Canada is preparing to spend historic sums on defence and security as it responds to NATO’s new 5 per cent spending ambition. Much of that investment is necessary. But some of the security pressures Canada must increasingly manage cannot be addressed through military capability alone.
Climate change and environmental disruption are expanding the “messy middle”: a space of persistent ambiguity, where consequences can unfold before cause or intent is clear, attribution is settled, or responsibility for responding is agreed. It is neither war nor peace; neither fully domestic nor entirely foreign; neither exclusively military nor wholly civilian.
These challenges increasingly cut across the civilian systems and communities of everyday Canadian life. As Canada expands its security investments, it therefore needs to build the relationships, civilian capacities, and protections needed to navigate that uncertainty.
Climate change is expanding the messy middle
Climate change is already a defence concern. Climate-related disasters are placing growing demands on the Canadian Armed Forces, while military infrastructure and operations must themselves adapt to a changing environment. But those are only part of the climate-security challenge.
Climate change does more than multiply established threats; it reorganizes the terrain of insecurity. It exposes infrastructure vulnerabilities, alters access to territory and resources, disrupts livelihoods and supply chains, and strains essential services.
In the Arctic, changing conditions may contribute to the opening of new routes and enabling new activity while placing added pressure on infrastructure and communities. Wildfires can devastate communities while also disabling critical communications and other infrastructure. Climate change is not the only environmental source of this kind of disruption. Severe space weather can disrupt satellites, navigation, aviation, communications, and power systems.
None of these disruptions is inherently hostile. But each can expose dependencies, create cascading effects, and complicate responses across governments, operators, and affected communities.
The result is not simply more emergencies. Environmental, technical, commercial, and strategic pressures can overlap, making it difficult to determine what kind of problem is unfolding, who should respond, and how.
Those vulnerabilities can also become strategically relevant. Confusion can be exploited, existing grievances amplified, and disruption compounded by deliberate interference or misleading information. A crisis need not be manufactured to be weaponized by adversaries.
When the same event becomes different crises
A communications failure in the North may look to an operator like a technical problem, be experienced by a community as a public safety emergency, and raise national security concerns for government. Even the cause may be contested. During NATO’s 2018 Trident Juncture exercise, Norway documented GPS jamming originating from the Russian side of the border. Russian researchers later pointed to natural space weather effects as a possible explanation for GPS errors during the exercise.
The point is not that the explanations were equally persuasive. It is that environmental and deliberate interference can affect the same systems in similar ways, complicating decisions about what is happening and how to respond.
The 2022 cyberattack on Viasat’s KA-SAT satellite network shows the stakes when interference is deliberate. Launched as Russia invaded Ukraine, it disrupted Ukrainian military communications as well as commercial services relied on by civilian users across Europe. For users, the effect came first. Attribution came later.
These are not simply different perspectives on the same problem. Different people and institutions see and experience harms differently, have different information and responsibilities, and may disagree about what matters most or what should happen next. No one necessarily has all the knowledge, relationships, authority, and trust needed to respond credibly alone.
How the problem is defined therefore matters. It shapes which harms are recognized, what kind of response follows, who is expected to act, and whose needs receive priority. In the messy middle, those choices often have to be made before uncertainty has been resolved.
Shared responsibility requires shared capacity
These conditions help explain the appeal of whole-of-society security. If no single institution has all the knowledge, authority, or capacity needed to respond, governments have good reason to involve infrastructure operators, communities, civil society, and other non-military institutions more directly in preparedness and response.
But broader participation also spreads responsibility, and those being asked to contribute do not enter on an equal footing.
History offers reason for caution. Shared responsibility has not always meant that risks, obligations, and intrusions were distributed evenly.
This matters especially for those closest to disruption but furthest from the decisions and resources that shape the response. Northern and Indigenous communities, municipalities, infrastructure operators, and civil society organizations can bring knowledge, trust, and practical capacity that governments may not possess.
Whole-of-society preparedness therefore requires more than widening participation. Responsibility must be matched by the capacity, authority, and protection needed to carry it. Otherwise, burden-sharing can become burden-shifting.
Investing in the messy middle
If whole-of-society security depends on capacities distributed across society, those capacities have to be built. As Canada expands defence and security spending, investment in the messy middle should focus on three things.
First, build relationships before crises. Governments, Indigenous and municipal authorities, infrastructure operators, technical experts, civil society, and affected communities need durable ways to share information, plan together, and clarify roles before disruption begins. Trust and familiarity are difficult to improvise once systems are failing and uncertainty is already shaping how events are understood.
Second, build the capacity to govern amid ambiguity. Institutions need to recognize harm, weigh competing interpretations, and act proportionately before cause, intent, or attribution is fully settled. That also means drawing on local knowledge and involving affected communities and civilian organizations in how a problem is understood, not simply consulting them after key decisions have been made.
Third, invest in material civilian protection. This includes reliable local infrastructure, communications redundancy, climate adaptation, emergency management capacity, and practical support for communities most exposed to disruption. Whole-of-society preparedness is only credible if the people and systems expected to absorb shocks have the means to withstand them.
As climate change expands the messy middle, these investments are not substitutes for military capability. They are part of what national security in a changing climate now requires.
Some capabilities can be purchased. Others have to be built. If Canada expects more from Canadians in the name of security, it must invest in their capacity to contribute.
Dr. Jessica West is a Senior Researcher at Project Ploughshares specializing in space security and governance, climate security, and the implications of emerging technologies and environmental change for peace and security.
Dr. Jennifer Silver is a Professor in Geography, Environment and Geomatics at the University of Guelph. She specializes in environmental governance, digital technology in environmental decision-making, and the oceans and outer space as global commons.
Dr. Pauline Pic is a professor of Geography at the Université du Québec à Rimouski (UQAR), where she holds the Transforming Climate Action research chair in the geopolitics of the seas and oceans. Her research focuses on Arctic and ocean governance, commons governance, and the geopolitics of marine data.
The views expressed in this op-ed are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of the Institute or its staff.
