Science diplomacy in the polycrisis

Events in recent months have, arguably, marked a significant shift in the global Zeitgeist. This is perhaps most pronounced in the geopolitical sphere. Many countries are experiencing a rise in political instability and / or are reeling from escalation of conflicts. International law is being ignored, and multilateralism has been significantly undermined. Some influential countries have pulled out of the Paris Agreement just as global temperatures in 2024 broke the threshold of 1.5°C above the pre-industrial levels. Around the world, climate action has fallen much further down the political agenda, while “security” and military spending take priority in many countries¹.

Scientific research institutions, universities, and individual researchers are not immune to the implications of this emergent polycrisis. They are in many ways at the forefront. Until now, researchers tended to operate on the implicit assumption that governments (and a majority of the public) will respond to the climate crisis with near “optimal” solutions, marked by a win-win approach associated with the global green growth paradigm. Current (geo-)political upheavals and resultant de-prioritization (and in some cases, reversal) of green policies (e.g., declarations to seek “energy dominance” by extracting fossil resources from protected lands) must lead us to a fundamental rethink.

While research funding incentives are an indispensable reality, in addition to continuing our work within existing frameworks, is it not perhaps time to put more emphasis on transformative research frameworks to ensure relevance in the changing world?  While science may not dictate societal evolution, which must remain an outcome of messy (and sometimes frustrating) political and other processes, we can do better when it comes to framing planetary challenges². I want to propose one under-scrutinized domain with the most urgent need for attention and reframing: security (and consequently, “geopolitics”).

This has been a relatively under-researched domain, particularly from the sustainability perspective, but it may provide the best leverage amid the escalating Polycrisis. As a researcher Gerald Toal notes, “Geopolitics will cost us the planet”³. There are at least three layers of causation involved:

• Global military spending redirects a huge fraction of our productive capacity toward potentially destructive purposes. If this capacity is not used destructively as such, it constitutes an opportunity cost. For example, military spending is on par with financing needed to meet the global sustainable development goals.
• Military spending contradicts sustainability in the sense that it amounts to around 6 % of total greenhouse gas emissions⁴ and the very thought of decarbonizing explosive weaponry is an absurd notion.
• It serves to perpetuate the extractive mindset and geopolitical scramble for control of resources, which contradicts the necessity to remain within the planetary boundaries.

Military spending is justified in a world where actors do not trust each other, and a credible threat of retaliation is perceived as the only way to ensure security. This leads to an arms race, a dynamic in which an ever greater proportion of productive capacity is directed to the military or a precarious equilibrium⁵ under the shadow of so-called ‘mutually assured destruction’ (MAD). Furthermore, as the adage goes, if you have a hammer, everything you see is a nail. A military security mindset leads societies to reconstitute emergent threats, most notably environmental changes and disruptions in terms of threats from the other³. It blinds us to true causes of the emerging polycrisis while simultaneously escalating it.

To navigate this predicament, a fundamental deconstruction and rethink of the dominant security framework is needed. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) inspired framing of human security⁶ as positive security (as an enabler for human development) rather than state-centric negative security (from others) as a useful starting point. Science-informed security frameworks must also align with biophysical realities as a pre-condition for survival and human flourishing.  This leads to two pillars of a social-ecological security framework:

Social security: Societies where everyone’s basic needs are met are less prone to conflicts and tend to be more resilient. This implies ensuring universal access to basic needs, for example, guaranteed access to food, shelter, education, and primary healthcare.

Ecological security: Human survival and flourishing are contingent upon resilient ecosystems. Hence, tackling a triple planetary crisis of global warming, biodiversity loss, and pollution should be an imperative of our collective global security.

Reframing these realities with a positive security logic (so-called ‘securitization’⁷) is meant to strategically prioritise them as a pragmatic “win-win” approach to ensure collective security. This is where, following a tradition of past efforts like The Russell–Einstein Manifesto, the Montreal Protocol, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) science-informed security framework may play a role in foregrounding new security threats while simultaneously reducing geopolitical tensions, helping to dismantle destructive military-industrial complexes that have hitherto been one of the major and under-discussed impediments to global sustainability⁸.

Together with other colleagues, I had an opportunity to present some preliminary ideas about this proposal as a policy brief for the 2024 G20 meeting in Brazil⁹. Since then, this topic seems to have become even more relevant and consequential¹⁰. There are growing calls for leveraging science diplomacy to revive multilateralism¹¹. The war and peace challenge has been framed as “a systems issue of the highest order” in IIASA circles. IIASA was founded at the height of the cold war to find solutions to issues too large or complex to be solved by a single country or academic discipline. Given IIASA’s legacy as a bridge-building institute, both a product of and a leading advocate of science diplomacy¹², it is well-placed to advance the task of further developing such a framework, needed to respond to the Polycrisis and ensure sustainable wellbeing, a core principle of IIASA’s mission.

Acknowledgements:
While the views expressed here are my own, I am very thankful to Reinhard Mechler, Steffen Fritz, and Elena Rovenskaya for their insightful comments in response to an earlier version, and to Elena Rovenskaya for also leading above-mentioned G20 Policy Brief on this topic.

References:

1. SIPRI. SIPRI Yearbook 2005: Armaments, Disarmament, and International Security. (SIPRI Yearbook, 2005).
2. Patil, P. The Science Activist: Should Science Get Political? https://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/18766/1/EGU%20Transcript.pdf (2023).
3. Toal, G. Oceans Rise Empires Fall: Why Geopolitics Hastens Climate Catastrophe. (Oxford University Press, 2024). doi:10.1093/oso/9780197693261.001.0001.
4. CEOBS. How increasing global military expenditure threatens SDG 13 on Climate action. CEOBS https://ceobs.org/how-increasing-global-military-expenditure-threatens-sdg-13-on-climate-action/ (2025).
5. 2025 Doomsday Clock Statement. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/2025-statement/.
6. UNDP. 2022 Special Report on Human Security. UNDP U. N. Dev. Programme (2022).
7. Buzan, B., Wæver, O. & De Wilde, J. Security: A New Framework for Analysis. (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998).
8. Stoddard, I. et al. Three Decades of Climate Mitigation: Why Haven’t We Bent the Global Emissions Curve? Annu. Rev. Environ. Resour. 46, 653–689 (2021).
9. Patil, P. et al. Toward a New Global Security Paradigm. G20 Brazil Policy Briefs https://t20brasil.org/media/documentos/arquivos/TF06_ST_01__TOWARD_A_NEW_GLOBA66faf1f10be47.pdf (2024).
10. Gayle, D. & correspondent, D. G. E. Revealed: Nato rearmament could increase emissions by 200m tonnes a year. The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/29/nato-military-spending-could-increase-emissions-study-finds (2025).
11. Science Diplomacy and Sustainability. Cambridge Core https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/global-sustainability/announcements/call-for-papers/science-diplomacy-and-sustainability.
12. The Vienna Statement on Science Diplomacy. IIASA - International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis http://iiasa.ac.at/network-with-us/vienna-statement-on-science-diplomacy.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the Nexus blog, nor of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.