An exemplar of national security management?

Alan Dupont, of the Cognoscenti Group, wrote this month on LinkedIn about COVID-19 being a golden opportunity for Australia to strengthen its national security. 

After my 20 years in Timor-Leste, a country that has faced countless security risks, it is interesting to turn one’s thoughts to how Timor-Leste could prepare itself for future crises, that will inevitably appear. 

One crisis facing Timor-Leste – as for all of us – is climate change. This might lead to a variety of discrete emergencies that could easily render the developing nation helpless to protect its population. Already they experience increasingly erratic rainfall, extended dry seasons, dying rivers, and sea-level rise. 

Water security will be a significant issue in the coming years as rainfall patterns change. Early 2020, saw Dili experiencing major flooding that left hundreds homeless. Experts warn us that such events will only become more common as the effects of climate change increase. 

As a country where 80% of the population relies on agriculture for their livelihoods, the adverse flow-on effects are great and varied: crops will fail as rivers dry up. And if water supply is increasingly less reliable, how can people wash their hands regularly to protect themselves from infections such as COVID-19? 

The Green Climate Fund, an initiative between 194 countries to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries, estimates that infrastructure damage due to extreme weather events in recent years has cost Timor-Leste around $250 million annually.  

Timor-Leste has been quick to adopt climate change policies to address these issues. However, none of us is in control of climate crises. Much like the challenge from COVID-19, we rely on the world to act as one ‘extended family’ to succeed. 

Financially the country is also vulnerable because of reliance upon income from its oil and gas-based sovereign wealth fund that in 2019 provided the country with approximately 88% of its income. In a 2019 report, the IMF identified the primary risks to the Timor-Leste economy as political risk and inflation, with ‘minimal’ impact from a drop in global oil prices. I suspect that report would now see things differently. For example, there was no mention of the risk of a global pandemic, an event for which most countries should have been more prepared.

So, this is where we return to the main point: risks may come out of the blue, but most do not. We know Timor-Leste faces risks from climate change and from a fall in fossil fuel prices. As I write this, the futures price of oil has dropped below zero in the US, so the risks are real.

Now that we have seen the result of COVID-19 on the world economy, we have been given a wake-up call to examine the broader array of risks facing the world. We now have the perfect opportunity to apply our learnings from the COVID-19 health crisis and consider the cost of preparing and the opportunity cost of not preparing for each of those risks. 

Australia appears to have done well in dealing with COVID-19. If the Australian Government becomes an exemplar of national security management, perhaps it could share knowledge, expertise, and strategies with its neighbours? After all, if COVID-19 has shown us anything, it is that when a global crisis strikes, we are all in it together.