The Western Australian Defence Review looks at how climate change in the Indian Ocean will affect Australia.
By Dr Nick D’Adamo, Dr David Brewster, Dr Paul McLeod, John Roberts and John Loney
Key Points:
- The Indian Ocean is being altered by a warming climate with profound influences on its marine anatomy and its links to weather, with those influences reaching far and wide into the African, greater Asian and Indo-Pacific regions.
- The region’s geo-politics and security will come under increasing pressure as changing ocean and related weather phenomena make many Indian Ocean territories increasingly vulnerable to food insecurity and exposure to an array of extreme ocean and climate events.
- There is a critical need to adequately monitor, understand and predict the relationships between the environmental, social, economic and geo-political elements of a changing Indian Ocean.
- Being a major Indian Ocean marine hub, and in the context of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021-30, Perth can play an enhanced leadership role in this objective, including with support from the defence sector for the IIOE-2 (2015-25), as was previously the case for IIOE-1 (1959-65).
