Enviro journalist & researcher, think tanker @ The Wilson Center & @ Center for Climate & Security, Author of 'The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence'
published on New Security Beat on Jun 11, 2024
When Luxembourg’s Green Party was offered the defense portfolio in coalition talks after performing strongly in the country’s 2019 elections, its senior members faced a dilemma. Never before had a party of its political stripe held that brief anywhere in the world.
Some of the Green rank and file, drawn from pacifist backgrounds, seemed uncertain as to what to make of it all. But to François Bausch, the Green politician who ultimately took on the roles of defense minister and deputy prime minister there, the answer seemed obvious. Here was an opportunity for the party to advocate for climate security from a highly relevant perch, all while showing voters that it could be trusted with such strategic concerns.
“If you want to change something then defense and security policy in general is a good choice,” Bausch told me in an April conversation. “This is a good opportunity to confirm that we are effective in this domain and that we can be effective in general.” (In the end, the Luxembourg Greens remained in government for four years, proving forceful advocates for climate security throughout that period.)
Elsewhere on the continent, other Green parties have enjoyed similar recent success with comparable dividends for climate security policy. Propelled by intensifying concern over climate change, the Greens and their allies won about 10 percent of all European Parliament seats at the most recent election in 2019, much their greatest showing yet. As of spring 2024, Greens form part of seven European national governments, also their most ever.
Despite increased interest in climate security from more mainstream parties, it is the newly empowered Greens who are principally responsible for forcing the issue up the European political agenda, many Green and non-Green politicians say. Or at least they were responsible… Read on.
That the Greens are enthusiastic about climate security might seem utterly unsurprising, a natural and logically consistent extension of their core environmental mission. When I asked Philippe Lamberts, a Belgian member of the European Parliament (MEP) and co-president of the Green group in Brussels, why he and his colleagues deemed this issue important, he seemed a bit put out by the question.
“Is there any other issue that is more important to Green parties than climate change?” he said. “And the security angle? Well, this is the logical consequence of not tackling climate change at large. If we don’t, we’ll go into a Mad Max world.” It makes sense, a colleague of Lamberts added, that an empowered Green movement would equate to increased climate security advocacy.
But, in discussion with a half dozen senior Greens, many of them suggest that climate security plays a broader political, as well as a principled, role in their party programming.
For one, emphasizing climate’s security fallouts can be a useful means of persuading unconvinced voters of the necessity of climate action, according to Thomas Waitz, an Austrian Green MEP and the dominant force behind a 2021-2022 EU parliament resolution on climate security.
“The main question for me is how to motivate bigger numbers of Europeans to support measures to counter the climate crisis and politically support the transformation that is needed,” Waitz said, echoing many of his colleague’s comments. “There are different motivations for citizens to do so. One of the motivations that I’ve found is to reach out to people who might not be so motivated by health or ecological impacts, but are approachable from the security angle. We need majorities in society, and within the political parties. This can help.”
For another reason, underscoring climate’s overlap with other political blocs’ animating issues can yield similar results within “the system.” Mindful of the necessity of wooing their more populist counterparts, many of whom have enjoyed dramatic electoral success across Europe off the back of the migration crisis and whose support must often be secured if climate security legislation is to pass, some Green politicians have framed their overriding worries in such a way as to better resonate across the political aisle.
As Bausch put it, “Many of my Eastern European colleagues are more conservative on refugee issues. And I say to them: With all these worsening ecological issues, people will come here in bigger numbers. If you don’t want that, then you need to act on ecology.”
In an interesting, if slightly unrelated, aside, Bausch also suggested that his party may have developed a particular interest in climate security because of Luxembourg’s longstanding focus on Francophone West Africa. The country directs the lion’s share of its development and aid funding to this linguistically familiar and geographically proximate region, which is also home to many of the world’s most pressing conflict-climate settings.
Finally, there may even be an overall internal Green party imperative to focusing on climate security. As its national parties strengthen and secure more roles of strategic significance, they’re having to develop workable security policies—in some cases for the first time. That isn’t always the simplest of asks for a movement that is at least partly grounded in Cold War-era pacificism and antinuclear mobilization, and which has historically boasted an uneasy relationship with hard security concerns as a consequence.
For those charged with keeping the peace within these parties, climate security is an issue weighty enough to be taken seriously within defense circles, but also one that is sufficiently close to environmentalists’ bread and butter as to appease most peaceniks. The result can seem like a win-win.
Once riven with party disputes over Western European military involvement in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Green politicians stress that this aversion to all things military is slowly dissipating. Some Green parties have been among the most forceful European advocates for supporting Ukraine. This is particularly the case in Germany, where the Greens were previously perhaps the most torn by ‘realist-fundamentalist’ disagreements. Their mettle, as with so many others, has seemingly been reinforced by a perception of the Russian invasion as a fossil fuel-fed phenomenon. Other national parties, such as the Greens in Russia-bordering Latvia, have followed Luxembourg’s lead in assuming control of the defense ministry. After a lifetime without a Green defense minister, the swift arrival of a second has prompted few double takes.
Since 2022, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza have stifled European progress on climate security, and, simultaneously, threatened to undo many Green electoral gains. The focus on those conflicts has largely crowded out “softer” security questions, with Waitz’s resolution still the high-water mark of Brussels’ interest in climate security. A Green-backed bid to add climate security advisors to EU security missions abroad is, at best, proceeding slowly. Moreover, a recently leaked draft of the next proposed EU priority list contains almost no mention of climate change at all, a major reversal from the climate-heavy 2019 iteration of the plan.
Environmentally minded politicians are predictably outraged. But, with their number of seats falling by almost a third in the European elections this past weekend amid an anti-climate action far right surge, there will soon be fewer of them left in Brussels to express that anger. Voters, unhappy at a cost-of-living crisis that has only worsened since the Russian invasion, appear to have less appetite for expensive-looking climate measures, at least for the time being. Those associated with them have reaped electoral punishment.
To Philippe Lamberts, the takeaway is clear. “The backlash that we are experiencing to the Green New Deal at the moment shows that the raison d’être of the green parties has not disappeared,” he said. “They say everyone has become green nowadays. The backlash shows that everyone is green until the response requires a cent of effort.”