From Pacific leaders to regional intelligence analysts, climate change is consistently identified as the foremost security issue for the Pacific island region. Yet Australia’s current defence and intelligence approach to regional engagement, focused mainly on traditional defence, fails to adequately address this existential concern, leaving a gap in its strategy.

Greater integration of climate security issues into Australia’s defence and intelligence establishments, drawing inspiration from the United States’ approach, could improve Australia’s Pacific reputation. It would demonstrate that Australia takes the threat of climate change seriously and streamline regional mitigation, adaptation and preparedness efforts. With growing geopolitical competition in the region and the likely US retreat from climate-security leadership, this has never been of greater strategic importance.

Australia’s National Defence Strategy is clear that deepening Pacific relationships is key to our strategy of deterrence by denial. We seek to build and maintain these relationships mainly through traditional security arrangements, particularly by delivering what the strategy calls a ‘comprehensive package’ of maritime security infrastructure, equipment and training.

However, this approach doesn’t seem to be greatly enhancing our strategic influence in the Pacific. This should come as no surprise, as the strategy fails to account for the full breadth of security priorities and threat perceptions of its subject countries.

Since the early 1990s, Pacific island leaders have made it clear that climate change is their greatest security challenge. As the high commissioner of the Solomon Islands to Australia said in 2020, ‘climate change, not Covid-19, not even China, is the biggest threat to our security’—a threat, and plea for action, that Australia is perceived to have largely ignored.

Australia remains one of the largest greenhouse gas emitters per capita. Considering this—along with sentiments such as Palau President Surangel Whipps Jr’s statement that world leaders who remain inactive on climate issues ‘may as well bomb’ Pacific nations—how can Australia expect to be the Pacific’s partner of choice?

In contrast, the US has been a global leader when it comes to matters of climate security. It was an early advocate and placed climate change ‘at the heart’ of its national security. With the recent US Framework for Climate Resilience and Security, the 2022 National Security Strategy and the 2021 National Intelligence Estimate, the US’s defense and intelligence community leads the way in monitoring, analysing and assessing climate security threats. This information is crucial to streamlining mitigation and adaptation policies, identifying priority areas of investment and ensuring adequate preparedness not only domestically, but for partners across the globe.

Climate security leadership gave the US a significant and under-recognised advantage in the Pacific: it demonstrated its commitment to, unity with, and genuine respect for the people of the region and advanced the US’s status as the preferred partner.

But with an incoming president who has previously called climate change a hoax, US climate security leadership is likely at its end.

With China’s domination in almost every aspect of the renewable energy transition likely to win Beijing favour throughout the Pacific, climate security is an emerging gap in the West’s regional strategy.

If Australia wants to maintain regional strategic balance, it must urgently step up and lead in the climate security space. Leaving this area uncontested risks further compromising Australia’s regional influence, ceding the upper hand to other players in the region.

Australia’s capacity to engage with matters of climate security is much smaller than that of the US, so identifying and acting upon leverage points will be necessary. Australia should adopt a climate security strategy based on what has been the US strategy—one that considers how Australia’s National Intelligence Community can best be mobilised to monitor and assess climate security threats.

To facilitate this process, Australia should establish a climate intelligence working group.

This group should be a partnership between relevant scientific and intelligence agencies, similar to the United States Climate Security Advisory Council. It should identify and advise the government on priority areas of focus, which should be resourced and supported accordingly. Group output may, for example, include an annual net assessment, from which public and partner products could be produced.

This enhanced incorporation of climate security issues into our defence and intelligence establishments will demonstrate the seriousness with which Australia considers climate security threats. By affirming our commitment to and partnership with Pacific island nations in overcoming these threats, Australia may garner substantial favour throughout the region.

Furthermore, Australian leadership in this space would highlight Pacific islanders’ calls for urgent global climate action. As stated by Whipps, ‘the hardest challenge, I think, is sometimes you get drowned out—people denying that it actually is happening ….’

Australia can ensure that our neighbours’ voices are amplified, not drowned out.

If we want to persist with our current strategy, rather than adopt one that relies less on our Pacific partners, it’s time to take climate security seriously.

As former Samoan prime minister Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi said, ‘We all know the problem, the solutions. All that is left would be some courage to tell people there is certainty of disaster.’