Security and climate change

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Abstract

Despite it being the most studied and arguably most profound of global environmental change problems, there is relatively little research that explores climate change as a security issue. This paper systematically explores the range of possible connections between climate change and security, including national security considerations, human security concerns, military roles, and a discussion of the widely held assumption that climate change may trigger violent conflict. The paper explains the ways in which climate change is a security issue. It includes in its discussion issues to do with both mitigation and adaptation of climate change.

Section snippets

Introduction: delimiting security

That environmental problems can become security problems is now well recognised in policy, including United States foreign policy. Surprisingly, despite climate change being the most prominent and best-studied of the suite of environmental change problems, it has thus far received little systematic analysis as a security issue (for partial connections see Brown, 1989; Edwards, 1999; Rahman, 1999; Swart, 1996; van Ireland et al., 1996; Wilson, 1983). This paper systematically explores the range

Redefining security and climate change

Security is a multifaceted concept. The national referent dominates discussions of security, large scale violent conflict is the concern that receives the most attention from policymakers, and developing military capability to respond to possible violent conflicts consumes large amounts of public resources: an average of 2.9% of every nation's Gross Domestic Product was spent on defence expenditure in 1996 (UNDP, 1998). However alternative risks to security and alternative referent objects

National security and climate change

The potential impacts of climate change on nations has been considered as a national security issue. Climate change figures in the United States’ National Security Strategy (NSS), although in at times incoherent ways as in the 1996 NSS which countenanced the possibility that there might be armed competition between nations for “dwindling reserves of uncontaminated air” (Clinton, 1996, p. 26).

Because sovereignty over delineated territory is the material substrata of national security, then

Climate change, violent conflict, and migration

It is necessary to be cautious about the links between climate change and conflict. Much of the analogous literature on environmental conflicts is more theoretically than empirically driven, and motivated by Northern theoretical and strategic interests rather than informed by solid empirical research (Barnett, 2000; Gleditsch, 1998). This in part reflects the long-standing difficulties in finding meaningful evidence of the determinants of violent conflict and war at international and

The military and climate change

As the organisations principally responsible for national security, and commanding a large share of public resources for that purpose, the world's militaries will increasingly have to manage the challenges of climate change. Militaries are major emitters of greenhouse gases. A crude indicator of the scale of this can be gained from taking the share of a country's GNP spent on its military as representative of the military's share of that country's overall greenhouse gas emissions (assuming

Human security

That climate change poses risks to human welfare is relatively uncontentious in both climate science and climate policy circles. People living on atolls, on coasts, in areas affected by El Nino, in drought-prone areas and arctic regions are all likely to experience negative impacts from climate change. It is not only the long-term change in mean conditions that is the problem, but also the possibility of increasingly variable (less predictable) climate, increasingly severe and frequent extreme

Conclusions: problems and possibilities for a climate–security discourse

It is clear that climate change is a security problem for some states and people. But, what does it serve us to speak of climate change in these terms and what are the implications of doing so? This is an important question that has been repeatedly taken up in the broader environmental security literature, although with little specific reference to the problem of climate change. The crux of the problem is that national security discourse and practice tends to appropriate all alternative

Acknowledgments

This paper was prepared as part of a Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research Visiting Fellowship in conjunction with a New Zealand Science and Technology Postdoctoral Fellowship. Thanks to Neil Adger and Mike Hulme for helpful comments.

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