Climate change isn’t a threat multiplier. It’s the main threat
Why hasn’t humanity responded to climate change—currently on track to produce global catastrophe—with the same intensity in which we respond to military threats? And is there a way to reorient the defense sector to enable and support a whole-of-society effort to protect our planet’s ability to support life as we know it?
One barrier is the way we think. Research finds that humanity’s “deep frames”—worldviews wired into our neural circuity over a lifetime, and which influence perception and decision-making at the sub-conscious level—hinder our capacity to understand new kinds of threats. These frames, often reinforced by those they benefit, influence security posture and institutional design.
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A new approach called PLAN E frames climate and environmental issues not as an influence upon the threat environment, but as the main threat—indeed, a new kind dubbed the hyperthreat—subjected to a military-style analysis and response-planning process. The rationale for this approach and the methods used are outlined in the Spring 2022 issue of the Journal of Advanced Military Studies. To prompt broader imagining of what a new threat posture could look like, Marine Corps University has published a notional PLAN E grand strategy.
To be precise, PLAN E is the conceptualization and planning phase of a six-phase “hyper-response”: a civilian-led, whole-of-society mobilization (note: not militarization). The overall mission is to reach “Destination Safe Earth” by 2100: a habitable planet “safe” for all people and all species.
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