Climate and security: evidence, emerging risks, and a new agenda (original) (raw)
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Climate and Security: Evidence, Emerging Risks and the New Agenda
There are diverse linkages between climate change and security including risks of conflict, national security concerns, critical national infrastructure, geo-political rivalries and threats to human security. We review analysis of these domains from primary research and from policy prescriptive and advocacy sources. We conclude that much analysis overemphasises deterministic mechanisms between climate change and security. Yet the climatesecurity nexus is more complex than it appears and requires attention from across the social sciences. We review the robustness of present social sciences analysis in assessing the causes and consequences of climate change on human security, and identify new areas of research. These new areas include the need to analyse the absence of conflict in the face of climate risks and the need to expand the range of issues accounted for in analysis of climate and security including the impacts of mitigation response on domains of security. We argue for the necessity of robust theories that explain causality and associations, and the need to include theories of asymmetric power relations in explaining security dimensions. We also highlight the dilemmas of how observations and historical analysis of climate and security dimensions may be limited as the climate changes in ways that present regions with unprecedented climate risks.
Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2023
Securing Resilient Livelihoods through Early Warning Systems and Adaptive Safety Nets peter lä derach, frans schapendonk, paresh shirsath, giriraj amarnath, steven d. prager, sridhar gummadi, berber kramer, ajit govind, and grazia pacillo Highlights • Understanding the climate-security nexus requires framing risks and resilience, which often reflects a negative cycle of fragility, climate vulnerability, and human insecurity. • Climate actions can enhance a society's climate resilience and generate pathways towards improved peace and security. • These actions include early warnings for food security planning, building local capacity to translate early warnings and climate-informed advisories, climatesmart mapping and adaptation planning, safety-net programmes, and risk finance. • Other changes and interventions are also needed to break the cycle between climate and conflict, align climate actions to peace objectives, and thereby contribute to a climate-resilient peace. 7.1 From Climate Resilience to Climate Security Ambitions to increase resilience, transform food systems, and ensure an end to hunger and malnutrition are intrinsically linked with actions to keep countries, regions, and communities safe. To end dependence on humanitarian assistance for 40 million rural dwellers by 2030 and realign US$5 billion per year for adaptive safety nets, it is critical to embrace a climate-security lens, and in so doing ensure that climate action is aligned with conflict-prevention and peacebuilding objectives (Steiner et al., 2020). Conceptualising the climate-security nexus requires framing risks and resilience. Such framing reflects a negative cycle of fragility, climate vulnerability, and human insecurity, all of which may worsen the risk of violent conflict. In this context, climate change is conventionally framed as a risk multiplier, exacerbating 63
Editorial: Climate change and security nexus
International Development Planning Review, 2023
The United Nations Security Council's high-level open video conference on climate change and security was held on 23 February 2021, bringing together high-ranking leaders from the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), Least Developed Countries (LDCs), and Group of Friends on Climate and Security. Quoting the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the UN secretary-general António Guterre's inaugural address at this conference, reminded attendees that eight of the ten countries hosting the largest multilateral peace operations in 2018 were in areas highly exposed to climate change (UNSG, 2021). Drawing on examples of Afghanistan and several sub-Saharan African countries, he explained how climate change posed a security threat vis-à-vis conflict, and how conflict could further increase vulnerability through exacerbating the challenge in adapting to climate change. This meeting of the UN Security Council not only underscored the importance of the subject but also called for further contemplation on the conceptual clarity of security threats in the face of climate change. Though there is a general global consensus that climate change is real, its links to security and conflict are often debated and contested. Such debates start by posing some very basic questions. Has there been progress to contain the security threats of conflict? If climate change is expected to increase conflict risk, was the era before global warming safer, more prosperous and peaceful than the present or the foreseeable years to come? What can we learn from the past, especially in light of evidence suggesting that the pre-industrial and cooler times of the 'Little Ice Age' in Europe and East China happened to be more violent than the present (Tol and Wagner, 2010; Zhang et al., 2006)? In today's world, climate change and politics are inherently entwined: from global negotiations and treaties, to calls for reparations and environmental justice, to local efforts to reduce carbon emissions or mitigate climate change. Political interests continue to frame narratives of climate change, of whose responsibility climate change is and who should be held accountable. Meanwhile, climate change directly and indirectly drives policy decisions ranging from energy and food security to flood defences and
Climate and security : evidence , emerging risks and a new research agenda WORKING
2013
ww w. id dr i.o rg UNDERSTANDING THE RAMIFICATIONS OF THE CLIMATE-SECURITY NEXUS A common challenge for policymakers and researchers are the several ramifications of the potential and existing links between climate change and security. Opportunities of environmental peace-building exist within places vulnerable to climate change and affected by conflicts. They require, however, efforts to frame climate policies within a peace agenda. States affected by changing weather patterns, increasing societal vulnerabilities and shifting demographics are constrained to develop capacity-building to adapt to environmental changes. Finally, strategic issues, including water and energy resources, as well as critical infrastructure—roads, ports or airports—are also affected by climate change. Too often, simplistic assumptions are sketched out about water scarcity conflicts, risks for critical infrastructure and tensions between climate and energy security.
Climate Change and Security : A Coherent Framework for Analysis
2009
The international political environment will change substantially as the Earth enters a period of rapid bio-physical transition driven by climate change. While it is true that climate change will have considerable impact on the national security of states around the world, the link between climate change hazards and security threats is not direct. The academic literature has been haphazard in presenting a theoretically consistent paradigm for assessing the security implications of climate change. Because of the global scale of climate change and the regional variation of specific climate change hazards, the traditional, human and environmental security paradigms can and should be reconciled to ascertain how conflict develops from climate change hazards and predict the probability of conflict scenarios developing at a given location. This paper attempts to redress this through a four-step framework for mapping how climate change hazards can lead to human and traditional security problems at a specific location and in surrounding areas.
Climate Change, Security Risks, and Violent Conflicts
Research on security-related aspects of climate change is an important element of climate change impact assessments. Hamburg has become a globally recognized center of pertinent analysis of the climate-conflict-nexus. The essays in this collection present a sample of the research conducted from 2009 to 2018 within an interdisciplinary cooperation of experts from Universität Hamburg and other institutions in Hamburg related to the research group “Climate Change and Security” (CLISEC). This collection of critical assessments covers a broad understanding of security, ranging from the question of climate change as a cause of violent conflict to conditions of human security in the Anthropocene. The in-depth analyses utilize a wide array of methodological approaches, from agent-based modeling to discourse analysis.
International Development Planning Review, 2023
The climate change and security nexus is an evolving area of research and policy. At the outset of work in this field, major research concentrated on how climate change is adversely impacting human well-being. However, in recent years, academics began to reflect critically on the social, cultural and political construction of vulnerabilities and developing understandings of climate change as a risk multiplier. Different aspects of the conflict-security nexus and its future trajectories became subject to critical academic scrutiny, including at a 2021 conference at Hamburg University where more than 100 scholars of relevant research interests from across the globe discussed and debated twenty-eight presented research papers. A total of sixty-five scholars from over twenty institutions have contributed to those research papers and participated in extensive discussions. The conclusion of these discussions highlights how climate change is an opportunity to reflect upon everyday injustices in distribution and access to resources as integral to concerns with security and conflict. A holistic approach to the nexus of climate change and security is thus vital to efforts to promote and realise societal development efforts while minimising social and environmental injustice.
Climate Change and Security: Filling Remaining Gaps
Politics and Governance
As perception of climate change as a threat to humanity and to ecosystems grows, the rapidly growing literature increasingly refers to the notion of “climate change and security,” for which there is as yet no single agreed definition. Despite the extent of literature already published, there are at least three remaining gaps: (1) Added theoretical value: How does “climate change and security” differ from similar notions such as “climate crisis” and “climate emergency”? What theoretical gains can be made by securing against climate change? (2) Role of non-state actors: The traditional concept of security is tightly bound to the notion of national security, but the climate change and security discourse opens the door to the participation of non-state actors such as the business sector, local government, and citizens. How do they take part in ensuring security? (3) Regional imbalance: Most of the literature on climate change and security published so far comes from Europe and North Ame...
Rethinking Climate Change, Conflict and Security
Geopolitics, 2014
This special issue of Geopolitics presents a series of critical interventions on the links between global anthropogenic climate change, conflict and security. In this introduction, we situate the special issue by providing an assessment of the state of debate on climate security, and then by summarising the eight articles that follow. We observe, to start with, that contemporary climate security discourse is dominated by a problematic ensemble of policy-led framings and assumptions. And we submit that the contributions to this issue help rethink this dominant discourse in two distinct ways, offering both a series of powerful critiques, plus new interpretations of climate-conflict linkages which extend beyond Malthusian orthodoxy.
Climate Change and Security: Adapting the Discussion to the Evidence
The linkages between climate change and security are high on the political agenda of international security bodies of the United Nations, the European Union and NATO. Recent scientific evidence shows that climate change will continue to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as the storms and flooding that recently devastated Pakistan and Thailand, and of droughts like that which emaciated millions on the Horn of Africa in 2011. In contrast to the strong scientific support for a direct causal relationship between climate change and individual human security, the relationship between changing environmental conditions and violent conflict remains largely ambiguous and lacks adequate empirical evidence. This Global Governance Institute Briefing Paper argues that policymakers globally should work to address these proven, and urgent, human security implications of climate change, rather than its unclear implications on violent conflict. In this vein, GGI recommends particularly that Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: step up societal adaptation and resilience programs; urgently finalize work on the Green Climate Fund to provide sufficient resources to vulnerable populations in developing countries; and complete and implement National Adaptation Plans in developing countries to ensure financial resources are used effectively.