we'll open it up. And you don't need to disagree with each other, but you would not allow to say the same thing as the other person said, not that you have done that at all. But what I'm really interested in the context for this group is how we might see these dynamics, be they, you know, the clean energy, or sorry, climate impacts or clean energy competition or whatever, we've just, you know, broadly been speaking about changing the very nature of conflict itself in the next few decades, right?

We are in this moment where the existing UN architecture is being brought to new lows in terms of funding, the humanitarian side is increasingly unable to keep up with the pace of disasters, the, you know, security budgets are getting increasingly plussed up, it looks like we're entering into a new era of instability of which the climate crisis is just one or potentially multiple strands of instability.

So how would you be sort of thinking about preparing this in the next generation of folks working in conflict resolution to deal with new things that they haven't seen before? Yeah, please.

Ulrich Eberle:
All right.

Kate Guy:
First mover advantage.

Ulrich Eberle:
First mover advantage. I think Erin already brought it up, the strategic element of climate change in conflict, it can be a tool of extortion, it can be an instrument of pain for denying access to resources and all these things. And the information environment is very important.

And I think in the current environment with less funding, and facing increasingly bigger challenges, and the military really the only place where, you know, there seems to be at least when it comes to funding, there is a, you know, much, much more possible. And that's probably good in some ways, and probably bad in many other ways. I think the way we can still make a difference and also going back to the research is really through information on disasters.

Over the last five, 10 years, we have seen such a boom in technology on you know, satellite analysis, and it's a lot big part of my work. When I started, we had 200 kilometer resolution data, now we're having 30 centimeter that just gives you a sense of what's possible, what we can remotely sense and observe. And all the lot of the climate hazard monitoring and forecasting involves exactly that technology.

Now we got AI, all of that can be done cheaper and be brought to a broader audience. And I think even if you know, programming is limited, you know, information has become cheaper at the same time and we have seasonal forecasts that go one to nine months or six months out. They're really good.

And Columbia does a lot of good work on that. IRI, wonderful work on seasonal forecasting that can be used to inform smarter policies and smarter programming on anticipatory action, for example, to bring resources to places likely affected or to move communities before a flood is affecting a region. And I think that I see as a critical point strengthening the information side, especially since with funding cuts, a lot of the knowledge is lost.

Unfortunately, NGOs have less space to do work. Also in governments, a lot of the expertise is unfortunately gone. So using the information, a smart way to allocate resources to have more effective programming, I think is the key to do hopefully more with less.

Kate Guy:
All right. So we've got two for there. We've got more strategic risk, more sort of weaponization, coercion risk, but we also have potentially a lot more opportunity with increases in technology and AI to have better foresight and better analysis of risks that are coming.

Erin, you want to jump in?

Erin Sikorsky:
Yeah, I would say one change is the geography of conflict. And I think a lot of times the climate security conversation has focused on places that are already highly vulnerable, already highly unstable, right? And you layer climate on top and it makes things worse, which is absolutely true.

But I'm expecting over the next 10 to 20 years to see more instability and risks of conflict in places where we might not expect it, including in Western Europe, in the United States, as conflict or strain on resources grows, as disinformation about the sources of the extreme weather events grow, right, and as governments are challenged in responding. And you see this in bits and pieces already, right? You've had protests in France in recent years over water and private control of water resources in the United States.

You've seen groups like the Proud Boys and other extreme right groups try to exploit government inability to respond to water shortages in the West. And so I just think expanding our viewpoint and perspective and challenging our assumptions about where climate security risks lie will be really important to be able to be prepared and get ahead of this.

Scott Moore:
So one sort of global thing and then one region-specific thing. The global thing is, I do think the Hormuz crisis is going to have a really, you know, sustained kind of implication for energy systems around the world. And in particular, it's going to push governments around the world to do two things.

One, to electrify their economies to the greatest possible extent so that you're not dependent on kind of isolated stocks of fuels. And the other thing is to try to reduce, as Erin said, there's sort of, you know, stocks and flows with energy sources to reduce the flows as much as possible, which mostly means, you know, lower or no carbon sources. That has obvious, I think, implications for major oil and gas producers and things like that.

The regional thing is, you know, I think one of the issues with climate and particularly like political senior decision makers is it's so, like, you know, macro scale in its implications. But and here's back to the bad news on climate. We're now, like, getting a pretty good sense of what the bad stuff is going to look like very specifically.

And it's things like the shutdown of the Atlantic Mariadonal Overturning Circulation. I think I pronounced that right. The Atlantic Current System.

Which is why Europe is way warmer and wetter than it should be based on its latitude. That goes away. That's a huge hit to Europe's agriculture, totally transforms the way people live.

The building stock is going to be totally out, you know, outdated. The Emerald Isle will no longer be so emerald. There's a lot there.

And I think those kind of implications regionally that we're starting, you know, are really coming into, I think, sharper focus are also really worth trying to drill down on and sort of, you know, interrogate as to what exactly are the implications for conflict and hopefully for resolution.

Kate Guy:
Sharper focus, but also potentially tighter timelines, right? Like AMOC is a good example. That's the Atlantic Current System.

Maybe it wouldn't collapse entirely in the near term, but weakening could certainly happen within the next few decades and thresholds could be crossed. That sort of makes it a done deal for collapse much sooner than we thought. So maybe last quick question to all of you and then get your thoughts ready because I'm going to come to you.

How should these security decision makers be thinking about the timelines of these threats, the imminency of these threats, what to prepare for? I mean, we've talked about many different things from water to resources, to electrification, to energy security and supply, to tipping points. It's a lot of bad on the table.

Like what is most important to respond to soonest if you're going to try to blunt some of the most extreme security risks?

Ulrich Eberle:
Well, that's a big question for a two minute answer. I think one point you already started unpacking is that some of the circulations, including for El Nino, there's a lot of things we don't understand yet. We increasingly do and there's a lot of nuance to it.

So for example, the hurricane season during El Nino will be probably sealed up about three less hurricanes in the US, but more in the Pacific, right? And because we're reaching some of these points, it becomes sometimes harder to rely on what used to be the normal because it's been a different climate already, right? And we feel that to some extent, summers are getting hotter with a very hot winter as well in the US.

But it also means that we will see probably much more erratic behavior, much more disasters that were just not normal. And that's back to my point that we do need that monitoring capacity to really understand where these disasters are heading, which ones we need to reply to. And then going back to sort of the climate security context, when we did the research in South Sudan, we talked to local communities.

And I think there it became clear that if better information would be available, people make use of it. Because it means in the end, if you can plant a hat and plant the right crop, because there's going to be more drought pressure, you can coordinate with your community and everyone benefits from it. And I think, again, going back to that point, while there's a lot of technological opportunity, it also means that to some extent, we also need to understand how the climate has already changed, will continue changing in terms of timelines to your question.

A lot of this stuff is already happening now, right? It's not certain for some stuff what will happen, which hazards get worse. For some, it's pretty clear it will get hotter, right?

With global warming. But we'll see less rainfall in some places more than others. We'll see changes of currents and things like that.

And a lot of that is simply not understood yet. And having the research feeding into the policy decisions and informing local communities is the key for that.

Kate Guy:
So top security investment priority is the early warning, the monitoring, the forecasting.

Ulrich Eberle:
It's definitely one of them. There's many others. But that's the one where I think...

Kate Guy:
That's it. That's it. Scott, what's your top?

Scott Moore:
I guess it's, you know, kind of essentially a version of the Hormuz, you know, sort of dynamic I laid out where I think there's a window of opportunity now to make very compelling security driven arguments for investment in renewables that actually don't have anything necessarily to do with climate. And, you know, typically, when we talk about climate and security, we are interested in the implications for security of climate change. But the reverse can sort of also be true where climate security sort of concerns create opportunities for climate action.

And I think, you know, by flipping that, that's kind of the moment that we're in. And I think there's a political and policy window of opportunity to make those arguments very sharply.

Kate Guy:
So arguments not based on green sustainability, on pursuit of target. You know, we were in that moment a few years ago, but you're saying that those narratives no longer went out as opposed to the hard security narrative.

Scott Moore:
Very quickly, my neighbor out in Westchester, apropos of nothing, I saw her walking my dog the other day and she said, you know, I love my EV before, but I've loved but for the past, you know, few months, the fact that I haven't been to a gas station in five years is something I like lord over everyone I can, including you.

Kate Guy:
So I think I think Spain and other countries are doing a similar thing of like, aha, look at all of you. We we have a better moment right now than than you because we invested in renewables. So happens at the local level and national level, Erin.

Erin Sikorsky:
All right. I've got three quick things to our bureaucratic things I think countries should do. One is I think every country should be doing regular national intelligence assessments about climate risk.

Germany has done a great one. The UK has done some good ones. The U.S. did one in the last administration. I think that's just be part of the process. And the second thing which is connected to that is I think governments and foreign and security policy agencies need to figure out ways to more regularly partner and work with climate scientists within their governments as well. And it isn't just you throw a question over the transom to the science agency.

They throw you the answer back. But like, let's creatively think about how we build new structures to work together to get after some of these problems. And then the third thing, investment, I think focusing on extreme heat and managing that is a no regrets investment, whether it's a mock tips or not.

The Atlantic Currents. Right. Whether El Nino is bad or not, extreme heat is something that all countries are going to have to manage.

And I think if you invest and deal with it smartly, there are huge security benefits. There are clean energy opportunities there. I just think there's no downside to figuring out how to manage in a warmer, warmer temperatures as a top priority.

And that would really help a lot of these things.

Kate Guy:
All right. So we got some deeper elaboration of the risks of the threats, but also some potential opportunities within there. What have we missed?

What do we what do you want to hear more about or what do you see in your work as really important here? All right. We'll go down here.

Yep.

[Speaker 7]
Thank you. Thank you so much for yet another rich panel discussion. Scott, I agree with you.

I think you should be jealous that you're not sitting from here from the amount of the wealth that's been discussed since Monday. But Kate, your last two questions hit home for me. So I wanted to build on that.

So your last question, if I can throw back at the panel in terms of what is the biggest misconception that policymakers have about the relationship between climate stress, demographic pressures and conflict? And how does that misconception lead government to invest in the wrong prevention strategies? So if we can build on that, that will be helpful.

I work for the UN, so this is going to be helpful to us as well. And then building on the second to last question. And Scott, you mentioned that.

And Erin, you mentioned that as well in terms of co-designing the solutions for the climate. So as we prepare now to the COP and then the climate talks. So Bonn is starting next week.

The London talk is coming up. The New York is becoming for the last two years bigger and bigger. So what's the advice you have for those involved in these climate talks so they can really co-design and get ready to present something much more realistic and suitable to the reality in the building up to the COP in November?

Thank you.

Kate Guy:
Two good questions. Two good questions. So lots of misconceptions, I would say, in this realm.

So whoever wants to answer that. And then I did like your second question, because we've talked a lot about security actors and advice for security actors and investment security actors. What about the climate actors?

What about the ones who are going year after year, month after month to those negotiations? How is that space changing and shifting as well? So the floor is open.

Whoever wants to answer. Ulrich, you always go first.

Ulrich Eberle:
I'm glad you raised the COP as well. And just a brief background. Climate security has been discussed at the UN Security Council for quite some time, about 10 years.

There was a resolution that got vetoed, I think in 2022. There is a group of friends and other initiatives that keep the agenda, the topic on the agenda, even in this reduced capacity. At the same time, we saw the topic of which brought about climate adaptation in fragile states emerging at COP.

COP28 in Dubai was one moment where it was officially featured on the thematic agenda. The UAE at the time also had the seat at the UN Security Council, and they orchestrated efforts both at the UN Security Council and the COP. And I think there was pretty broad agreement that we need to deal with those issues.

It's a no-brainer to do so. What I think happened though, and it's harder now with less funding and discussions at the UNFCCC with the US having left, are not getting easier, right? And then the topic that is sort of siloed runs risk that it falls through the cracks.

And I think one thing that I would like to see is that the fragility considerations at COP being more streamlined into other mainstream conversations and negotiations. Because the fact is, even though that we had these conversations at the last couple of COPs on security, there was no negotiated outcome. And if we look at the landscape of countries that are at the forefront of climate security risks, they don't have many negotiators.

They don't have much political lobby to achieve those goals. And there is a real structural issue there. So if there's one thing that I think would lead to more sustainable outcomes, would be really taking what we often discuss as an isolated issue, but the European Union actually did try to look at climate security more for a lens, also for energy, much broader, and take that lens into other discussions that are already established.

And I think if it's packaged the right way, it can be a win-win. It's not this extra conversation for which we need an extra pot of funding, etc., but rather have more sensitivity thinking about security risks when doing climate adaptation and other related work.

Kate Guy:
Just to push back slightly there, Ulrich, I mean, these folks are well-versed in the real power politics that's happening at the UN. There are large detractors, important detractors to the climate security agenda within the United Nations member states, right? And to peel back the curtain on that a little bit, there are whole countries who deny that the UN Security Council should take up the issue of climate change.

Some of that might have to do with their climate positions. Most of that has to do with they don't have a seat on the Security Council, right? That's Brazil, the last COP host who did not continue that agenda from Dubai, in part because they don't see that as a topic they wanted to intersect, right?

Ditto on Turkey, you know, ditto on Russia, the states that vetoed it. So you're dealing with, you know, that might be the best case scenario, but you're dealing with these macro-political positions that these great powers always have, and it's something you're always going to have to come up against, whether you're in the Security Council or you're in COP, because it's a very similar pushback in that venue, too.

Ulrich Eberle:
I mean, there's structural issues that are not climate-specific that, you know, the Council is just as effective as it is. But I think even after the veto, there was creative ways to still keep the topic at the agenda. One of the things that got created is the climate security mechanism, climate advisory with UN missions.

I think they did a great amount of work connecting sort of the global political agenda to the regional issues. There was creation of regional hubs, which I think is key in the Horn of Africa. We saw that.

And also for the regions to own the topic, right? It's great to have political agreement, but you only get so far with that. Then, you know, sort of streamlining that into existing efforts, into regional efforts.

I think that's where I see the most potential, but obviously you're right that there is always a lot of limitations and pushbacks on climate, perhaps specifically at the Council for some members.

Kate Guy:
Specifically from the United States right now, I'll be clear. Okay, Erin, Scott, misconceptions or climate side?

Erin Sikorsky:
Yeah, I'll jump in on the misconceptions question, which I really like. I mean, I mentioned one earlier, right, that when we're talking about climate security, we're only talking about developing countries, right? I think we already talked about that.

The other one, though, that I hear a lot is that when you say climate security, people think you mean greening the military, that that's the most important piece of the puzzle. I would actually say that's kind of like the smallest piece of the puzzle here. And really what we're talking about is how do you build security in a world where our underlying assumptions are shifting due to climate?

We've traditionally held climate constant, frankly, in a lot of security conversations and that's all going out the window. And I mean, Scott, you mentioned earlier that the definition of security has gotten so large and it encompasses so many things. I understand that that can be a challenge, but I also think part of the work of climate security is changing the definition of national security.

It's not just about protecting the borders of your country, right? But it's about protecting the people within that country from these climate hazards and really thinking differently about how you approach security when it's not just state actors that are the threat or it's not just non-state groups like terrorists, but it's now what the former director of the CIA called problems without passports, right? And not just kind of putting it in the, oh, well, that's the human security piece of things, which is always seen as lesser, right?

But instead really pushing for a different definition.

Scott Moore:
It gently disagree with it, not conceptually. I mean, I fully agree with that. Couldn't really be a non-resident fellow at the Center for Climate and Security and disagree with the concept, but I might slightly disagree politically.

And this I think gets to the second question that you asked about how you frame these conversations. So what I think is really interesting about the Hormuz moment that we're now in, crisis, whatever, is that you can make a really, really compelling argument for zeroing out fossil fuels that has nothing to do with climate, absolutely nothing to do. And it doesn't even necessarily have to do with security.

I think you could easily, and maybe even productively, just talk about it as it's about resilience and it's about affordability. And it's mostly about affordability from a political standpoint. So if we think about, and just maybe one more point on that, I think most non-climate people, if they think about the energy transition, they would say, that's going to take a long time, man.

I sure get it, but the world economy is built on fossil fuels. That is a long tail to totally phase out fossil fuels. Even if you totally electrify transportation, you still have the petrochemical stuff, which is embedded in everything as we've seen.

Here we have all of a sudden an event that crystallizes the economic cost of that fundamental dependence on fossil fuels. And I think on just sheer economic grounds with some resilience too, you don't want to be dependent on critical inputs being disrupted, whether it's because of a war or a natural disaster or whatever. But we just have this moment that crystallizes the costs of that.

And I think if you're a climate person, you absolutely need to... So in other words, you mentioned climate fora, but in some ways, I think you could really make a compelling argument in those fora without even using the word climate.

Kate Guy:
Some have argued that the Iranian blockade of the Strait is the world's first carbon tax. Right? It's quite small.

It's like $5 a ton or something like that. I think somebody did the math, but it is, right? I mean, it's adding sort of that externality into everything we do.

Different externality than climate, but still a security externality. One misconception I will add to this that's sort of in between those two points on how we see the threats and whether it's climate or not. I actually think a lot of this doesn't look like quote unquote climate when you're looking at the security threats.

One anecdote is when I was in the government and had a nice, wonderful, fancy security clearance, I asked all the smart security analysts to pull everything you have on climate and security risk. And they came with quite a small folder. And I was like, this can't be possible.

I mean, I know you're doing more than this. And they had to their siloed perception, just control F search for climate. And I was like, I don't want you to search for the C word.

I want you to search for water risk. I want you to search for extreme weather. I want you to search for flooding, for these different things of which there were all sorts of reporting and analysis done.

Ditto on folks on the ground in Sudan, they're not talking about climate change, right? They're not talking about the big macro cop process. They're talking about their resources, what's happening to them, what's shifting in their weather patterns, their crop patterns, right?

And so we can have that whole security discussion without saying, talking at all about the C word. We know that it's like exacerbated and changed because of those broader processes, but it's not going to be like that. All right, who else?

Maybe we'll get two questions, two or three questions in before coming back. Yeah.

[Speaker 9]
Thank you for the comprehensive and mildly spicy panel, I would say, for the interest of time.

Kate Guy:
Spice tolerance, so mild.

[Speaker 9]
Thank you. Thank you. Maybe I have two questions, but maybe just for the interest of time, just one question.

I am interested in how climate change can shape the approach of major powers in the Arctic regions as we see it right now. I know that the ice is melting and how do you see it forward? And as we are mainly in the space of peace and security and how would we prepare for it?

Thank you.

Kate Guy:
Okay. Who else? Yep.

Who's ever got the mic? Just go. Yeah.

Andres Napuri:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much for the insights.

My name is Andres. I come from Peru. Of course, Peru is also a highly climate vulnerable country, particularly to the adverse effects of El Nino, but thank you for highlighting that component.

No, I just wanted to mention also a couple of points that were mentioned on how perhaps for the past 10 years or so, we've seen a positive shift towards public and private investments on disaster prevention, as opposed to just having reactive policies and reactive measures. In fact, Peru also was hit very hard by El Nino cycle in 2016, 2017, which caused that as a reaction to that major shift was made in policy, but also like in the legal mandate of the army, same as a Spain where, you know, the army is now taking a higher role into disaster response with greater, you know, institutional operational capacity. So that's on a positive note, perhaps on the issue of, you know, climate change as a, say, quote unquote, threat multiplier.

Domestically, perhaps I would highlight perhaps a couple entry points for that. Of course, we see that a glacier retreat affects widely water availability, water supply for some communities downstream. And, you know, that can have potential negative consequences in terms of internally displaced people and, you know, communities fighting over water supply.

Another issue could be somewhat correlated is a deforestation and the Amazon rainforest. Of course, it's, you know, the largest part of our territory is in the Amazon rainforest and it's a huge carbon sink for the world. So we see increasing threat of deforestation in relation to illegal economic and highly polluting economic activities, such as, you know, illegal mining, illegal logging and so on in relation to, you know, transnational organized crime as well.

So those are facts that, of course, we're trying to tackle with policy. Of course, we have the issue of Ruiz also, you know, an important supplier of critical minerals for the global energy transition. Huge mining investment projects, most of which are located in, you know, in nearby indigenous communities areas.

And it's always been a challenge to articulate properly, you know, the interest of, you know, corporations, the government and the local communities. So that as well is it could be, you know, a source of conflict domestically, at least. So just to just want to put that out there, perhaps just a question in terms of governance, perhaps following up to my colleague's question.

And of course, you know, working on some of these issues in the context of the UN, we see that, you know, some of these areas are, you know, tackled in silos, you know, climate risk, disaster risk reduction, economic vulnerabilities and security concerns within different policy ecosystems. Yet, you know, we see that they're increasingly interlinked. So how do you in your view, our, I don't know, international institutions are still organized around the, you know, the right challenges, or, you know, there's still, you know, some ways that we can improve the way they're organized, and we're better prepared to tackle the 21st century challenges.

Kate Guy:
Great question. So sort of reform of institutions. Let's get on here and then we'll turn back to you guys.

Datcha Byangoy:
Yeah, thank you very much. Good morning. Thank you very much for a great panel.

I work at the UK Mission to the UN on peacebuilding and conflict prevention. And some of the conversations we've been having on the peace side of the house is how we do engage the private sector to think in the context of kind of like peace positive, conflict sensitive investment in countries. At the moment, we don't see that quite a lot.

And I think we have a long way to go to get them on board to think about peace more broadly. And I was curious, Ulrich, from your perspective, if you can speak a little bit about how Bloomberg or the private sector has been having these conversations when it comes to climate peace and security, because I think the focus right now is mainly on the security side of the house rather than peace. So to kind of understand how the private sector has been working with those with a political mandate actually to provide that kind of conflict analysis to kind of advance peace positive investment.

Thank you.

Kate Guy:
Thank you. OK, so we've got Ulrich, private sector question for you. Erin, maybe I'll hit the Arctic one to you.

And Scott, you want to bring us home for institutional siloing? All right, go for it.

Ulrich Eberle:
Yeah, I think the only way to get it done is with the private sector. Right. And that has been not happening to the extent it should have been.

I think in the end, if we go back, when we talk about climate security, we talk about the security side of the problem. But in the end, for those dealing with it, it's often about economics. It's about farming and herding communities to try to make a living or access to water to sustain your household income.

And I think better integrating that. And I went to a conference a couple of years ago, back on back to conversations on critical minerals and energy security. One was in Brussels and the other one was in North Africa.

And the discussion couldn't have been different. Right. One was about how do we leverage this for economic growth.

And the other one was about the security side. And I think reconciling those would be key to do that. And also maybe very briefly, to your point on the Amazon, quite a bit of work on that.

And I think there is a bigger topic that we didn't bring up so much today is the regional component about resource sharing. That's true in the Amazon. That's true on the Mekong.

It's true on the Nile or the Indus. And there is, I think, a lot of bigger questions of what, quote unquote, are common goods. And maybe that's also relates to the waterways that are being blocked on the strategic side.

Will this be leveraged by stakeholders? And then especially if you see climate entering the equation, Panama Canal will be one example for that. So I think that's something we should definitely have on the radar, how resources are getting leveraged.

And I don't really see the answer to the question which institute, which policy body should manage this. There's regional efforts on that. But that's definitely one of the great challenges that we are already facing now.

And we start seeing it. And we'll continue seeing it, in my opinion.

Kate Guy:
Great point. We'll come back next year and talk a whole all about resource exploitation. Erin, over to you.

Erin Sikorsky:
Yeah, very briefly on the Arctic. I mean, clearly, as the ice melts across the Arctic, there is growing interest in access to resources there. Also access to shipping lanes.

I don't think China would be calling itself a near Arctic power if climate change didn't exist, frankly. But this happens all at a time when Russia, the relationship with Russia has deteriorated because of the invasion of Ukraine. And the U.S. is obviously acting much more aggressively. So you have the geopolitics and the climate pieces coming together in a way that increases risks of accidents, just because there's a lot more traffic in the Arctic. And it's still a very inhospitable place to operate. It's not the Caribbean Sea, right?

Just because it's warming up. And I also think, though, there's a little bit, two things. There's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy I worry about.

We talk so much about risks and there's so much NATO activity up there now. Right. And you just, you know, if you could, I worry you could create a security incident.

And then also, if we get to the point where things melt so much, temperatures rise so much that the Arctic really is navigable, we're going to have so many other challenges around the globe because of that, including maybe these Atlantic currents overturning and other things. So to only focus on the Arctic and maybe only focus on the opportunities of the melting there, I think is a little bit missing the forest for the trees. And it's important to have that broader conversation.

Kate Guy:
All right, Scott. And I think this will be the last last comment, too. So a lot of pressure, Kate.

Scott Moore:
OK, so institutional kind of governance stuff. I'm certainly not a cop hater. I enjoy cops.

I want to see them continue. Yeah, no, I genuinely enjoy that, although probably mostly because the majority of the time I've been I've gone as like exactly as a civil society delegate. So, yeah, just just get the fun stuff.

So I do think, though, cop has been fatally weakened by two things. Most obviously, the U.S. withdrawal, whether or not that eventually is remedied, even more importantly, by the rising tide of protectionism, trade protectionism around the world that, in my view, fundamentally kind of breaks the original promise of the Framework Convention and indeed of the whole Rio conference, which is that for emerging economies, you don't have to choose between environmental protection and economic growth and development through trade. Trade was the crux of the argument that you don't have to choose between the two.

That's not a credible, in my view, promise anymore. China plays a part in that, I think, why that's the case. But regardless, I think it is the case.

I do think it will remain an important forum, but I think we need at least three new fora to take forward the serious elements of the climate and energy kind of agenda going forward. One is that trade piece. So in particular, how you deal with green industrial policy basically around the world, including and especially China, how you deal with serious climate finance.

Again, no disrespect, but the COP is just not going to solve climate finance under any conceivable scenario. And number three, I think the exotic technologies that we're starting to talk a lot about in the climate space. Most obviously, on every climate panel, somebody eventually brings up geoengineering, climate intervention.

Last word, I'm going to do it. So I think you need another forum that it takes that kind of the regulation of that technology and potentially other exotic technologies like biotech seriously. So I don't think you can do that effectively within COP and you do need different fora for those things.

Kate Guy:
Really great point to link that to broader technology, because I think it is more a technological issue potentially than it is a big governance issue. All right. Well, we got through a lot in the world.

Thank you to this incredible panel. I hope you all recognize just how much you got from these experts. So thank you.

Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for focusing on this topic, which can too often get left off the agenda. So huge, huge props to you and enjoy the energy conversation and ask them about climate change.