Executive summary:

Australia’s current government has supported a vision of the country as a ‘renewable superpower’. This imagines Australia supplying renewable energy and related goods to the world, in place of fossil fuels. Realisation of this vision could have major strategic benefits. It could help Australia enhance both its own and its trading partners’ economic security, while making an outsized contribution to global climate security. This could subsequently enhance Australia and its region’s traditional military security by minimising future climate-linked conflict and allowing Australia to improve ties with highly climate conscious and geopolitically important Pacific countries.

But strategic arguments have also held back Australia’s renewable superpower transition. Key Asian countries, led by Japan and Korea, have argued that Australia should slow the pace of its transition to continue providing for their own fossil fuel-based energy security needs. They have also presented this obligation as related to other security concerns. However, arguments that energy, economic, traditional, and even climate security are dependent on sustained fossil fuel use are flawed. There is significant evidence to suggest a move towards renewables-based energy development and international interdependencies can bolster all of these security outcomes.

In its second term in office, the government could regain momentum on the renewables transition by embracing the concept of green security. It should work with its partners in both Asia and the Pacific to ensure this concept is regionally adopted.

Policymakers should adopt a comprehensive approach to related statecraft, including taking the following actions:

• Adopt and uniformly promote the new concept of ‘green security’, which particularly redefines energy security and its interactions with other concepts of security

• Highlight the various elements of green security in a new national security strategy, in line with Australia’s commitments under the Pacific Island Forum’s 2018 Boe Declaration

• Increase awareness of regional climate security threats by publicly releasing the Office of National Intelligence’s 2023 assessment

• Increase support to Australia’s renewable superpower model and wind back support to Australia’s fossil fuel superpower model

• Support international fossil fuels-to-renewables transitions, particularly in Asia

• Internationally signal Australia’s intention to provide long-term renewable-based energy security in place of fossil fuels

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