The narrow repertoire of climate security
What we do and say now about climate security really matters for how we’re going to deal with the impacts of climate change in the future.
Framing climate security
We know that climate change is going to cause huge problems for people and polities around the globe in both poor and rich societies, and one of the ways of understanding these problems is through the lens of insecurity. Climate insecurity predicts a collapse in the safety and stability of peoples’ environments, and their consequent ability to go about their lives and provide for themselves and their families.
These developments have not gone unnoticed by leading national security organisations, particularly in the United States, which have begun to seriously consider how climate change might function as a security problem. In my recent article Making a World of Climate Insecurity: The Threat Multiplier Frame and the US National Security Community, I argue that the way these organisations frame climate change as a security problem is ultimately counterproductive and actually contributes to making the world less secure.
In the article, I examine the US national security system’s preferred framing of climate security, which is the idea that climate change is a threat multiplier, or something which exacerbates and stokes other threats and problems. While I don’t suggest this is a false statement, I argue that the way that national security professionals define the problem and the kind of solutions they pursue risks a dismal and limited future, in which climate security is largely understood to be focused on the preservation of the national security system against the effects of climate change. It’s dismal because it says that climate change is going to hand us an awful, semi-apocalyptic world, and it’s limited because it says that all we can really do in the face of this is some institutional-level reform of key national-security institutions.
Making a world of climate insecurity
To make this argument I use a concept called worldmaking which is popular in a range of disciplines including International Relations. Worldmaking helps us describe and understand the ways in which actors anticipate and create future worlds. I break worldmaking processes down into three steps: aggregation, coherence, and construction. By describing climate change in this way, I’m able to link together both what people say about climate security, but also link it to what they do.
In the first step, aggregation, worldmakers (in this case, the US national security system) set out to pull together a set of fragments of a future world: the many problems, crises and perils they anticipate arising from a warming world. This includes the physical impacts of climate change: storms, sea level rise, heatwaves, and other events and trends which damage and degrade their ability to do their jobs. But they also suggest that climate change could cause conflict and humanitarian crises to which the security organisations will need to respond.
In the second step, coherence, the national security system makes sense of those problems by describing how they relate to what the national security system sees itself doing in the world, which is primarily fighting wars. The national security system understands these problems and threats in terms of the way they stop the national security system from functioning as it’s intended, which is really about keeping planes flying, ships sailing, and tanks rolling forward to battle.
The final step, construction, is about the physical actions which flow from this understanding. This involves the hardening of bases, the rehearsal for climate-related operations, and the persuasion of allies they need to do the same. The net result, ultimately, is all about ensuring that Washington’s power continues unabated despite climate change’s many destabilising effects.
This has powerful effects on the kind of future we’re heading towards: by focusing climate security so relentlessly on national security organisations themselves, we risk a very myopic and constrained response to the very real crisis we appear to be hurtling towards. In an age where states and corporations are abandoning many of their climate goals, it is ever more likely that the dominant ideas about security on a hotter planet will be out of step with people’s lived realities.
Conclusion
On some level it might seem like this is a banal thing to say: of course the US national security system is going to talk about climate change in this way. But it’s important to zoom out and think about how significant the organisations dedicated to prosecuting the US’s national interests really are: they have enormous influence over the way that these problems are framed. What these organisations identify as problems are the ones which are likely to receive the most attention and funding, particularly in a polarised political environment, where funding for defence and security is just about the only major policy area with anything approaching consensus. There’s evidence that this framing has escaped the US: it now often appears in the language of major international organisations.
This means that it’s important that we try to rethink what climate security is and could be, because by doing so we’ll recentre it on the people and places that are going to be hit hardest. Any attempt to remake climate security must focus on the areas of genuine need, not on making sure that fighter jets can take off unimpeded by water intrusion on their runways. If we do this, we create a climate security that helps us to adequately address many of the problems and crises emerging from the dismal world the threat multiplier predicts.
About the author
Rob Cullum is a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College London’s Department of War Studies. He’s interested in how some classic questions in IR, particularly the search for order and security, are being pursued in a warming world.
This blog post is part of a series that spotlights recently published work in environmental and climate politics. Do you have something to share? We'd love to hear from you - get in touch at ecp.group@bisa.ac.uk
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