Towards Ecological Security?

Abstract

Climate change is increasingly identified as a first-order security issue. It has been debated in the United Nations Security Council, has found its way into states’ national security strategies and has been linked to large-scale conflict in Darfur and Syria. While policy practitioners and policy-oriented think tanks have clearly promoted this relationship between security and climate change, academic scholarship has also increasingly embraced the idea that climate change constitutes a threat to security. In a recent survey of scholars of international relations, albeit conducted prior to the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, climate change was three times more likely to be identified as the most pressing threat to global security than the next most significant threat (McDonald 2017; see also Harrington and Shearing 2017:18). Of course, only a small and ever-dwindling number of sceptics would deny that climate change is a significant problem. The increasing concentration of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere since the preindustrial era has driven an increase in the earth’s average temperatures, already at over 1 degree Celsius. While the scale of change and its effects have been different and experienced differently across the world, manifestations of this change include rising sea levels, changing rainfall patterns, desertification, an increase in vector-borne disease and an increase in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters, among other effects. These manifestations have, in turn, driven biodiversity loss, an increase in disease, economic privation, population displacement and the loss of arable land, again among many other implications. While these effects are clearly significant, business-asusual emissions scenarios pointing to a likely increase of 3–4 degrees by the end of the century would be truly catastrophic, rendering large parts of the currently populated earth uninhabitable and killing off a sizeable percentage of the earth’s living beings (Christoff ed. 2013; Burke 2019).