Changing Climates and Changing Global Orders Australia’s new era of uncertainty

Abstract

The international order is undergoing rapid change at an unprecedented scale, and whilst change can bring new opportunities for Australia, it also brings many challenges. Australia faces an increasingly concerning strategic outlook, and the two most critical security challenges we face are the threats of climate change and threats to the rules-based global order. In discussing climate change, this paper firstly addresses the localised security impacts on Australian land and domestic resources. However, the most critical dangers of climate change to our security ultimately stem from collateral impacts of destabilisation within neighbouring states in the Asia Pacific region. Climate change threatens Australian security most profoundly as a ‘threat multiplier’ that reduces state capacity, thus paving the way for transnational security challenges in our immediate region, including refugee crises, regional instability and terrorism. In discussing the second challenge of an uncertain future in the rules-based global order, this paper will explain why Australia’s security hinges so greatly upon the existence of such an order. It will then discuss how this order could be threatened by a rising China and an increasingly unreliable United States (US).