Did you know that the British military has its own think tank? It’s the Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre. It regularly reports on Global Strategic Trends, most recently in mid October. I just got round to reading it. Here’s the report https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/754732/GST6_Web_Version_v2.pdf 1/n

As you might imagine, the DCDC does not f*ck about. Unlike, say, @PhilipHammondUK‘s budget, which did not mention climate change once, this report references climate change 171 times. Politicians deal with ‘political reality’, while the military deals with, well, reality. 2/n

Here, for instance, is their graphic mapping future uncertainty and risk. “Increasing disruption and cost of climate change” has the LOWEST UNCERTAINTY and the 2nd or 3rd HIGHEST IMPACT of all of the trends and risks they assessed. That’s the orange blob on the top left. 3/n

The hefty chapter on Environment and resources is chock full of apocalyptic predictions, stated in the matter of fact manner of a shipping forecast. What I find most compelling about this report is the risk management perspective the military necessarily bring to bear on this 4/n

“Almost half of the world’s population is unlikely to have reliable access to clean water by 2050” 5/n

“Projections suggest that hydrocarbons are likely to remain the main source to meet overall energy demand, at around 70%, by 2050. To keep temperature rises below 2° Celsius, hydrocarbon use would need to be half of this.” 6/n

“The Amazon basin ecosystem may be at particular risk... as complex interactions between deforestation, forest fires and climate change could turn the area from a rainforest to a savannah. Such a shift would have global impacts, including the loss of a major carbon sink”
7/n

“Approximately 50% of people live in coastal regions and most of the world’s largest cities are on or near the coast, rendering them particularly vulnerable to flooding. If a major city is flooded, military assistance is likely to be needed, both at home and overseas.” 8/n

It goes on like that. The report sketches four ‘future worlds’, in two of which the environmental crisis is just about manageable. The other two are pretty much war and famine 9/n

This puts me in mind of this excellent piece, the key message of which is that we still have agency: what happens next is up to us, and we can still choose our collective future 10/n https://www.thenation.com/article/mainstream-media-un-climate-report-analysis/

But this is also one of the things that I find most scary about Brexit; that it is an explicit retreat from multilateralism and international cooperation at a time when we need these things more than ever before in human history 11/n

Anyway, it’s a jolly romp, the 282 page Global Strategic Trends Review 6, but just in case of TL;DR, the DCDC have kindly made this terrifying video summarising the contents

“THE FUTURE STARTS TODAY”

Enjoy! 12/12