Climate Change and Security: From Military Preparedness to Ecosystem Resilience

It is genuinely difficult to understate the growth of interest in, and engagement with, the relationship between climate change and security over the past 15 years, in both academic and policy circles.

Since the first UN Security Council debate regarding the international security implications of climate change in 2007 – initiated by the UK – we have subsequently seen six such debates, with two in 2021 alone. Alongside this, we have seen informal Arria Formula discussion in the UN Security Council since 2013, debates in the General Assembly since 2009 and the establishment of a Climate Security Mechanism in 2018 to draw together work on climate security across the UN system.

This growth in attention is also evident at the level of states and national security policy. From representing a fringe issue for a handful of states in the early 2000s, we have seen an increasing number of countries not only recognise climate change as a potential challenge to national security but develop climate security strategies and even new institutional arrangements.

To a significant degree, this upsurge in interest is reflected in, even propelled by, work from think tanks and universities. While organisations such as RUSI were ahead of the game in engaging this relationship in the UK context, a significant number of think tanks based in the US produced reports on the climate–security relationship between 2006 and 2008. Since then, the number of analyses has only increased, with dedicated think tanks such as the Center for Climate Security established to focus on the development of policy-oriented research and recommendations on this issue.

Growing Concern, Growing Divergence

But of course, we also see significant differences in how the climate change–security relationship is understood and approached, in both policy and academic circles. For some, the emphasis is on the potential impact of climate change effects for future military operations, equipment and infrastructure. This concern, prominent in how the US has engaged the relationship between climate change and security, focuses our attention on the military’s ecological footprint and the functionality of its strategic resources in the face of climate change effects such as higher temperatures and rising sea levels.

For others, the concern is with the immediate and direct implications of climate change for human welfare and human security. This is central to how the Pacific Islands Forum presented the threat of climate change in its 2018 Boe Declaration, while research linked to the Global Environmental Change and Human Security project similarly pointed to the need to address the immediate exposure and vulnerability of human populations to the effects of climate change, particularly in the developing world.

And while different accounts in academic circles celebrated the upsurge in policy priority, funding and attention that would accompany recognition of climate change as an issue of security and survival, others pointed to the dangers of securitisation in enabling militarised responses to environmental issues.

Following climate security scholarship and policy over time, it is hard not to be struck by the extent of difference. These range from the question of whose security is deemed to be under threat to what tools should be used to prevent or respond to that threat. And they range from disagreement over exactly what the threat is – whether the direct implications of climate change or indirect effects as ‘threat multipliers’ – to who is responsible for realising or advancing climate security. Finally, engagement with the relationship between climate change and security, especially in academic circles, demonstrates significant differences in assumptions about the politics of security – about what security does – that has seen some embrace the language of security and others counsel against its application to climate change.

Discourses of Climate Security: Towards Ecological Security?

Of course, recognising and drawing out points of difference in how climate change and security are connected – in research, policy and practice – is an interesting analytical undertaking. But it is also politically and practically significant for two key reasons.

First, security is not just another issue area – it is fundamental to the political legitimacy and reason for being of key institutions in global politics: states and international organisations. The social contract on which states justify the reason for their very existence is precisely why national security strategy documents invariably begin by acknowledging that the provision of security (to citizens) is the most important obligation of the state. And, of course, Article 1 of the UN Charter commits the organisation to the maintenance of international peace and security. So, the question of how security is defined and approached – and whether it is being protected or advanced effectively – is actually crucial to broader questions of the purpose and legitimacy of key institutions of global politics.

Second, different approaches or climate security discourses – frameworks of meaning defining whose security matters, from what threats, by what means it is to be addressed and by what agents – encourage different practices in response to climate change. An emphasis on the preservation of a state’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in the face of the indirect threat of climate change – climate ‘refugees’ attempting to reach a new homeland, for example – encourages adaptive responses that do little to address the problem at its source while potentially presenting key victims of it as a source of threat. Indeed, this precise example was in a 2003 Pentagon report examining the potential national security implications of abrupt climate change for the US.

This means choices about the nature of the threat posed, whose security is under consideration, what responses should be enacted and by whom are particularly consequential.

On these grounds, a human security discourse of climate security appears as more defensible than one that might focus our attention on the territorial preservation of the nation-state from external military threat. But such an approach still presents currently living human populations as the referent object of security, potentially denying moral obligation to other living beings or future generations. And it still implies closing off humanity from the (ecological) conditions of our existence. This latter point is arguably particularly problematic in the context of the Anthropocene: a new geological era recognising humanity’s effect on earth system functions themselves.

These points – the (moral) limits of existing climate security discourses and the reality of the Anthropocene context – serve to make a case for conceiving and approaching the security implications of climate change through the lens of ecological security.

Here, our concern is with the resilience of ecosystems themselves: the capacity of ecosystems to function in the face of change that is already with us and ongoing. If this is our focus in approaching climate security – advancing ecosystem resilience – the practices undertaken should ensure an orientation towards the most vulnerable across time (future generations), space (marginalised populations throughout the world) and species (other living beings). The threat posed by climate change in this context is a direct and immediate one to ecosystem functionality. While recognising a potential role for adaptation and even potentially geoengineering, our focus here would overwhelmingly be on the minimisation of harm through urgent mitigation action. And the imperative for undertaking action associated with ecological security should be determined by the capacity of various actors to create or minimise climate-related harm, recognition that places particular emphasis on well-resourced and powerful actors to orient their actions in this direction.

Such an approach to the climate change–security relationship is clearly a significant divergence from existing accounts. It raises complex questions of interpretation and implementation, and enjoys limited immediate support in corridors of power.

But thus far we simply have not seen the type of urgent response to the climate crisis that suggests genuine recognition of the fundamental existential threat posed, or the acute vulnerability of those least responsible for the problem but likely to be most harmed by it. And in the context of the Anthropocene, orienting towards ecosystem resilience involves recognition of humanity’s place in the world.

Moving climate security debates and policy settings in the direction of ecological security is not easy. But in my book, other than outlining the key contours and rationale for this approach, I spend some time talking about how we might get there, and which existing practices and even institutions provide foundations for building on. As we all know, time is running out.

The views expressed in this Commentary are the author’s, and do not represent those of RUSI or any other institution.

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