Europe's big guns put climate change on the security agenda

Nov 1, 2007, 8:31 GMT

Brussels - When the history of the twenty-first century is written, 2007 is likely to be remembered as the year that Europe's big guns shot climate change to the top of the security debate.

Climate change is 'a threat to our security and economic development,' German Chancellor Angela Merkel said in a speech in Potsdam, Germany on October 10.

Global warming 'threatens the destruction of our planet,' and the campaign against it is 'essential for the future of humanity,' France's President Nicolas Sarkozy agreed four weeks later and some 6,000 kilometres away in a speech to the US Congress.

Twenty years ago, climate change was seen as the most outlandish of fringe concerns, the preserve of dreadlocked eco-warriors and hippies in hand-knitted jumpers.

Even in environmental circles, it played a muted second fiddle to issues such as saving the whale, banning the nuclear bomb, cutting down on car-use and recycling rubbish.

But in the last few years, climate change has made a dizzying leap from the purely environmental agenda to become a central issue in European security debates.

'Climate change constitutes a threat to global security,' the head of the EU's executive, Jose Manuel Barroso, said bluntly during a conference in Lisbon on November 7.

'For too long, climate change was considered in purely environmental terms. Now it is easy to imagine the collateral damage caused by the phenomenon: climate change will only sharpen the tensions which already exist in the world's poorest regions,' EU Aid Commissioner Louis Michel added in the same city on November 9.

Indeed, across Europe, more and more top-level diplomats are calling for closer links between defence, climate, development and aid policies - as an issue of national and international security.

The EU's defence and development ministers held their first-ever joint meeting on November 19 in an effort to coordinate their actions better. Environmental issues, predictably, were close to the top of their agenda.

'Security is no longer the concept we had years ago, it goes beyond state security and the simple use of force. There is military, environmental, economic and social security,' said Portuguese Defence Minister Nuno Severiano Teixeira, who chaired the meeting.

That comment came just four days after Britain's Foreign Secretary David Milliband warned that 'environmental security, not food security, is the challenge of the future,' in a speech in Bruges, Belgium.

And it was made on the same day that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown dubbed the fight against climate change 'the great project of this generation' and called for a 'fourth technological revolution.'

Not since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, have Europe's big political guns aimed such a weighty barrage at a single target, Brussels observers say.

'There has been an incredible boost' in diplomatic activity on climate change issues in recent years, Henrik Hasselknippe, senior emissions-trading analyst at Oslo-based carbon-trading consultancy Point Carbon, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

But it is no lightning victory. Europe's leaders may now be directing their heavy artillery at global warming, but they have not yet committed themselves to the vicious political trench warfare which is likely to be needed to bring their domestic carmakers, airlines, power generators and heavy manufacturers into line.

And with the EU's major security and development tools - from fighter jets to food parcels - powerless to stop the build-up of carbon dioxide particles in the atmosphere, the re-branding of climate change as a security issue looks to be more of a symbolic gesture than a concrete tool to fight global warming.

The year 2007 may go down in history as the year in which Europe turned its big guns on climate change. It is not likely to be remembered as the year in which they hit the target.