Editor's Note: Today we welcome Paul Ennis to the writing team. Paul writes out of Ireland, where he's studying for a PhD in Philosophy, with a particular emphasis on the philosophy of ecology. Watch out for some interesting posts from Paul!
Does the allocation of funding for research into the consequences of climate change by the Ministry of Defence represent something invidious? The good news is that climate change is now considered a threat worth factoring into geo-political considerations. The bad news is that it seems to have become just another consideration in the lexicon of strategic interests. It also stresses a depressing fact about the climate change message. It seems that in order to gain the widest audience about the threat it is necessary to tailor the message to anthropomorphic concerns. The Stern Review propelled the government into action by offering up the incentive of economic sense: invest in averting climate change or allow climate change avert economic development. The Stern Review considered the prospect of economic disaster as an international one by projecting global collapse. The problem with the MoD funding is its partisan nature. The research is international in scope, with a particular interest in already volatile regions, but the assessment has parochial interests at heart -- namely the strategic, that is economic, problems that may arise for the United Kingdom.
Back to the positives: the commissioning of the research is clearly premised on an acceptance of not only the reality of climate change but declining rates of freshwater, and seems acutely aware of the unprecedented rate with which agro-ecosystems are becoming unstable. These are issues that are often peripheral to the ‘apocalyptic,’ and therefore headline-grabbing, story of climate change. The enlightened response to the awareness of these problems would surely be an attempt to eradicate them. Prevention is better than cure as they say. The UK defence budget is currently running at £30.1 billion of which a fraction would go a long way to relieving some of the basic humanitarian problems related to climate change.
UK consumers are capable of creating a ‘green’ economy, now worth billions, but that figure is unlikely to be matched in the developing world. Translating military expenditure into preventative aid might just avert the predicted problems that this research seems to be retrospectively affirming. This is the same logic as the Stern review: investing a fraction of the defense budget into prevention will yield dividends in the long-term. Looking after strategic interests from an ecological perspective does not necessarily imply parochialism, but opens up the possibility of a mutual partnership benefiting all members of the international community. Think of the money they’d save on the defense budget. Stern might just have been on to something.
Source: Guardian
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