A new global actor: Climate

December 15, 2023 - Defence Stories

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing the world and it has profound implications for National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces. The newly published Defence Climate and Sustainability Strategy 2023-2027 (DCSS) provides a vision, guiding principles, and concrete actions to address the challenge. The DCSS expands the sustainability discussion to include a strong emphasis on responding to the security issues arising from climate change.

The DCSS was tabled in Parliament on November 2nd, 2023. It establishes direction and renewed targets to improve National Defence’s environmental footprint and to guide our response to a changing climate. It is aligned with the Government of Canada’s sustainability priorities, as detailed in the Federal Sustainable Development Strategy, and supports the Greening Government Strategy. With a core mandate to protect and defend Canadians and Canadian interests at home and abroad, the Defence Team must have a focused approach to climate action and sustainability that ensures both continuity of our operational readiness and interoperability with our Allies.

On a global scale, climate change contributes significantly to things such as resource scarcities, large-scale health crises, sovereignty challenges and population displacements. All of these tend to create conditions of social, political, and economic instability that impact the security landscape. At an organizational level, climate change impacts defence infrastructure, materiel and operations, including increasing operational tempo. 

The increasing tempo of climate change crises can be measured by the jump in calls for disaster relief CAF has answered: “Between 1990 and 2010, there were only six deployments under Op LENTUS, while from 2011 to 2020 there were 30, with a drastic increase of 11 in 2021-2022 alone.”

The DCSS aligns our approach to climate action with the NATO Climate Change and Security Action Plan. This ensures we can talk about our climate change awareness, adaptation, mitigation, and engagement actions one for one with our Allies. This is particularly important as Canada establishes the NATO Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence in Montreal with our Federal partners, Global Affairs Canada.    

While the DCSS outlines our climate and sustainability priorities for the next four years, climate change will be there for the long haul. As the DCSS concludes: “Looking to the future, climate and security considerations will be central to our decision-making.”