Defence and climate change: An introduction

: Although the consequences of global climate change may seem to be the stuff of Hollywood--some imagined, dystopian future--the melting ice of the Arctic, the spreading deserts of Africa, and the swamping of low lying lands are all too real. We already live in an age of consequences, one that will increasingly be defined by the intersection of climate change and the security of nations. For the past year a diverse group of experts, under the direction and leadership of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), met regularly to start a new conversation to consider the potential future foreign policy and national security implications of climate change. The group consisted of nationally recognized leaders in the fields of climate science, foreign policy, political science, oceanography, history, and national security.

Who has responsibility for addressing the security implications of climate change? States and the United Nations justify their existence on the promise of providing security. Yet, although the national and international security implications of climate change are increasingly acknowledged, incorporation of climate change in national security planning or institutional arrangements is far from universal, while debates in the UN Security Council about its role in addressing climate change have been characterized by contestation. This article examines key debates about the responsibilities these institutions have for providing security in the face of the threats posed by climate change, examining the extent to which these institutions accept responsibility for providing security in these contexts. Drawing on Toni Erskine’s notion of institutional moral agency, the article examines a 2017 inquiry into the national security implications of climate change in Australia, and the September 2021 UN Security Council debate on the international security implications of climate change. These two case studies explicitly focus on the question of institutional responsibility – of the Australian Government and the UN Security Council respectively – for addressing the threat of climate change. In both cases these institutions stop short of accepting responsibility for providing security in the face of climate change, with limited policy responses or institutionalization as the result. With the security implications of climate change increasingly apparent, and increasingly recognized by these (and other) actors, the failure to accept responsibility raises potentially significant questions about the legitimacy of these institutions themselves.

Issues in Australian Foreign Policy January to June 2022

Why Canada must tackle the security dimensions of climate changeHumanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.1This was the consensus conclusion of the first international conference on climate change and security - held in Toronto in 1988 and attended by scientists and policymakers from about 50 countries, including Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. In the 22 years since that groundbreaking event, the climate change-security nexus has not been discussed, debated, or analyzed in any serious, sustained, or comprehensive way in Canada. Today, the security implications of climate change are obscure, almost invisible, to Canadians. This situation seems to be rooted in one or more of the following assumptions. First, the skeptics are right: climate science is imprecise and uncertain, and scientists cannot agree on the origins or consequences of a changing climate. Second, the people who are raising concerns about the possible security implications of climate change are scaremongers who lack credibility and tend to exaggerate risks and dangers. Third, climate change scenarios are not serious enough to translate into genuine security concerns for Canada. And fourth, Canada's security arrangements are adequate to handle whatever happens, and therefore it is okay to wait and see.This article explores each of these assumptions and argues that too few people and organizations in Canada are paying serious attention to how climate change will affect Canadian security interests. This inattention is puzzling, particularly because two federal government departments have produced solid, science-based studies that could serve as the basis for assessing security risks and ensuring the right security strategies, policies, capabilities, and plans are in place.Natural Resources Canada engaged hundreds of Canadian scientists in the production of From impacts to adaptation: Canada in a changing climate, while Health Canada followed with Human health in a changing climate: A Canadian assessment of vulnerabilities and adaptive capacity.2 Together, these two reports provide almost iooo pages of Canada-specific scientific analysis and projections - an extraordinary advantage that most other countries lack. Yet, paradoxically, security officials and organizations in Canada have failed to leverage this exceptionally strong foundation of scientific expertise.This article examines why the climate change-security nexus is being ignored in Canada and recommends concrete actions for assessing and tackling a myriad of potential public safety, national security, and international security implications.ASSUMPTION i: THE SKEPTICS ARE RIGHT: CLIMATE SCIENCE IS IMPRECISE AND UNCERTAIN, AND SCIENTISTS CANNOT AGREE ON THE ORIGINS ORCONSEQUENCES OF A CHANGING CLIMATE.Wrong. An unprecedented consensus now exists among the world's leading climate scientists. They agree that the climate is changing in dramatic ways, that no region of the world is untouched, and that human activity is the principal contributor to increased concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and other greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere. Scientific uncertainty cannot be cited as a legitimate reason for ignoring the security implications of climate change.The current go-to document for the scientific consensus on climate change is a 2007 report issued by the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC).3 The IPCC concluded that changes in the global climate system during the 21st century will exceed those observed during the previous 100 years, primarily as a result of fossil fuel consumption, agricultural expansion, and other human activities. Scientific academies and societies around the world, including the Royal Society of Canada, have endorsed these conclusions.Four interrelated dimensions of climate change dominated the most recent IPCC assessment and are critical to understanding potential impacts on Canadian security interests. …

The efforts of the securitization of climate change have been witnessed since 2007 at both international and national level. While the effectiveness of those securitization efforts needs to be further assessed, the security implications of climate change have come to be recognized at both levels. In the above context, this article attempts to explore why China has not gone so far in the securitization of climate change, especially compared with the EU who acts as one of the securitizing actors? This study mainly applies the methods of case study and comparative analysis. It draws on securitization theory as developed by the Copenhagen School of Security Studies to assess climate securitization practice in a critical way, with China as a case and focus. It also compares the divergent views of China and the EU on international securitization of climate change and their different approaches. China has been generally reluctant to climate change securitization at international level and has embraced the climate securitization at domestic level to a limited extent although it recognizes the security implications of this issue. The concerns of the political ramifications of the United Nations Security Council’s involvement and different priority agenda could explain why China has not gone so far in the process of climate securitization. The awareness of the potential security implications of climate change has been increased since the UNSC's first debate on this topic in 2007. However, there are divergent views between China and other players on the question of whether it is appropriate to consider climate change a threat to international peace and security and whether the Security Council is an appropriate forum in which to consider climate change. Meanwhile, the EU and China have responded to climate security with a converging trend in terms of mitigation.

Climate Change and Conflict in South Asia

As the contributions to this special issue suggest, IR has had a problematic relationship with environmental issues. Indeed it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that IR has treated environmental change almost as a distraction from important concerns of global politics, and gives us few significant resources for understanding these challenges or addressing them effectively. This is perhaps most starkly evident in the subfield of security studies, despite increasing recognition that environmental change warrants consideration as a security issue. This paper examines this engagement with a particular focus on climate change. Ultimately, the paper advances two arguments. First, examinations of the climate change–security relationship located in traditional security studies struggle to come to terms with the nature of the Anthropocene challenge and more specifically with the questions of who needs securing; what the nature of the threat posed is; and who is capable of or responsible for addressing this threat. Second, however, we can see progressive potential in engagement with the security implications of climate change in IR where such scholarship parts ways with traditional accounts of security; does not allow existing configurations of power to define the conditions for thinking about agency and sites of politics; and reflexively and self-consciously draws on insights from beyond the IR discipline. The increasing volume of work consistent with this more critical engagement is grounds for hope for this field of study in engaging productively even with a challenge as complex and significant as climate change.

The study of security implications of climate change has developed rapidly from a nascent area of academic inquiry into an important and thriving research field that traverses epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. Here, we take stock of scientific progress by benchmarking the latest decade of empirical research against seven core research priorities collectively emphasized in 35 recent literature reviews. On the basis of this evaluation, we discuss key contributions of this special issue. Overall, we find that the research community has made important strides in specifying and evaluating plausible indirect causal pathways between climatic conditions and a wide set of conflict-related outcomes and the scope conditions that shape this relationship. Contributions to this special issue push the research frontier further along these lines. Jointly, they demonstrate significant climate impacts on social unrest in urban settings; they point to the complexity of the climate–migration–unrest link; they identify how agricultural production patterns shape conflict risk; they investigate understudied outcomes in relation to climate change, such as interstate claims and individual trust; and they discuss the relevance of this research for user groups across academia and beyond. We find that the long-term implications of gradual climate change and conflict potential of policy responses are important remaining research gaps that should guide future research.

The impact of climate change (CC) on food security has been widely discussed in the literature. However, the role of food export restrictions induced by CC is poorly understood. In this study, we take rice as an example and apply a global economic model to investigate the food security implications of CC and food export restrictions based on both self-sufficiency rate (SSR) and household rice consumption indicators. We find that for capturing the impacts of CC and export restrictions on food security, the household rice consumption indicator is much more suitable than the SSR indicator. The impacts of the export restrictions on food security vastly exceed CC effects in over half of the regions. Regarding household rice consumption indicators, the sign of the impact of rice export restriction for each country depends on its position in the global rice market and whether it enforces the restriction policy. The magnitude of impacts depends on the changes in consumer prices of rice and the affluence level of each region. Facing CC, household rice consumption in regions without export restrictions will be negatively affected. Interestingly, not all the regions enforcing export restrictions would benefit from the restrictive policy. Only the net rice exporters benefit slightly, while net importers are adversely affected. The export restriction policy would make the harmful effects of CC transmit from South Asia to Africa and the Middle East. For adaptation/mitigation policies, more attention should be paid to the leading exporters imposing export restrictions where the adverse effects are originated and the more impoverished regions with close trade connections with such regions.

: 1 INTRODUCTION Carolyn Pumphrey Triangle Institute for Security Studies The Evolution of a Problem. Until fairly recent times no one thought climate changed, let alone was influenced by human activities. By the 19th century, scientists were theorizing that temperatures were affected by what we now call greenhouse gasses. And in the late 19th century, the Swedish scientist Arrhenius suggested that human industry might cause the planet to warm. But this notion was generally scoffed at. Over the course of the 20th century, the scientific community gradually came to terms with this theory and began to regard climate change even rapid climate change as more than a distant possibility. Interest in climate change as a national security issue developed even later. Although the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) did commission a study to look into the security implications of climate change in the late 1970s, the issue had little resonance until the late 1990s when the Senate Armed Services Committee declared that environmental destruction, including global warming, was a growing national security threat. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created in 1995 in part to allay fears. And then, in 2003, the rather notorious report commissioned by the Pentagon, An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and its Implications for United States National Security, provided a worst-case scenario, which suggested that climate change might have a catastrophic impact, leading to rioting and nuclear war.

The world is generally becoming less violent, but the debate on climate change raises the specter of a new source of instability and conflict. In this field, the policy debate is running well ahead of its academic foundation—and sometimes even contrary to the best evidence. Although comparative research on security implications of climate change is rapidly expanding, major gaps in knowledge still exist. Taken together, extant studies provide mostly inconclusive insights, with contradictory or weak demonstrated effects of climate variability and change on armed conflict. This article reviews the empirical literature on short-term climate/environmental change and intrastate conflict, with special attention to possible insecurity consequences of precipitation and temperature anomalies and weather-related natural disasters. Based on this assessment, it outlines priorities for future research in this area.

The literature on the security implications of climate change, and in particular on potential climate-conflict linkages, is burgeoning. Up until now, gender considerations have only played a marginal role in this research area. This is despite growing awareness of intersections between protecting women’s rights, building peace and security, and addressing environmental changes. This article advances the claim that adopting a gender perspective is integral for understanding the conflict implications of climate change. We substantiate this claim via three main points. First, gender is an essential, yet insufficiently considered intervening variable between climate change and conflict. Gender roles and identities as well as gendered power structures are important in facilitating or preventing climate-related conflicts. Second, climate change does affect armed conflicts and social unrest, but a gender perspective alters and expands the notion of what conflict can look like, and whose security is at stake. Such a perspective supports research inquiries that are grounded in everyday risks and that document alternative experiences of insecurity. Third, gender-differentiated vulnerabilities to both climate change and conflict stem from inequities within local power structures and socio-cultural norms and practices, including those related to social reproductive labor. Recognition of these power dynamics is key to understanding and promoting resilience to conflict and climate change. The overall lessons drawn for these three arguments is that gender concerns need to move center stage in future research and policy on climate change and conflicts.

The security implications of climate change are increasingly acknowledged in academic scholarship and in national security strategy documents. Climate change has also increasingly featured in UN Security Council (UNSC) debates since the first discussion of this topic in 2007. However, the UNSC has yet to agree a resolution formally recognizing its own role in addressing the implications of climate change for international security; a draft resolution on this issue was voted down in late 2021. Examining the statements and contours of 2021 debates preceding this vote, this article points to fundamental impediments to such a resolution, with the position of opponents (Russia, China and India) suggesting intractable obstacles linked to different visions of world order. While opponents' stated concerns about the UNSC's role in addressing climate change find some support in existing scholarship, the authenticity of claims made by opponents is called into question by the internal inconsistency of these arguments, the gap between stated concerns and foreign policy in other contexts, and the broader foreign policy interests and identities of these states. These factors present key impediments not simply to a UNSC resolution, but arguably to international action consistent with the urgency of the climate crisis.

While it has been forcefully argued that the world is generally becoming more peaceful (e.g. Gleditsch 2008; Pinker 2011), the debate on climate change raises the specter of a new source of instability and conflict. In this field, the policy debate has been running well ahead of its academic foundation—and sometimes even contrary to the best evidence. A small but important literature of systematic research on possible security implications of climate change is now emerging. To date, however, the studies are inconclusive, often finding no or low predicted effect of climate change. The scenarios summarized by the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 2001, 2007, and 2014 are much less certain in terms of the social implications of climate change than in their conclusions about the physical implications. In addition, the few statements on the security implications found in these IPCC reports are largely based on sources of uncertain academic credit and relevance.

Boykoff and Mansfield (2008), in a recent paper in this journal, provide a detailedanalysis of the representation of climate change in the UK tabloid newspapers.They conclude that the representation of this issue in these papers ‘diverged fromthe scientific consensus that humans contribute to climate change’. That is,portrayal of climate change in tabloid newspapers contradicts the conclusions ofthe fourth Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment (IPCC2007). Is it healthy to have the scientific consensus challenged so frequently? Butshould we worry about systematic misrepresentation of scientific consensus? Webelieve the answer to both of these questions is yes. To present regular updates onclimate change issues in the popular press is important because the changes inbehaviour needed to achieve substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissionsrequire a broad understanding of the basic facts. However, if the majority ofreaders receive misleading information, it will be difficult to achieve the level ofpublic understanding necessary to make such reductions needed to avoiddangerous climate change (Schellnhuber