Environmental Security and Climate Change

Environmental Security and Climate Change  

Simon Dalby
Print Publication Date: Mar 2010 Subject: Environment, Political Geography, Security Studies
Online Publication Date: Dec 2017 DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.168

Updated references, enhanced discussions of security and political geography.

Updated on 30 June 2020. The previous version of this content can be found here.

Summary and Keywords

Environmental security focuses on the ecological conditions necessary for sustainable de­
velopment. It encompasses discussions of the relationships between environmental
change and conflict as well as the larger global policy issues linking resources and inter­
national relations to the necessity for doing both development and security differently.
Climate change has become an increasingly important part of the discussion as its conse­
quences have become increasingly clear. What is not at all clear is in what circumstances
climate change may turn out to be threat multiplier leading to conflict. Earth system sci­
ence findings and the recognition of the scale of human transformations of nature in what
is understood in the 21st century to be a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, now
require environmental security to be thought of in terms of preventing the worst dangers
of fragile states being unable to cope with the stresses caused by rapid environmental
change or perhaps the economic disruptions caused by necessary transitions to a post
fossil fueled economic system. But so far, at least, this focus on avoiding the worst conse­
quences of future climate change has not displaced traditional policies of energy security
that primarily ensure supplies of fossil fuels to power economic growth. Failure to make
this transition will lead to further rapid disruptions of climate and add impetus to propos­
als to artificially intervene in the earth system using geoengineering techniques, which
might in turn generate further conflicts from states with different interests in how the
earth system is shaped in future. While the Paris Agreement on Climate Change recog­
nized the urgency of tackling climate change, the topic has not become security policy
priority for most states, nor yet for the United Nations, despite numerous policy efforts to
securitize climate change and instigate emergency responses to deal with the issue. More
optimistic interpretations of the future suggest possibilities of using environmental ac­
tions to facilitate peace building and a more constructive approach to shaping earth’s fu­
ture.

Keywords: Anthropocene, conflict, development, earth system, environment, geoengineering, planetary boundary,
safe operating system, security, sustainability

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Environmental Security and Climate Change

Environmental Security and Sustainable Devel­

opment
The contemporary formulation of environmental security was effectively put on the inter­
national policy agenda by the World Commission on Environment and Development
(WCED) in its 1987 report, Our Common Future. While the report is best remembered for
its advocacy of sustainable development and its catalyzing role in shaping the agenda
that led to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED), the so called “Earth Summit,” environmental security is specified in the report
as the provision of the conditions necessary for sustainable development. Environmental
security is also unlikely to be a possibility in the long-term future if sustainable develop­
ment is not followed as an overarching economic priority. Thus, the two formulations mu­
tually reinforced each other. Without environmental security sustainable development
was unlikely to succeed because conflict and disruption would prevent sensible initia­
tives. Likewise, if sustainability wasn’t a policy priority, in the long run, ecological de­
struction would prevent its accomplishment.

While the exact trajectory of climate change wasn’t clear in the 1980s, and Our Common
Future suggested that much more science was needed, it was noted as a significant issue
that needed attention in formulating environmental security. Other matters, including the
dangers of the cold war arms race, were highlighted; clearly nuclear military prepara­
tions were anathema to long-term survival and the possibilities of environmental security:

Perhaps the greatest threat to the Earth’s environment, to sustainable human

progress, and indeed to survival is the possibility of nuclear war, increased daily
by the continuing arms race and its spread to outer space. The search for a more
viable future can only be meaningful in the context of a more vigorous effort to re­
nounce and eliminate the development of means of annihilation.

(WCED, 1987, p. 35)

While the dangers of nuclear warfare and the possibilities of a nuclear winter disrupting
climate patterns for years, or even decades, were on people’s minds in the 1980s (Sagan
& Turco, 1990), environmental security was understood as a larger planetary concern
needing attention and, implicitly, a very different formulation of security. “The time has
come to break out of past patterns. Attempts to maintain social and ecological stability
through old approaches to development and environmental protection will increase insta­
bility. Security must be sought through change” (WCED, 1987, p. 250). Simultaneously,
Our Common Future suggested that there were growing sources of environmental con­
flict where resource shortages fed into violence in many underdeveloped parts of the
world. Wise use of renewable resources, to ensure their sustainable yields, was a key part
of providing environmental security too. Quite how resource shortages were causing con­
flict wasn’t clearly specified in the report; this was simply assumed to be the case and as­
sumed to be a situation that was getting worse. That there were numerous environmental

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Environmental Security and Climate Change

problems in need of attention isn’t in doubt, but the assumption that scarcity was the
cause of the difficulties went more or less unexamined.

Three decades later, as the science on climate change and the role of fossil fuel consump­
tion in particular is highlighted as a key cause of global warming, it is clear that the prob­
lem that needs attention is not a matter of scarcity. While climate disruptions may cause
local scarcities of water in particular, the problem with climate change is that there is too
much fossil fuel, not too little, being used in the global economy. As climate change accel­
erates, security is increasingly a matter of infrastructure provision and vulnerabilities to
extreme events (Dalby, 2009). Fossil fuel’s geographical distribution likewise has conse­
quences for geopolitics and the conduct of climate policy, which does not make global co­
ordination of climate change efforts easy (McGlade & Ekins, 2015). Renewable energy is
widely dispersed and, given the lack of fossil fuels, access and transportation difficulties
are much less likely to be a matter of geopolitical disputes (Overland, 2019). However, de­
spite this, much of the discussion about climate change and security replicates the earlier
discussion of the 1990s, on environmental causation of conflict, without focusing on the
larger system transformation that climate change is driving and the consequences of that
for security broadly understood.

This is changing, however, as discussions of climate risk and the need to rethink environ­
mental contexts and interconnections in the global political system become clear, in the
aftermath of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change of 2015, and the toll rises of casual­
ties from storms, droughts, fires, and floods as a result of accelerating climate change.
Earth system science, in its nascent stages when Our Common Future was being written,
has progressed by leaps and bounds, and the necessity of thinking through human vulner­
abilities, in what is now widely called the Anthropocene, has become clear to most re­
searchers (Lewis & Maslin, 2018). This is not necessarily clear to many policy makers still
working within traditional developmental frameworks and energy supply security agen­
das. The contrast between traditional energy security priorities with energy indepen­
dence as top priority, for the United States in particular (Yergin, 2011), and climate
change policy (Nyman, 2018), is especially stark in the Trump administration, a matter
that highlights the importance of politics in deciding on priorities in security planning.

Our Common Future didn’t provide a precise definition of environmental security, but it
clearly suggested that environmental stress was a cause of conflict and that sustainable
development required stable environmental conditions to succeed. Hence, environmental
security emerged as a policy goal despite the lack of a clear definition as to what it en­
tailed. These themes subsequently shaped both the policy and scholarly agendas in the
1990s, engaging the relationships between environment and insecurity, widely under­
stood, as well as the more specific research focus on environmental change causing con­
flict (Dalby, 2002). While scholarly and policy attention to environment temporarily reced­
ed in the early years of the 21st century, during the war on terror, climate concerns reac­
tivated this discussion in updated form, especially in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina
in 2005, an event that raised numerous questions about human vulnerability and the ca­

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Environmental Security and Climate Change

pabilities of states to provide security for their citizens in the face of accelerating climate
change.

Various formulations of climate security emerged (McDonald, 2013), and in parallel with
the discussion in the 1990s, scholars set about trying to clarify the role of climate in caus­
ing conflict while simultaneously addressing how this new discussion of human vulnera­
bilities required updated formulations of security. Most recently, this research and the
policy debate have been shaped by the findings of earth system science and emergent dis­
cussion of the policy implications of the Anthropocene era (Dalby, 2020). In all this, there
is no commonly accepted definition of either environmental or climate security, beyond a
general sense that predictable weather conditions are key to human flourishing, both di­
rectly in agricultural societies, and indirectly given the vulnerabilities of urban societies
to infrastructural disruptions.

To explicate all this further, the rest of this article looks back briefly to the discussion in
the 1990s concerning environmental change and conflict, then observes the reinvention
of the environmental causation arguments and their links to security in the middle of the
first decade of the new millennium. Subsequent sections deal with the emergence of the
larger earth system science discussion, which documents the scale and urgency of deal­
ing with climate change, energy security that frequently contradicts climate policy, the
emergence of climate risk as a policy focus, the discussion of climate securitization, and
possibilities of planetary geoengineering; finally, the chapter draws some tentative con­
clusions about future research directions.

Environment and Conflict

While Our Common Future assumed relationships between resource shortages and con­
flict, quite how this relationship actually worked wasn’t clear in the report. Two major re­
search projects were undertaken in the 1990s to address the question of how environ­
mental change might generate conflict, in what conditions, where, and with what implica­
tions for policy. Thomas Homer-Dixon (1999) led a team of researchers that investigated a
number of case studies, including South Africa, Rwanda, Pakistan, and elsewhere to trace
the casual pathways between environmental change and what he termed acute conflict.
One of the initial problems turned out to be that security was such an imprecise term that
it wasn’t practical as a research agenda if causal relationships were the key to the investi­
gation. Hence, this project focused more narrowly on acute conflict, rather than security
more generally. Guenter Baechler (1999) led a parallel series of investigations that more
closely looked at matters of development and discrimination in terms of access to envi­
ronmental resources in rural areas.

In very broad terms, both research efforts concluded that environmental matters alone
weren’t key to predicting conflict. While they were obviously important in numerous situ­
ations, key intervening variables included historical patterns of grievance and conflict as
well as the competence and legitimacy of existing governmental structures. Scarcity
wasn’t obviously a causal factor, and clearly it emerged that in crisis conditions elites of­
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Environmental Security and Climate Change

ten acted to enhance their power and control over resources, a matter that accelerated
the marginalization of rural communities. Maldevelopment in Baechler’s (1998) terms
was a key problem and, as such, policies that dealt with the perverse consequences of
rural transformation and focused on practical matters in particular contexts were key to
sustainable economic activities that were likely to avoid conflict. Elite appropriation of re­
sources was also a theme in Colin Kahl’s (2006) detailed field-based studies of Kenya and
the Philippines. This finding is broadly in parallel with the political ecology literature that
has long investigated the power relations in rural transformations linked to development
and economic change (Peluso & Watts, 2001).

Simultaneously, another series of research efforts were looking to the role of resources in
civil wars and larger scale conflict in the Global South. Here, the discussion suggested
that control over extraction and export of resources, including timber, oil, diamonds, and
coltan, was a key to understanding patterns of violence in the Global South (Bannon &
Collier, 2003). This is a long-standing pattern in traditional geopolitics, where rivalries
over access to resources is a cause of conflict, and in cases such as the Japanese entry in­
to the Second World War, major warfare too (Le Billon, 2013). Controlling resource
streams and the revenues that they generate may be a way to power and wealth in poor
areas that is much more tempting than waiting for long-term economic development to
enrich a society. This suggests that local cases of resource abundance may be much more
important than scarcity as causes of conflict generation (Le Billon, 2005). But it is impor­
tant to note that most of the resources in these discussions concerning diamonds, miner­
als, and petroleum, in particular, are not strictly environmental matters. Hence, the dis­
cussion of resource curses, Dutch disease, and related resource economics issues are of­
ten tangential to environmental security matters.

These studies all suggest in one way or another that theories of locally generated vio­
lence as the source of environmental conflict are inadequate; clearly, the larger global
economy and the political economy of resource supplies is key to explaining conflict in
particular locations, although the causal link is frequently indirectly environmental, at
best. Clearly too, while war is related to famine and frequently involves the use of food as
a weapon, starving people are usually far too busy trying to find food to initiate large
scale conflict despite the practicalities of violence often involved in these situations
(Watts, 2013). Food riots are frequently urban phenomena emphasizing the importance of
economics in insecurity, but large-scale insurrections are at best indirectly related to re­
source scarcities. As the Arab spring phenomenon suggested global food prices matter;
rapid increases in these are often the trigger for political unrest; but environmental mat­
ters are indirectly rather than directly involved here as a cause of conflict (Homer-Dixon
et al., 2015).

In terms of wider interpretations of environmental security, it was also clear in the 1990s
that matters of pollution, food shortages, inadequate nutrition, and lack of safe drinking
water were substantial hazards to populations in many places. These concerns were part
of the larger discussion of human vulnerability (Adger, 2006) and human security that in­
corporated environmental matters into its overarching formulation of the dangers faced

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Environmental Security and Climate Change

by the poorest parts of humanity that threatened their prospects for development (Adger
et al., 2014). Environmental security in these terms is compromised by many factors, not
just those related to overt conflict (Floyd & Matthew, 2013); the discussion of specifically
environmental security spills over into larger concerns with human security broadly un­
derstood (O’Brien, Wolf, & Sygna, 2013). Both the narrow version of conflict-related envi­
ronmental change and the broader understanding of human security having an environ­
mental component fed into the policy discussion of sustainable development.

Climate and Conflict

The failure of the American state to deal effectively with the aftermath of hurricane Katri­
na and the flooding of New Orleans, in 2005, dramatically increased the policy attention
given to the matter of vulnerabilities to climate change. In 2007, the discussion once
again found its way into policy debates in the United States and the United Kingdom
(Mabey, 2007) with a number of high-profile publications coinciding with the publication
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate assessment and the
controversy over Al Gore’s documentary movie An Inconvenient Truth, which shared a
Nobel prize with the IPCC and won an Oscar. Both the CNA Corporation (2007) and the
Centre for Security and International Studies (Campbell, Gulledge, McNeill, Podesta, &
Ogden, 2007) published reports on national security and climate change in 2007, to be
followed soon by the German Advisory Board on Climate Change (2008) and the US Army
War College analysis of national security and climate change (Pumphrey, 2008).

A key formulation in this literature in the United States was the idea of climate change as
a threat multiplier (CNA Military Advisory Board, 2014), something that added to other
sources of instability, and in light of the focus on terrorism, a potential source of discon­
tent and terrorist recruitment. Hence this was seen as an issue for national security, and
something worth thinking through in terms of long-term strategy. It once again raised the
question of the causal links between environmental change, this time explicitly as a result
of climate change induced weather variability, and conflict generation. An updated formu­
lation suggested that climate was better understood as a catalyst of conflict (CNA Mili­
tary Advisory Board, 2014). In parallel, the American military became concerned that
storms and rising sea levels might render its facilities vulnerable (Briggs & Matejova,
2019); a decade before, Tyndall Airforce Base in Florida was badly damaged by hurricane
action in 2018. Vulnerabilities of facilities and the potential for growing interventions to
deal with disaster relief and insurgencies aggravated by climate change made climate a
matter for military attention regardless of the lack of interest from the Bush, and subse­
quently the Trump administration in Washington (Klare, 2019).

These concerns generated a renewed research focus on environmental conflict and re­
vived the 1990s discussions as to the appropriate frameworks for analysis and methods to
investigate political consequences of climate change. A research literature emerged ad­
dressing both the empirical studies and policy implications with some quantitative analy­
ses suggesting a clear indication that weather events and larger scale climate change do

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Environmental Security and Climate Change

cause violent conflict (Hsiang & Burke, 2014; Hsiang, Meng, & Cane, 2011). But other re­
search produced results that are much less certain on connections between civil wars and
climate (Buhaug, 2015), suggesting that the empirical evidence about such things as
drought causing conflict is less than consistent or less than clear (Theisen, Holtermann,
& Buhaug, 2012). Special issues of Political Geography in 2007 and in 2014 and the Jour­
nal of Peace Research in 2012 (see Gleditsch, 2012) have generated both empirical inves­
tigations and methodological disputes about how to tackle the relationships between cli­
mate change and conflict. In Africa, where many of these studies are done, detailed re­
search doesn’t obviously link climate to large scale conflict (O’Loughlin et al., 2012). A
key part of the methodological debate here in terms of whether large studies are what is
required, or whether, given the large variation of social and geographical circumstances
over which climate change occurs, data aggregation across diverse situations is in fact
useful (Buhaug, 2015; Busby, 2018; Ide, Link, Scheffran, & Schilling, 2016).

These findings are sometimes complicated by the inclusion of large-scale historical events
and more contemporary cases as well as their inclusion of a variety of scales from individ­
ual acts of aggression all the way up to climate as a factor in civilizational collapse
(Hsiang, Burke, & Miguel, 2013). Historical studies linking up with new scientific analysis
of climate records suggest very clearly that the period of the little ice age, especially in
the 17th century, when agricultural production and food supplies were severely compro­
mised in many parts of the world, is related to wars and political conflict (Parker, 2013).
Similar investigations of the decline of the Western Roman Empire suggest that climate,
and in this case disease, were key factors in these historical events (Harper, 2017). But
great care has to be taken to generalize from these past events to draw conclusions about
present trends given the sheer scale of transformations in the global economy over the
last few generations, and the emergence of international institutions of aid and gover­
nance.

While some large statistical studies claim there is a relationship between climate and con­
flict, detailed empirical work on the ground repeatedly suggests that if there is such a re­
lationship it is relatively weak in comparison to issues of development and governance
(Selby, 2014). Focusing on livelihood issues and historical trajectories in particular places
suggests specific local factors are crucially important in understanding relationships of
violence (Deligiannis, 2012). There are numerous difficulties with data sets, distinguish­
ing dependent and independent variables, universal causation claims, and the scales in­
volved (Meierding, 2016A). Likewise, difficulties occur in terms of how media reports
code events, whether civil wars are the focus or more general outbreaks of violence, the
scale at which events register in these sets, given that national aggradation over large
states may produce spurious correlations, and their completeness as a record of political
conflict (Buhaug, 2015).

Some quantitative analyses focusing on Africa have suggested that there is a relationship
between warming and civil war in Africa (Burke, Miguel, Satyanath, Dykema, & Lobell,
2009), but detailed investigation of the statistical claims seems to suggest that the rela­
tionships between conflict and environmental change are anything but clear, especially in

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Environmental Security and Climate Change

the case of Eastern Africa (Raleigh & Kniveton, 2012). The scholarly research on this
theme comes to diverse conclusions. “Sweeping generalizations have undermined a gen­
uine understanding of any climate–conflict link, whereas cumulative results from the nu­
merous studies of individual communities are difficult to summarize” (O’Loughlin et al.,
2012, p. 18344). The finer points of the methodological debate are beyond the scope of
this chapter (see Bretthauer, 2017), but efforts to integrate different research methods
are obviously important to get greater clarity on which connections are most important
(van Baalen & Mobjork, 2018). While rural disruptions are clearly a matter influenced by
weather (Busby, 2018), the question as to whether distress turns to conflict relates to the
political and social circumstances in particular cases, and the particular ways that rural
political economy channels social change into conflict, migration, or collaboration (Ide et
al., 2016). Nonetheless, despite the lack of clarity about results, this literature has fed in­
to policy analyses of climate risks and the need to consider conflict risks as a matter of
foreign policy in Europe (Detges, 2017), and in the United States (Werrell & Femia, 2017).

A noteworthy attempt to resolve some of the conflicting claims in the empirical discus­
sions by a process of expert elicitation among the key researchers appeared in Nature
(Mach et al., 2019). This synthesis suggests that four drivers of conflict are especially im­
portant in subnational contexts: low socioeconomic development, low capabilities of the
state, intergroup inequality (for example, ethnic differences across groups), and recent
history of violent conflict. What is unclear is the importance of climate variability, al­
though there is agreement that further climate change will amplify conflict risks. Much of
this is simply because, to date, climate disruptions have been small relative to other con­
flict drivers. Nonetheless, this research effort continues because “Given that conflict has
pervasive detrimental human, economic, and environmental consequences, climate-con­
flict linkages—even if small—would markedly influence the social costs of carbon and de­
cisions to limit future climate change” (Mach et al., 2019). The concerns about climate
change are about future possibilities, which climate projections suggest will be severe for
most societies (Steffen & Rockstrom, 2018), but there is no agreement in the scholarly lit­
erature that there is a substantial empirical record of this so far in the 21st century. In
the policy discussions that draw on this work, there is considerable concern that climate
change induced conflict will change the geostrategic situation in dangerous and unpre­
dictable ways, not least as a result of extrapolations from the war in Syria.

Multiple accounts suggested that one of the causes of the Syrian civil war was the migra­
tion by unemployed farmers from drought stricken eastern areas to Syrian cities (Gleick,
2014, Kelley, Mohtadi, Cane, Seager, & Kushnir, 2015; Werrell, Femia, & Sternberg,
2015). If climate change had induced the drought, which in turn removed agricultural
livelihoods from rural areas, and these people, upset with the failure of the government to
assist them protested then, so the argument went, here is a case of climate-induced con­
flict. Careful subsequent analysis of the case and the evidence on which it is based cast
considerable doubt on the whole situation, both as to whether climate change had caused
the drought in 2007 and subsequent years, and whether the protestors who were at­
tacked by state security forces included substantial numbers of displaced farm workers
(Selby, Dahi, Frolich, & Hulme, 2017). While rural distress in Syria clearly happened in
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Environmental Security and Climate Change

those years (Daoudy, 2020), the causal link via formulations of migration and political
protest all the way through to the subsequent civil war is difficult to establish (Ide, 2018;
Selby, 2018). The violent suppression of protest would seem to be key to subsequent
events, and the history of regime violence against protests is nothing new in Syria.

Overall, it may be more important to inquire into how large-scale processes of globaliza­
tion have played out in the region and how the responses of particular regimes to the on­
going warfare since 9/11 have shaped political rivalries (Swain & Jägerskog, 2016). In
these terms, the role of oil in geopolitical competition is important too, and American in­
tervention in particular is a key factor in the larger patterns of violence. That said, even if
so-called oil wars, to gain access to specific supplies, may be overrated as a direct cause
of war (Meierding, 2016B), there is a long history of conflict around oil in the Middle East
in particular (Bichler & Nitzan, 2004). Now global food markets and climate disruptions
are adding additional complications to this pattern. In terms of causal factors relating vio­
lence and change 21st century events are heavily influenced by the global economy and
multiple interconnected crises in the political architecture of the international system
(Homer-Dixon et al., 2015).

The Anthropocene
The Syrian case also poses the question as to how much the drought might have been
caused or aggravated by anthropogenic climate change. The question of attribution, as it
has come to be known, in terms of either the increased likelihood or the severity of dam­
aging weather events (Kirchmeier-Young, Gillett, Zwiers, Cannon, & Anslow, 2019), raises
issues of responsibility and hence liability, as well potential conflicts if victims of in­
creased storm activity and other climate-change related disruptions seek recompense for
their suffering (Byers, Franks, & Gage, 2017). As critical scholars have emphasized, as
extreme events escalate, people in the Global South in particular, who had very little to
do with causing climate change, are its victims. Hence climate justice is a key part of
geopolitical discourse, even if representatives of states that have caused the bulk of cli­
mate change downplay it, and repeatedly refuse to comprehensively discuss loss and
damage as part of international climate change negotiations (Chaturvedi & Doyle, 2015).

All of which is even more complicated by the fact that climate change is but one of the
phenomena in play as human actions transform ecosystems in most parts of the earth sys­
tem. Earlier discussions of global change (Steffen et al., 2004) have fed into what is
known as earth system science and changed our understanding of how planet Earth
works. The scale of human activities suggests that we live in new circumstances, in a
planetary system that we are remaking drastically and quickly, so much so that it is wide­
ly accepted that we live in a new geological epoch named the Anthropocene (Lewis &
Maslin, 2018).

This science provides at least some of the answers to the questions raised in Our Com­
mon Future concerning the trajectory of climate change and other environmental factors.
Prominent among the formulations in this new Earth System Science is the suggestion
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Environmental Security and Climate Change

that the Holocene period of the last ten thousand years provided conditions within which
we know humanity can flourish (Davies, 2016). All of human history has occurred since
the last glaciation, a period of relative stability in the planetary climate that has allowed
agriculture to develop and has provided predictable conditions for complex economies to
persist over long periods. During this time human actions have dramatically transformed
landscapes by removing forests and changing habitats and species mixes in most of the
ecologically productive terrestrial ecosystems (Ellis, 2018). The impact of European colo­
nization linked the world into a global capitalist economy.

Most recently, in the period since the middle of the 20th century, now known as the great
acceleration (McNeill & Engelke, 2016), earlier fossil fuel-powered industry has been dra­
matically expanded by petroleum-powered globalization. This has involved the vast in­
crease in the use of fertilizers, the introduction of dangerous chlorofluorocarbons and
other things into the system, the widespread use of plastics and concrete to change habi­
tats and modes of living, and the diversion of much of the fresh water systems of the plan­
et due to dams, irrigation, and urban water systems. The planet is increasingly an artifi­
cial entity due to the expansion of this “technosphere,” which now measures in trillions of
tons of material (Zalesiewicz et al., 2017).

In earth system science terms, the period of the Holocene provided a “safe operating
space” for humanity, a set of conditions within which we know humanity could flourish
(Rockstrom et al., 2009). Doing so required that the earth system operate within a num­
ber of key “planetary boundaries,” beyond which dramatic disruptions not previously
known in human history would result (Steffen et al., 2015). In contrast to the Holocene
period, the previous million years witnessed a series of glacial periods in what effectively
was a lengthy ice age marked by brief warmer “inter-glacial” periods. Current trajecto­
ries suggest that we are heading toward a hothouse earth pathway, where rapid and ac­
celerating climate change will be the norm (Steffen & Rockstrom, 2018).

This trajectory will further disrupt historical ecological systems and agriculture on land,
and will, through pollution, warming, and acidification of the oceans, damage oceanic
ecologies fundamentally. As life is primarily an oceanic phenomenon this has profound
consequences for all of life, not just humanity; this is the new context of rapid planetary
change that we face in the Anthropocene (Angus, 2016). Environmental security at the
largest scale now requires policies that lead to a “stabilized earth” system, one not too far
from the conditions that pertained in the Holocene (Steffen & Rockstrom, 2018). The al­
ternative “hothouse earth” pathway offers no indications that civilization can function in
conditions of ongoing drastic disruptions, a theme that has received widespread popular
commentary (Wallace-Wells, 2019).

Risks, Fragility and Adaptation

Early in 2019, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) published a report by
the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation that didn’t mince
words on the scale of the current transformation:
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The accelerating deployment of renewables has set in motion a global energy

transformation that will have profound geopolitical consequences. Just as fossil fu­
els have shaped the geopolitical map over the last two centuries, the energy trans­
formation will alter the global distribution of power, relations between states, the
risk of conflict, and the social, economic and environmental drivers of geopolitical
instability.

(Global Commission, 2019, p. 12).

This is important, as climate is increasingly being discussed in terms of risks. Mabey,

Gulledge, Finel, and Silverthorne (2011) offered a discussion of climate security in terms
of risk analysis, suggesting that, because this formulation is both insightful and familiar
to security planners, it should be efficacious in security policy circles. However, while
they suggested that risk analysis is useful, they did emphasize a key point that frequently
gets lost in the discussion. Normal risk assessments work with a scale that has high prob­
ability, low impact events on one end and low probability high risk events on the other.
This is not the situation faced by climate analysts (Ruttinger, 2017). The present trajecto­
ry is clearly leading to high probability high impact futures, and this requires careful
thinking about what risks, where and when, need attention in security planning. Focusing
on water issues in particular, it is clear that matters of infrastructure and the political
economy of access to supplies is key to insecurity, and hence a crucial part of the relation­
ship between climate change and insecurities in particular places (Zografos, Goulden, &
Kallis, 2014). Likewise, cooperation across international boundaries is important in water
management, and cooperation is necessary to effectively deal with extreme events and
supply disruptions; at least so far, the vast majority of cases of cross-boundary water diffi­
culties have generated cooperative efforts rather that conflict (Dinar & Dinar, 2017).

A report on “A New Climate for Peace,” presented to the G7 meetings in Germany in

2015, identified seven “compound fragility risks” to states in coming decades as climate
change stresses weak states beyond what they may be able to cope with effectively. These
risks encompassed: local resource competition,; livelihood insecurity and migration, ex­
treme weather events, volatile food prices and provision, transboundary water manage­
ment, sea-level rise and coastal degradation, and notably, concern that climate policies
may have unintended consequences. This final point draws on studies suggesting that, if
adaptation strategies don’t think about specific local conditions carefully, they may aggra­
vate injustices or generate responses that make climate adaptation more difficult. These
“backdraft effects” (Dabelko, Herzer, Null, Parker, & Sticklor, 2013) may
“boomerang” (Swatuk & Wirkus, 2018) on aid programs and enhance insecurities, espe­
cially where the political economy of climate adaptation perpetuates traditional develop­
ment efforts relying on engineering projects that fail to take ecological and political con­
ditions in fragile states into account (Sovacool & Linner, 2016).

Noting that geopolitical rivalries remain a major problem in the international system,
Mobjork, Smith, and Ruttinger (2016) emphasized the importance of managing them
peacefully to facilitate effective climate actions. Similar concerns have been expressed by

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Environmental Security and Climate Change

US AID concerning the risks of climate change and fragile states where “threat multipli­
ers” may enhance the consequences of climate disruptions (Moran, et al., 2018; Null &
Risi, 2016). These considerations have been brought to larger audiences in the documen­
tary movie The Age of Consequences and in the TV series “Years of Living Dangerously.”
As with earlier efforts, including the ENVSEC initiative (Hardt, 2018), there remains the
difficulty with these formulations that focus on the dangers of instability in the Global
South, but in the process focus on the symptoms of climate change rather than the causes
in metropolitan consumption of fossil fuels (Dalby, 2013). This is not to deny the complex
consequences of climate change in rural underdeveloped regions that need urgent atten­
tion, but the first task in dealing with climate change is the rapid reduction in the use of
fossil fuels, and this is something that the affluent consumers of the world need to attend
to, especially as the social costs of climate change are mounting in affluent states, too
(Ricke, Drouet, Caldeira, & Tavoni, 2018).

Invoking a universal climate crisis, where everyone is equally affected or capable of deal­
ing with the consequences, or focusing just on its symptoms rather than causes is to mis­
construe the geopolitics of environmental security (Chaturvedi & Doyle, 2015). This is es­
pecially so when Malthusian fears of growing African populations and climate migration
are fed into the policy discourse (Hartmann, 2014). In so far as climate migration is an is­
sue, much of the dislocation is within states, and while climate is a factor in long-distance
migration, disentangling it from political and economic processes is difficult. The World
Bank has estimated that as many as 2.8% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa, South
Asia, and Latin America may be forced to move as a result of slow onset climate change
(Rigaud et al., 2018). While these are large absolute numbers, relative to the dynamics of
urbanization and economic change in these regions, they are relatively small amounts.
How states respond to cross-border distress migration is one of the key themes that the
revival of xenophobic geopolitics poses for sustainable development and effective climate
adaptation strategies; the past cases of closing borders to prevent migration from disas­
ters presents alarming precedents (Smith, 2007).

Geoengineering and Conflict?

Given the very slow response to increasingly clear indications of rising dangers caused by
climate change, discussions of the possibilities of artificially cooling the earth have
emerged. Technical fixes to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface in­
clude increasing cloud cover by spraying seawater into the lower atmosphere, and most
popular, mimicking the cooling effect of volcano eruptions by injecting sulphur dioxide in­
to the stratosphere (National Research Council, 2015). While these might be effective in
temporarily reducing insolation, their most articulate advocates make it clear this is a re­
ally bad idea that only makes sense as a last-resort temporary measure to buy time while
energy systems are converted away from fossil fuel use (Keith, 2013). This provides one
form of environmental security in that it, if it were to work successfully, it might keep

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Environmental Security and Climate Change

earth’s overall temperature within, to use the earth science system terms, the safe oper­
ating space of a stabilized earth system.

While such interventions might work to reduce temperatures, they are also likely to have
further largely unpredictable consequences, such as changing the patterns of monsoon
rainfall in Asia. Hence, as critics argue, such initiatives need to be avoided and sensible
climate mitigation strategies followed instead (Hamilton, 2013). If, however, geoengineer­
ing efforts were undertaken and disruptions of the monsoon happen, with all the likely
consequences for crop production in a region that is populated by more than half of hu­
manity, the disruptions would be severe. If in these circumstances, one state’s leaders
were to blame another’s geoengineering efforts for the disruptions and issue ultimatums
to cease and desist using such technologies, the possibilities of major conflict loom. While
no one took Iranian President Ahmadinejad seriously when he claimed, in 2011, that Eu­
ropean states had been using weather modification techniques to cause a drought in Iran,
the precedent is troubling (Dalby & Moussavi, 2017).

While overt conflict might not result from geoengineering, the discussion of the potential
consequences now includes investigations into possibilities of countermeasures (Parker,
Horton, & Keith, 2018), a situation that implies, and as has been suggested repeatedly,
that security in these terms can only be provided by careful agreements and cooperative
efforts by governments and corporations who might actually produce these technologies
and use them (Burns & Strauss, 2013). The continued failure of the international system
to grapple effectively with climate change makes it increasingly unlikely that the planet
will be maintained within the aspirational targets of 1.5 or 2 °Celsius average heating
above pre-industrial levels (IPCC, 2018). As heating accelerates in coming decades, it
seems increasingly likely that efforts to artificially cool the planet will be attempted
whether or not there is widespread consensus among the global community. The possibili­
ties of unilateral action may be over rated, not least because of the possibilities of coun­
termeasures by other actors, but the potential for conflict over diverging priorities and
unclear causal mechanisms in the earth system is, potentially, a major security nightmare
for policy makers. As such, environmental security is far more likely to be provided by
rapid decarbonization than efforts to deal with the effects of failure to do so.

Securitizing Climate Change

At the largest scale, questions of climate disruptions link up with historical discussions of
the causes of major events in human history (Harper, 2017; Parker, 2013). These offer
useful lessons for the future of civilization and the possibilities of humanity causing either
the collapse of civilization (Diamond, 2005), or, in worst-case scenarios, our own extinc­
tion (Wallace-Wells, 2019). So far, climate change and the larger discussion of the Anthro­
pocene have not shifted the priorities of macro securitization from traditional concerns
with nuclear weapons, state rivalries, or terrorism (Buzan & Waever, 2009). Nightmare
scenarios loom of the future of a planet where the long-term legacy of contemporary ac­
tions is a “plutocene” (Glikson, 2017), as in a geological epoch where future strata are

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Environmental Security and Climate Change

marked by plutonium as a consequence of future nuclear wars, whether directly caused

by climate disruptions or other Anthropocene events, if the new geological circumstances
are not addressed quickly.

In terms of securitization theory, linking climate to security has had a mixed success in
gaining policy traction (Floyd, 2010); the issue is complex, and while climate is an exis­
tential threat to many entities, the complexity of the matter defies easy encapsulation in
traditional modes of security thinking (Mayer, 2012). In the United Kingdom, under the
Blair and Brown governments, it was understood to be a policy issue that mattered
(Rothe, 2016). Elsewhere, in case studies dealing with Germany, Mexico, and Turkey, the
difficulties of getting coherent narratives and national attention suggest how complex the
issue is, not least because of the various referent objects—individuals, states, and the
planet itself—that are invoked (Diez, von Lucke, &Wellman, 2016). So far, at least, efforts
to make climate change a security priority have had mixed results in the United States.
While President Obama invoked the language of security in making climate a security pri­
ority, climate policy has had to deal with opposition from the fossil fuel lobby, and subse­
quently, the enthusiastic endorsement of fossil fuel exploitation by the Trump administra­
tion. The sheer complexity of American politics and the conflicting dynamics between in­
terventionist and de-regulationist tendencies in the neoliberal state make for contradicto­
ry trajectories (MacNeil, 2017).

If climate change is understood to be a global security issue (Goldstein, 2016), then the
obvious focus for attention to this matter is the United Nations security council. This body
has considered the matter of climate security a number of times but hasn’t generated the
necessary momentum to deal with climate as a matter of urgency (Scott & Ku, 2018). This
is not least because the permanent members include the largest carbon dioxide produc­
ers, and the sense of urgency generated in scientific analyses of the current trajectory
don’t translate into political responses when fossil fuel industry influence is so wide­
spread. Activists have been making the case for emergency action on climate for many
years (Spratt & Sutton, 2009), invoking metaphors of wartime, like mobilizations, as nec­
essary to tackle the scale of the problem with the necessary speed (McKibben, 2016), but
so far with little effective traction on international institutions.

The major achievement of the 2015 Paris Agreement and its rapid acceptance by most of
the major states is in fact the agreement that this predicament is real and that it needs to
be dealt with in coming years by most of humanity. That said, the contradictions between
universal aspiration and national commitments remain to be resolved (Höhne et al.,
2017). In Bruno Latour’s (2018) terms, all politics is now somehow related to climate, ei­
ther as a focal point for attempts at collective action, or as a series of policies mobilized
to resist these, as in the case of climate denial efforts and fossil fuel company obstruction
of climate change initiatives. It also requires focusing on where international investments
go, to coal powered generation stations, or into efforts to restore and more effectively
manage forests so they can sequester carbon (Gaffney, Crona, Dauriach, & Galaz, 2018).

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Environmental Security and Climate Change

Keeping the earth system within its safe operating space, which is now the key to envi­
ronmental security, requires rapid action (IPCC, 2018). Environmental security can’t be
provided by violent actions after disruptions. It needs to be built into planning and prepa­
ration for likely disruptions that are already in the system, but it simultaneously needs to
work on the rapid elimination of fossil fuel-based combustion everywhere. Clearly envi­
ronmental management efforts, the use of parks, pollution prevention, and sustainable
yield strategies for resource management alone are not adequate to the tasks facing se­
curity planners. In Peter Dauvergne’s (2016) terms, this “environmentalism of the rich”
has failed to deal with either the colonial legacies of destruction of indigenous peoples
and their places, or the disruption of numerous ecosystems due to the resource extrac­
tions and pollution generated by the scale of the global economy. Neither can traditional
modes of “fortress conservation,” using armed forces to keep local populations away from
traditional territories to supposedly protect them (Duffy, 2016). Similarly, assumptions
that isolated regions can somehow protect societies from larger environmental disrup­
tions are premised on a failure to understand the interconnections in the earth system
and a nostalgia for inappropriate national containment strategies based on territorial sov­
ereignty (White, 2014).

Earth’s Future
In so far as peaceful cooperation among the great powers occurs and violence is con­
tained to relatively small areas that are disrupted by climate shocks, the possibilities for
environmental peacemaking add another dimension to the policy discussion (Swain &
Öjendal, 2018). While regional local peace initiatives, peace parks, and peace building
around shared waterways and cooperative resource management are useful initiatives,
they are all subject to large scale collaborative efforts of the major powers to slow and
eventually stop climate change. All this requires a recognition of the new context of the
Anthropocene, where caring for ecosystems rather than extracting resources from them
is key to security provision on the largest scale (Harrington & Shearing, 2017). It is about
more than plans to make societies resilient (Grove, 2018); what is needed now is transfor­
mative thinking to prepare for the disruptions that are inevitably coming, even if decar­
bonization does eventually lead to a stabilized earth system in future (Kareiva & Fuller,
2016).

In many rural areas in the global economy, however, corporations and military agencies
continue to expand their control over resources at the sometimes violent expense of local
people anxious to maintain traditional modes of livelihood and control over their territo­
ries (Buxton & Hayes, 2016). Activists who protest often get killed in the process, while
international meddling gets the blame (Matejova, Parker, & Dauvergne, 2018). As Our
Common Future suggested, in 1987, many of these practices will have to change if sus­
tainability is to be the priority. How to transition to more ecologically sensible modes of
economy is now a key theme in the discussions of environment, security, and peace
(Brauch, Oswald Spring, Grin, & Scheffran, 2016). The problem with climate change in
particular, and the Anthropocene in general, is precisely that what has been secured so
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Environmental Security and Climate Change

far is what is now endangering environmental security for all in coming decades (Dalby,
2020). Regional efforts and environmental peacebuilding will undoubtedly be useful, es­
pecially in areas where major rivers matter to multiple states, as in the case of the Hi­
malayas (Huda & Ali, 2018), but these efforts will only work in the long run if the planet
avoids the hothouse pathway of runaway climate change.

The states that are most obviously vulnerable to climate are the low-lying, small island
states that face immediate questions of survival, and many other states in the Global
South that are vulnerable to agricultural disruptions caused by storms and droughts, but
lack the means to make their existential plight a matter of concern for the larger interna­
tional community (Chaturvedi & Doyle, 2015). While climate change may be the largest
existential crisis facing human kind, the United Nations has not formulated an effective
response (Scott & Ku, 2018); a global problem still faces the persistent political problems
of multiple jurisdictions and politics, where relative gains are still valued in international
politics despite the likely disasters that temporary benefits may confer on the collectivity
in the longer term (Harris, 2013). The Paris Agreement of 2015 does recognize the neces­
sity of dealing with climate change but still relies on states to craft plans to tackle green­
house gas emissions without any overarching authority to enforce compliance, even with
the limited ambitions states have so far shown in dealing with this issue (Falkner, 2016).
Climate has so far been understood as a development issue and a matter of inter-state
rules, the “law between and development within” approach in Conca’s (2015) formula­
tion. In turn, this raises the question of whether the United Nations might have better
success in thinking about climate if it was considered in terms of its functions to protect
human rights and its peace building and conflict prevention roles.

More specifically, this requires thinking about survival as a matter of economic produc­
tion and shifting from fossil-fueled modes to more renewable ones. In terms of geopoli­
tics, it requires a shift, from assumptions of competitive antagonisms as the basic premise
for international politics and security problems, to assumptions of the possibilities of re­
silient peace as an attainable goal for the United Nations (Barnett, 2019). As Conca
(2019) suggests, focusing on the consequences of climate change in such places as the
Lake Chad basin and Iraq, where climate migrants and instability are linked to environ­
mental change, if not directly to conflict, may facilitate actions by the United Nations that
might accrue to a larger general series of policy initiatives.

Future Research
In light of the growing discussion of security in the Anthropocene (Harrington & Shear­
ing, 2017), to do so will also require more fundamental rethinking of environmental secu­
rity to focus more explicitly on the ecological functioning of the planetary system, a mat­
ter of “ecological security” in McDonald’s (2018) terms, referring to a functional earth
system, rather than simply taking the environment as a source of resources, or the con­
textual backdrop for human affairs. The implications of this new Anthropocene context
suggest the need for further research looking at the interconnections between places in

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Environmental Security and Climate Change

the earth system, matters sometimes now encompassed in the literature of environmental
geopolitics (O’Lear, 2018, 2020), as well as more work in the emerging field of environ­
mental peacebuilding. This latter work focuses on practical measures to use environmen­
tal cooperation as a tool for post-conflict reconstruction (Krampe, 2017) and the promo­
tion of quality peace conditions.

Nonetheless, unless this new framing has a comprehensive rethinking of rural ecologies
and their interconnections into the global economy, there remain dangers that many of
the problems with traditional development projects may stymie innovations (Ide, 2020).
How to avoid these in working on climate adaptations (Sovacool & Linner, 2016) is clearly
a key theme for new research on ecology and security in the next stage of the Anthro­
pocene. Research in the future must focus on transition strategies (Brauch et al., 2016),
especially in energy systems (Looney, 2017) and on how to accelerate social transforma­
tions (Linner & Wibeck, 2019), rather than looking to traditional themes of security stud­
ies concerned with conflict, war, and its prevention. As Our Common Future suggested, at
the beginning of the environmental security discussion, security has to be sought in terms
of change.

Digital Resources
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This site contains many of the
published IPCC reports online.

Earth System Governance. A key network of social science research on the earth sys­
tem.

Center for Climate and Security. A clearing house for military and policy materials
linking climate and security.

Planetary Security Initiative. A consortium of international think tanks researching cli­

mate and related security issues directed by the Netherlands Foreign Ministry.

Real Climate. Where climate scientists discuss contemporary scientific developments

and their human implications.

United Nations Environment Programme’s Global Environmental Outlook Pro­

gramme provides links to the latest GEO documents that summarize the changing condi­
tions of the biosphere.

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Environmental Change and Security
Program hosts the a key online source in the New Security Beat Blog

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Simon Dalby

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