Beyond climate and security trade-offs: Exploiting co-benefits and managing conflicts

Beyond climate and security trade-offs: Exploiting co-benefits and managing conflicts

Geopolitical competition is the new normal, with the US more unified in its hawkish stance towards China than almost any of its allies, the first shots of a trade war fired, and continued pressure from Washington for its allies to join it in de-risking supply chain reliance on Beijing. Closer to home, hard security is back in fashion in the UK, with a huge increase in defence spending - driven by the need to ensure European security in the face of Russian aggression and as the US sees its priorities elsewhere - joining economic security and growth as a top national priority for the UK. Technologically, an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is underway, with complex, integrated, multimodal systems promising to transform AI from a useful scientific and economic productivity tool to something that offers profound national security challenges and opportunities, and is not an option for the UK to ignore. But powering the AI revolution will require investment in energy generation and grid renewal if it is to be done affordably, or at all, and, while this could potentially be green energy it is far from certain that it will be, when pace and price are the driving factors. The alternative is to place data centres where energy is cheap - creating new and potentially dangerous dependencies. In that context, calls to scale back green ambitions in a bid to save costs for the taxpayer are increasing in volume, and may very well be heeded – the more so if the only way to meet them is through additional exposure to China. 

Is it necessarily the case, though, that climate and security ambitions should sit in tension, or are there areas of co-benefit that can be exploited, as conflicts are managed? How can we ensure successful long-term policy making that acknowledges climate as a threat multiplier, and also responds to acute crises without creating dangerous new dependencies? How can we better ‘price in’ the need for both national security and climate resilience in government investment decisions, and reframe our concept of value for money to reflect our true needs? This Ditchley summit brought together members of the Ditchley network from three key areas – climate and the green transition, defence and national security, and artificial intelligence and technology – to share views and ideas across boundaries and generate new options for action.