How Climate Change is Changing Cyber Resilience Plans

What is Climate Change?

Climate change is the overall change in average weather patterns across the world. Since the mid-1800s, humans have contributed to the release of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the air. This causes global temperatures to rise, resulting in harmful changes to the world around us. Here we look at how climate change can affect how we protect cyber-attacks.

What is Cyber Resilience?

Cyber Resilience (simply cyber security) is to have the ability to anticipate, withstand, recover from, and adapt to adverse conditions, stresses, attacks, or compromises on systems that use or are enabled by cyber resources.

How does Climate Change affect Cyber Resilience Plans?

With global temperatures set to rise, climate change will inevitably affect cyber resilience. Computing involves energy consumption and heat production, if we cannot produce enough “clean energy” to meet our needs for electricity, the energy consumed by computing, and security within it will negatively impact and contribute to global warming.

There are a few fields in computing and cybersecurity that swallow up huge amounts of energy such as:

• Supercomputers
• Blockchain mining
• Communication networks
• Data centres

Current research suggest that these networks and data centres consume more energy than computers.  Alongside the enormous energy usage increasingly large wildfires are threatening physical infrastructure, destroying supercomputers and other weather disasters creates cyber risks and complications for computing.

IT operations that appear to be unaffected by climate change can be affected. For example, manufacturing can be directly affected, but e-commerce, logistics, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems that rely on live data can also be affected. Climate change can also lead to higher levels of social and political turmoil, with an increase in cyberattacks and cybercrime.

Strengthen the Resilience

If we want to get ahead of new and ‘left-field’ threats in the same way that we start to get head of the weather – by understanding the climate globally and appreciating how climate creates the weather, and how our collective behaviours contribute to shaping the climate. For example, it may be best to invest in solar panels and battery-powered storage systems for a building or have alternative sources of energy available.