Barking up the tree wrongly? How national security strategies frame climate and other environmental change as security issues

Abstract

The right framing of climate and other environmental change is crucial to guide policy responses towards preventing human suffering, displacement, and violent conflict. This study analyzes how ministries of defense and other security policy actors from 93 countries framed climate and other environmental change in national security strategy documents (NSSD) published between 2000 and 2020. An inductive content analysis reveals three shortcomings in the representations of environmental and climate change in these documents: First, representations of direct impacts are overly dominated by a focus on disasters. Second, references to indirect climate impacts do not reflect the current state of research. Third, a share of references to climate and other environmental change represents the planetary dimension of change in problematic ways. Additionally, the global scope of the analysis reveals regional differences in climate securitization: Framings of climate migration were mostly raised by potential destination countries, which often have high historical emissions, fueling concerns of climate injustice. By contrast, questionable statements on environmental and climate conflicts were published in the Global North and South alike. All in all, this suggests that the securitization of environmental and climate change are global phenomena. They do, however, not adequately reflect the planetary uncertainties of the Anthropocene.