Ms Ellie Kinney:

Thank you. It is excellent framing to have a look at where the money is coming from and where it is going to. We might think about where the money is coming from and pick up on two key areas within this. The Senator mentioned social cohesion funding. It speaks for itself how closely that is tied to real human security. Security is so much broader than military might. Real human security in terms of how safe people feel in their communities and how we are able to function as a society is, if anything, the security that impacts people far more often on a daily basis. As to the money being taken from the just transition fund, that fund exists to support the communities that may be left behind in the move towards climate neutrality, for example, communities that might be reliant on certain industries that move further away. I am from the north west of England. I was brought up in a post-industrial town where unemployment was an issue and one could really see the social issues that came from that. This brings me back to the question of what security is. If asked, the majority of people on the street would say that what made them feel safe and secure was a stable income and a roof over their head. This is the real human security that affects us every day. There is that issue in terms of where the money is coming from. We have to factor those things in with the fact that where it is going to is directly worsening the climate crisis. There are no two ways about it. This is a fully non-hypothetical situation. An increase in military spending will increase emissions. This will worsen the climate crisis. It will make the Paris Agreement goals of limiting warming to 1.5o Celsius not possible. These things will get further and further away from us unless we act now.

It is useful to think about the framing of the short-term security that proposals like this invest in, which sounds reassuring because it is short-term security, but there is a much bigger picture to look at here. By our calculations, the climate impact of ReArm Europe, taken together with NATO's spending increase, will create up to $264 billion of climate damage per year. It is directly taking money from a pot that is to support climate neutrality and funnelling it into something that will create climate damages of up to $264 billion per year.

We have not really seen this kind of mobilisation and this framing of the climate emergency on a real, European level. A few years ago, there was real momentum behind the European Green Deal. We now seem to have changed our focus so that we can only have one threat at a time and it is now the threat of Russia we have to deal with. These are not singular issues. There is a range of things going on at the moment and the climate crisis is a very real threat impacting all of Europe at the moment. It goes to show that money can be mobilised at speed where there is the political will to do so. We absolutely need that kind of response to the climate crisis as an incredibly real threat that is impacting people now and will only continue to impact people more and more the further away we get from 1.5°C warming.