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“We are going to expand our fleet of rescue and logistical support helicopters, we will buy new bridge-launching vehicles [and] airtankers to help extinguish fires,” said Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez this time last year. “The climate emergency is a reality that, far from weakening, is getting worse year after year, so it’s important that our armed forces have the tools to face it.”
While Spain is not the only European country to have approved more spending on defence and climate – Germany is another – it was the first to explicitly direct such a sizeable portion of its new military expenditure towards climate resilience programmes. As Bloomberg reported, 17% of the year’s €23bn (£20bn) military spending would go towards natural disaster relief.
The decision helps to legitimise the use of defence spending in response to more frequent and visible climate shocks, professor Basil Germond, chair in international security at Lancaster University, tells Transform. As such, it is “less a novelty in operational military practice than a novelty in budgetary signalling,” he adds. “Spain’s move matters because it makes an implicit practice explicit, and because it is politically legible at a time of rapid growth in defence spending under extremely volatile geopolitics.”
Indeed, during non-military crises, armed forces across Europe and beyond have long been used for disaster relief operations and to support civilian authorities, although rarely with a clearly stated proportional budgetary allocation. Spain has formalised what climate-security research increasingly documents as a rising operational tempo of domestic deployments. In other words, the significance lies not only in the actual investment but in the way it tests the boundary of what politicians can plausibly call ‘defence’ in an era of expanding security agendas, Germond explains.
So, with conflict intensifying in the Middle East, will others follow Spain’s lead?
The US and Israel’s attack on Iran has certainly exposed the UK’s lack of military readiness and shortage of defence assets. Donald Trump’s recent “you don’t even have a navy” jibe was unfair, but hit home, reported the Financial Times, as the UK risks losing cutting-edge defence technology amid delays in publishing the government’s 10-year defence investment plan.
Years of under-investment have not helped matters. Last year, the UK government committed to increasing spending on defence to 2.6% of GDP by 2027 “to keep the British people safe and secure for generations to come”. The world has been reshaped by global instability, including Russian aggression in Ukraine, rising threats from malign actors, rapid technological change and the accelerating impacts of climate change, prime minister Sir Keir Starmer explained at the time.
How much will be dedicated to the climate emergency is not yet clear. The government’s narrative suggests that increased military spending will enhance national security and stimulate economic growth, according to Karen Bell, professor of social and environmental justice at the University of Glasgow. “However, this perspective neglects the immediate threats facing UK citizens: underfunded public services, a strained National Health Service and the escalating climate crisis,” she says. “Redirecting substantial funds to military projects, such as nuclear submarines and warheads, is likely to divert resources from essential sectors that directly affect citizens’ daily lives.”
Middle East conflict has brought food security front and centre again (as was the case when Russia invaded Ukraine). Fuel costs have risen and fertiliser flows have dried up, which has left farmers (and our continued reliance on chemical inputs) exposed. As Tim Lang, emeritus professor of food policy at the Centre for Food Policy, City St George’s, University of London, noted in The Guardian in April: “My report for the National Preparedness Commission, Just in Case, summarised why we should be diversifying supplies, growing more of our own food, coming off the oil-based farming treadmill and engaging the public in protecting itself for coming shocks. Now it emerges that defence analysts have been urging action too.”
A high-profile, if short, national security assessment by intelligence experts across government summarised the risks that the UK faces from global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse. It does not make pretty reading, but it is extremely important. In a blog for the think-tank Green Alliance, its senior fellow Ruth Chambers – who pushed for the assessment’s release under a freedom of information request – said that “the report’s framing is as significant as its content, as it treats ecological breakdown as a direct and escalating threat to national and international stability. It joins the dots between nature loss, security and society’s wellbeing.”
The UK is not adequately addressing these risks, as peers noted in a debate about the government’s reaction to the report’s findings. Concerns were raised about flooding’s impacts on crops both here and in places such as Spain (40% of our food is imported), and the need to invest in defence to protect the flow of food if there is a third world war.
In a paper published in the journal Sustainability in January, 39 food system experts from the University of York, Anglia Ruskin University and other institutions mapped how food system shocks, such as sudden price hikes or food shortages, could intensify pressure on already vulnerable parts of the system – increasing strain, instability and the risk of social unrest. It likened the current system to a “tinderbox”.
The warnings have been there for some time but are intensifying as the world changes environmentally, socially and politically. Whether the UK government reacts quickly enough or with future resilience in mind is moot. In its 2023 report Climate Change Dilemmas for UK Defence and Security, RAND Europe highlighted that the effects of climate change are expected to increase the frequency and scope of threats to the UK and its overseas territories; in turn, demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief and military aid to the civil authorities “will likely grow, exerting a growing strain on defence”.
Spain’s decision acknowledges this reality and the growing risks of climate change. As Erin Sikorsky, director of the Center for Climate and Security, puts it: “In an ideal world, the investment the EU makes to rebuild and boost its military capacity also boosts its capacity to respond to domestic climate hazards. Countries will face both threats – they’re not mutually exclusive.”
Indeed, some of the new large trucks, helicopters and heavy machinery being built for wars could be used for climate disaster relief during ‘offtime’. Spain’s emphasis on dedicated disaster-response capabilities also shows the growing appeal of dual-use assets that can be used for both warfighting and civil protection or disaster relief, notes Germond.
The peers’ debate in the UK suggested that new frigates could help to protect food flows during conflicts and disasters. “Other countries are finding that climate change and nature loss are harming national security and putting extra demands on their militaries, at the same time as destabilising geopolitics is placing extra demands,” says professor Tim Lenton, founding director of the Global Systems Institute at the University of Exeter. “Spain is interesting because they have resisted Trump’s demands to increase their NATO contribution, although they are increasing their military spending. It’s good to see them prioritising dealing with climate disasters.”
David Burrows is a freelance journalist and researcher
