Why is climate change seen as a security issue?

By Arjun Patel
This essay argues that climate change has become a security issue for two main reasons. The first reason is the debate over whether and how climate change can lead to conflict, focusing on conventional, state-level analyses. This may include general debates about causal mechanisms that may lead to conflict through factors such as water supply, and also more specific debates about the effects of climate change upon the geopolitics concerning Arctic sea passages. The second reason is the shift in post Cold-war discourse that stretches conceptualizations of what 'security' might entail, to include for example, the global ecosystem or the individual as referent objects, instead of the state. Whilst these re-definitional approaches also point to increased risks of conflict from environmental changes such as climate change, the conceptualization of this process shifts the focus from state-level actors and organizations to broader social and environmental concerns.

In the broadest terms then, climate change has started to appear on the security agenda, either because it is a new factor that affects traditionally conceptualized security concerns, or because the fundamental concept of security itself has changed. It is extremely difficult to distinguish between the two in the extant literature, however, which Gleditsch (1998) points out contains frequent lapses in conceptual clarity. He argues that, at least in part due to a lack of systematic research and reliable evidence, many participants in the debate resort to muddled argumentation including unjustified conjecture, a lack of clarity on the level of analysis, and reverse causality. As this debate is not a purely academic one, but also includes a large number of broader political interests, this seems justifiable - if a political actor can get climate change onto the

security agenda regardless of the conceptual clarity behind such a proposition, then this would further their political goals. Indeed Norman Myers, who admitted to 'heroic extrapolations' in some of the figures he cited on this regarding climate migrants, seems a prime example of this case (Brown 2008).

The fact that scholars are not conceptually clear on how climate change might generate security threats, despite the issue already being discussed at high levels within fora such as the UN Security Council, suggest that an overarching answer to the question above is the following: climate change has become a security issue out of political expediency. This process of securitization has been a collaborative one in which journalists, politicians, international organizations and NGO's have all participated. Deudney also suggests that many security organizations and experts welcome this, as it helps to maintain the currency of national security in the post Cold-War world (1990). And the widely disparate view of security scholars on the issue allows this to occur without clear or unified contestation from academia.

Scholars have, however, of course made many substantial arguments in support of securitizing the climate change agenda. The rest of this essay discusses the core reasons proposed within Security Studies that support climate change as a security issue, firstly by looking at the at the arguments surrounding security threats with the state as the referent object, and secondly by exploring wider definitions of the term security.

There is much debate as to what extent climate change might affect the risks of conflicts at the international level. Deudney (1990) questions whether the impact of environmental

degradation can be linked to conflict along national lines without serious analytical deficiencies, as neither the causes nor the effects of such changes align themselves to any national boundaries. Deudney's argument that environmental issues are simply not likely to cause interstate wars are probably true. This does not, however, mean that analysing the relationship between environmental change and international conflict is entirely useless - it is patent that the causes of wars have multiple, interrelated causalities. There are nevertheless specific examples that demonstrate that there are clear impacts on security at the state-level. One frequently cited example is the speculation of how melting polar ice may affect claims to rights over Arctic sea passages (BBC 2007). The planting of a flag at the North Pole by Russia, and the subsequent criticism by the Canadian Foreign Minister show that existing territorial disagreements could be exacerbated as the Arctic ice melts and opens up sea passages to trade (Busby 2008).

There are other specific examples of security threats that have been attributed to climate change. Ban Ki Moon, for example, attributed at least part of conflict in Darfur to climate change related desertification. However, as number of scholars point out, there is a distinct lack of data on the issue. As Gleditsch (1998) argues, existing studies have often relied on case studies, and the lack of a control group in much of the scholarship serves to make meaningful comparisons difficult:

"From a set of armed conflicts, one may variously conclude that they are all environmental conflicts, ethnic conflicts, clashes of civilizations or products of bad governance." (Gleditsch 1998)

Specific examples such as those mentioned above, then, have proven difficult as

material to generate trends. As such, they provide little predictive power to assess future security threats from climate change.

In spite of this, there have been several attempts to establish broad patterns of the security implications of climate change. Scholars such as Thomas Homer-Dixon have proposed that climate change will have neo-Malthusian consequences, i.e. population pressures and the consequent resource scarcities and migration will increase the likelihood of violent conflict. He does however stress that his models are hypothetical, and require verification though testing using historical and contemporary data (1991). The causal mechanisms proposed by Homer-Dixon and others, supporting the links between climate-change and increased violence, have been summarized by Gleditsch as follows:

Population growth/high resource consumption per capita > deteriorated environmental conditions > increasing resource scarcity > harsher resource competition > greater risk of violence (1998, p. 383)

This broad model has been proposed by a number of scholars that conceptualize environmental security from several different perspectives, ranging from biologists to critics of capitalism (Gleditsch 1998, p. 383).

Recently, however, empirical analyses attempting to test such hypothetical models have emerged. In looking at migration, for example, Reuveny (2007) argues that climate change can cause migration effects that contribute to conflict risk. However, he writes that the response of migration to environmental changes is one of three potential reactions to climate change. The choice between staying in place and doing nothing,

staying in place and mitigating problems, and migrating, depends upon both the severity of conditions, and the capacity of the population to mitigate the problems. Hendrix and Glaser (2007) also find some positive associations between reduced freshwater availability, land degradation and climate suitability for Eurasian agriculture and an increased risk of civil war. They also find that this is a weak association, particularly in comparison to inter-annual variations in precipitation, which is a much better determinant of conflict risk. The paper seems to show that short-term triggers are more important than long-term climate changes.

What both the above papers show then is that climate-change and security threats can be shown to be causally linked, but the significance of these links depends upon the time-scale over which such changes occur, and of their severity. No-one has, of course, managed to make long-term accurate predictions about climate change, the severity or speed of climate change, and by extension the implications for the security of states from conflict remain unclear. I would nevertheless argue that climate change deserves its position on the security agenda, as recent empirical studies show that climatic changes may well contribute to security threats, even where the term security is narrowly defined. The arguments that the causal links are weak and offer little predictive power do not negate the reason that they exist as security threats and uncertain causality and low predictability are surely trademark characteristics of this subject as a whole.

Many of the security threats outlined in the examples above could be shown to apply to conceptualizations of environmental security where the nation-state was not the referent object. Climate change has also become a security issue as a consequence of a

paradigm shift in Security Studies through a redefinition of the concept security. Many of the paper titles during the early years of environmental security scholarship confirm this aim - for example Redefining Security (Brown 1977), Redefining Security again (Ullman 1983), and An expanded concept of International Security (Westing 1986).

A human security approach, for example, to environmental security regards the referent object as individuals (Barnett 2010), and the focus is often on threats of conflict at the intra-state level. This is perhaps a more useful lens for looking at conflict such as Darfur, where the causes and the impacts of the conflict are clearly not simply at the state level. Defining environmental security from a human security perspective is at the same time problematic, as it limits the usefulness of the study for policymakers almost any area of public policy can be made a human security issue from this perspective, and the idea of security loses its focus to wider, long-term socioeconomic issues, that may well necessitate new legislation, rather than the use of security forces.

However, as mentioned above, many seeking to place climate-change under the policy umbrella of security, are not necessarily seeking to further our understanding of the relationship between security and climate change, but simply to raise its political profile.

Reference List

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