Climate Change and National and International Security

Security implications of climate change have been highlighted by various political and advisory bodies, as well as non-governmental organizations (NGOs), in recent years. It is unclear, however, whether such a ‘securitization’ of climate change can also be found beyond institutionalized politics in the public realm, and beyond Western countries. This article addresses these questions by investigating mass media coverage in nine countries over a period of 15 years. Based on an analysis of more than 101,000 newspaper articles, it shows an increasing discussion of climate change in security terms, with diverging trends in the analysed countries. While Western, industrialized countries such as the USA, the UK or Australia display an increasing securitization of climate change, the amount of securitizing language has decreased in India and South Africa. Moreover, different countries refer to different security dimensions – with regard both to the subjects whose security is of concern (national security, human security) and to the type of resources that are discussed in security terms (energy security, water security, food security). While Western countries strongly focus on national security and energy security, emerging economies place greater emphasis on food and, less pronounced, on water security.

In this paper, I argue that a new principle of background justice should be added to Rawls’s Law of Peoples because climate change is an international and intergenerational problem that can destabilize the Society of Peoples and the well-ordered peoples therein.
I start with explaining the nature of my project and Rawls’s conception of stability. I argue that climate change poses a realistic threat to the stability of climate-vulnerable liberal peoples and as a result undermines international peace and security. Despite the uncertainties due to the complexity of the climate system and about the resilience of
liberal societies, liberal peoples’ fundamental interests in just basic institutions and national security call for the adoption of a precautionary principle. Rawls’s own principles are, I argue, inadequate to solve the stability problem from climate change. Still, his framework provides the theoretical resources to develop a new extension. I propose a new
Rawlsian principle of international, intergenerational justice that guarantees the environmental background conditions under which well-ordered peoples can sustain their basic structure over generations and sketch the principle’s institutional implementation. I conclude with the theoretical and practical significance of this extension of Rawls’s theory.

The Model Pacific Climate Treaty presented in this report is a draft model treaty for the Pacific region aimed at averting the multiple threats posed by climate change. The initiative of a Pacific Climate Treaty builds on the momentum of the Paris Agreement adopted under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Although the adoption of this new international climate change treaty marks a major breakthrough in international diplomacy, the advances made with the Paris Agreement are mainly procedural. In contrast, the Model Pacific Climate Treaty contains substantive regional targets that combine climate, development and human rights objectives. For example, the Treaty provides a bold example of the region’s commitment to keeping global temperature rise well below 1.5°C by banning new coal or fossil fuel mines in the territories of State parties. The Model Treaty also contains a clause aimed at securing the perpetual sovereignty and rights of Pacific Island peoples and their territories, in the face of the existential threats posed by climate change to many Pacific Island nations and communities. As for institutions, the Treaty sets up a Pacific Islands Climate Commission to further enhance regional cooperation and promote Pacific leadership in meeting the challenges posed by climate change, and a Pacific Islands Climate Compensation Fund to help facilitate compensation for Pacific Island communities and nations affected by climate change from actors with significant historical responsibility for climate change. Overall, the Treaty is aimed at filling glaring gaps in the protection of those who are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, while inspiring more ambitious action in other regions and at the global level.

This is an analytical essay, which answers the question of 'With close reference to empirical examples, identify the principal security issues raised by climate change and assess how successfully these are being addressed.' We live in a world where climate change is predominantly a broader subject in everyday life both in the news and social media. Especially in recent years, climate change has been a worrying circumstance which has ultimately resulted in security issues being heightened. Some of the security issues raised are local resource competition, livelihood uncertainty and migration, transboundary water management and natural disasters which may have unintended consequences.

In one of the first efforts in the social sciences to explore the political and economic as well as natural causes of climate change policy ambition, this article assesses nations' climate change policies by using ratings of the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) pledges made at the 2015 Paris meeting of the United Nations. Our exploratory analysis shows that some domestic determinants of NDCs address political interests rather than strictly responding to mitigation needs. Key policy insights include the following: 1) nations subsidizing energy have less ambitious NDCs, implying that more effort may be needed to diminish direct effects of energy lobbies on climate policy; 2) vulnerability measured as economic damage and human loss caused by extreme weather events correlates only weakly with NDC ambition, meaning that greater government responsiveness to extreme weather vulnerability may be necessary in setting the scope of climate change policy; and 3) higher carbon emissions intensity is actually associated with less ambitious mitigation pledges. In other words, high emitter nations are actually doing less than low emitters. We conclude that if nations are left to their own devices, more ambitious NDCs are less likely to emerge from more fossil fuel-dominated, higher emitter nations and that true mitigation of climate change effects requires stronger and more enforceable national actions.