This chapter analyzes the interconnections between energy policy and security and defense policies in Norway. It explains the background of energy and security regimes and analyzes policy interplay. Prior to 2022, Norway had barely considered the energy–security nexus due to substantial domestic energy supplies. Some interconnections were, however, visible via three cases: the economic security provided by oil and gas exports, security of hydropower infrastructure, and internal tensions around wind power. Repoliticization of the Norwegian energy policy took place in 2022, and questions of energy sovereignty and energy security also became a part of Norway’s energy policy vocabulary. In 2022, strong degree of securitization was not evident, but, lightly framed, there have been breaks from previous energy political practices – evidenced by new support for offshore wind power and visible military protection of critical energy infrastructure.

This chapter provides the tools to compute catastrophe (CAT) risk, which represents a compound measure of the likelihood and magnitude of adverse consequences affecting structures, individuals, and valuable assets. The process consists of first establishing an inventory of assets (here real or simulated) exposed to potential hazards (exposure module). Estimating the expected damage resulting from a given hazard load (according to Chapter 2) is the second crucial step in the assessment process (vulnerability module). The application of damage functions to exposure data forms the basis for calculating loss estimates (loss module). To ensure consistency across perils, the mean damage ratio is used as the main measure for damage footprints D(x,y), with the final loss footprints simply expressed as L(x,y) = D(x,y) × ν(x,y), where ν(x,y) represents the exposure footprint. Damage functions are provided for various hazard loads: blasts (explosions and asteroid impacts), earthquakes, floods, hail, landslides, volcanic eruptions, and wind.

This chapter goes beyond the description of individual events by covering extremes caused by a combination of multiple events. Two main types of interactions are covered: domino effects and compound events. Domino effects, which represent one-way chains of events, are quantified using Markov theory and graph theory. Compound events, which include complex feedback loops in the complex Earth system, are modelled with system dynamics (as in Chapter 4). Two such systems are provided, the ESCIMO climate model and the World2 model of world dynamics. The impact of global warming, pollution, and resource depletion on catastrophes is investigated, as far as ecosystem and societal collapse. The types of catastrophes considered in this chapter are as follows: storm clustering, earthquake clustering (with accelerated fatigue of structures), domino effects at refineries (explosions, fires, toxic spills), cascading failures in physical networks (more precisely blackouts in a power grid), rainforest dieback, lake eutrophication, and hypothetical human population collapse.

This final chapter compares the country findings and brings together the conceptual and empirical insights presented. It also aims to answer the questions presented in the introductory chapter: What are the security implications of energy transitions? What elements of positive and negative security can be found? How should energy security and security of supply be redefined in the context of the energy transition? Is there a hidden side to policymaking in the energy–security nexus? It first discusses the interplay between energy, security, and defense policies, followed by securitization and politicization. Subsequently, focus is placed on the security implications of energy transitions, and on negative and positive security. The chapter ends by summarizing the key technological, actor-based, and institutional aspects of the country cases, perceptions of Russia as a landscape pressure, and final conclusions.

This final chapter demonstrates how the catastrophe (CAT) models described in previous chapters can be used as inputs for CAT risk management. CAT model outputs, which can translate into actionable strategies, are risk metrics such as the average annual loss, exceedance probability curves, and values at risk (as defined in Chapter 3). Practical applications include risk transfer via insurance and CAT bonds, as well as risk reduction, consisting of reducing exposure, hazard, or vulnerability. The forecasting of perils (such as tropical cyclones and earthquakes) is explored, as well as strategies of decision-making under uncertainty. The overarching concept of risk governance, which includes risk assessment, management, and communication between various stakeholders, is illustrated with the case study of seismic risk at geothermal plants. This scenario exemplifies how CAT modelling is central in the trade-off between energy security and public safety and how large uncertainties impact risk perceptions and decisions.

This chapter analyzes the interconnections between energy, security, and defense policies from a transition perspective in Finland. It explains the key characteristics of Finland’s energy and security regimes, and then examines administrative interaction and policy interplay. The interconnections are visible via three cases: expansion of wind power and the operation of air surveillance radars, framing of peat as a security question, and how the Finnish government addressed the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Policy coherence between energy and security was limited before 2022, mainly focusing on stockpiling fuels and mitigating direct risks to the electricity network, for example, collaboration via the “Power Pool.” Geopolitical discussion pertaining to Russia was avoided in energy policy discussions. Energy policy integration into security and defense policy has occurred on a general level, for example, energy is now seen as a critical infrastructure and the energy efficiency of defense premises has been improved. Recent events show the need for improved coherence and collaboration.

When Catherine Flowers in her memoir, Waste (2020), records how Lowndes County, Alabama, ‘inhabited largely by poor Black people who, like me, are descendants of slaves’, has a serious problem of waste accumulation in people's 1homes, she points to not just the present and future defined by sewage but to a certain past, a racialized history of land- and people-use. Flowers writes:

Flowers's advocacy-text-cum-memoir documents the acute distress of environmental injustice in areas populated mainly by coloured people and highlights the links between histories of transnational slavery, race, capitalism and contemporary American culture, especially government funding, policies and welfare measures. Environmental harm stems from a history of other kinds of harm suffered by the African Americans, argues Flowers.

The events in Lowndes originate elsewhere, and Flowers’ memoir is not merely an exercise in toxichorography – a portmanteau term for chorographic accounts that have toxified ecosystems and communities as their key theme – but presents us with planetary histories of environmental and social injustices, with the two forms of injustice being interlinked.

From a different context, Chen Qiufan in his novel Waste Tide (2019) giving us the backstory of Scott Brandle, a researcher for TerraGreen Recycling Co., Ltd., writes of the research group that wished to study ‘the impact of illegal logging on the environment and native tribes [in Papua New Guinea] with the goal of forcing the local government to crack down on illegal logging’ (unpaginated). This study was not, Brandle recognizes, for either environmental (the forests) or social or civic (the tribes) reasons, but to ensure that the ‘Rimbunan Hijau Group could be given a monopoly on the lumber supplies of Papua New Guinea’. Qiufan, through the thoughts of Brandle, calls the bluff when he writes: ‘[T]he so-called sustainable development was … just another name for legalized looting’ (unpaginated). Qiufan's toxichorography of Papua New Guinea reveals the toxic economy that inflects even the environmentalisms in our time where the environmental harm for the natives emerges from the calculation of environmental benefits that will accrue for the Rimbunan Hijau Group.

In Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift (2019), the mosquito chorus (called ‘Moskeetoze’) sings ‘the story of a place is the story of its water, and the Kariba Dam is no exception’ (78). The ‘story of a place’ and the ‘story of its water’ can be about either excess or scarcity, and the novels under consideration in this chapter deal with both effects of water. These novels are categorizable, after Sarah Nuttall, as ‘pluvial novels’ that are concerned with ‘heavy rainfall and flooding, but also with the pluvial flows, ubiquitous wetnesses and manifold waters that pool, stagnate, drift and roil’ (2022: 324). However, many novels dealing with water speak about the scarcity of water. I take this extended semantic scope of ‘pluvial’ from Nuttall herself, when she argues in her earlier work that

The fiction in this chapter, from literary novels to graphic texts, focuses on a crisis over or about water, a crisis often originating in and exacerbated by colonial history, postcolonial greed and models of development, human callousness and climate change. The novels are interested in not a single, cataclysmic event as much as a series of events and processes that lead to the crisis. These are not novels about the end of the world as much as an end-ing of the world some time in the future, and which is anticipated in the present, making them catachronistic in character and in their message.

Paolo Bacigalupi's The Water Knife (2015), structured as a climate thriller, is set in the near future where acute droughts brought on by climate change have rendered water an expensive resource. Water rights have been erased, and all water corporatized and guarded by militia hired by companies like the Southern Nevada Water Authority. The major agricultural areas, such as Imperial Valley, are becoming ‘dust bowls’, as one character puts it, due to the corporatization of water and protracted drought (70).