KEY POINTS:
Climate change is emerging as a major national security issue for Australia.
Defence and federal police chiefs have warned that their forces will have to prepare for serious issues ranging from a mass exodus of environmental refugees to swindling on emerging carbon trading markets.
Such challenges were entirely new, Defence Force chief Air Marshal Angus Houston said in a speech this year.
Global factors such as terrorism, pandemic disease, resource depletion and the security impacts of climate change may affect Australia's security interests, both directly and indirectly.
Air Marshal Houston's warning has been echoed by federal police commissioner Mick Keelty, who said this week that environmental change had the potential to wreak havoc, cause more deaths and pose national security issues such as the world had never seen.
"It's a challenge not just for the [federal police] and our state and territory colleagues, but for law enforcement the world over," he said.
Predictions by leading climate scientists pointed to potential disasters such as a catastrophic decline in the availability of fresh water, crop failures, rampant diseases and flooding so frequent that people en masse would be on the move.
Even if some and not all of this occurred, climate change would be the security issue of the 21st century.
Mr Keelty said that by 2040, China alone faced a great risk of environmental change, shrinking land available for grain production by as much as 30 per cent - a decade before sea levels rose by a predicted 2050 level of more than half a metre.
But if China was to feed its predicted population, food production needed to rise by about 50 per cent above present levels.
Across Asia-Pacific, millions of people could begin looking for new land, and would cross oceans and borders to do so.
The potential security issues were enormous and should not be underestimated, Mr Keelty said.
He also warned of the rise of new forms of white-collar crime as the need for environmental regulation - including carbon trading schemes - increased.
Prime Minister John Howard has recently released a discussion paper on a proposed carbon trading scheme and this year agreed with New Zealand counterpart Helen Clark that transtasman schemes should be harmonised.
The European Commission is expected to announce a new environmental package including carbon trading in December, and global carbon trading systems are being advocated by the International Emissions Trading Association, formed by 170international companies.
Mr Keelty said any carbon trading scheme to which Australia was a party would not only require regulation, but also investigation of corruption or fraud.
"I think police will begin to play a role in this sooner rather than later," he said.
"After all, it was not that long ago that the Singapore police were investigating the Barings Bank fraud in the futures and derivatives markets."
Carbon trading could fall into the similar futures and derivatives trading schemes.
