Australia’s 2026 National Defence Strategy, released in April, deals directly with climate change in one paragraph of a 102-page document.
That paragraph says climate change “could contribute to regional crises and instability”, and that demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief in the region “will increase as climate hazards grow in severity”.
🌏 The warning: Dr. Albert Palazzo, the Australian Army’s former director of war studies, has spent years researching how a warming planet could threaten Australia’s security.
The Institute for Economics and Peace has estimated as many as 1.2 billion people could be displaced by 2050 as climate change and other ecological threats worsen.
Palazzo said countries including Vietnam, India and the Philippines may be “hard-pressed to maintain their internal cohesiveness”.
In his 2025 book The Big Fix, Palazzo writes that the Australian public will eventually need to decide whether to welcome millions of refugees “for whom there is no chance of ever returning home”.
🚢 The wrong equipment: Palazzo says the Australian Defence Force (ADF) is likely to be sent into the region for aid and peacekeeping, work that needs planes and ships able to move large numbers of troops, heavy equipment and supplies.
Instead, Australia is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on nuclear-powered submarines under AUKUS. Palazzo says the submarines won’t be of much use in those situations.
🔍 Not the first warning: Former Chief of the Defence Force Admiral Chris Barrie said in April the strategy was “focusing on the immediate period and current preoccupations and downplaying bigger threats” and lacked a clear statement of “extreme climate impacts, geopolitical tension, authoritarianism and disinformation”.
Watch the National Account’s Archie Milligan below: