Climate Change and National and International Security

Climate change has challenged environmental security in Pakistan. It has intensified weather conditions. Climate variations are affecting every sector of Pakistan. It is need of the hour to pursue the securitization of environment in Pakistan at national security policy level. The security discourse of Pakistan should prioritize environmental security and issue of climate change which has ever been ignored being concern of low politics. Although previous Governments of Pakistan has made national policies for protection of environment, but still environment holds immense vulnerabilities not only for citizens but also for livestock, agriculture, and overall food web of the state due to worsening climate change. There is a dire need to focus and prioritize the proper mitigation and adaptation measure of climate change in Pakistan to survive predicted calamities in coming years.

The first responsibility of a government is to safeguard the people and their future well-being. The ability to do this is threatened by climate change, whose accelerating impacts will also drive political instability and conflict, posing large negative consequences to human society which may never be undone. This report looks at climate change and conflict issues through the lens of sensible risk-management to draw new conclusions about the challenge we now face.

From tropical coral reefs to the polar ice sheets, global warming is already dangerous. The world is perilously close to, or passed, tipping points which will create major changes in global climate systems.
The world now faces existential climate-change risks which may result in “outright chaos” and an end to human civilisation as we know it. 
These risks are either not understood or wilfully ignored across the public and private sectors, with very few exceptions.
Global warming will drive increasingly severe humanitarian crises, forced migration, political instability and conflict. The Asia–Pacific region, including Australia, is considered to be “Disaster Alley” where some of the worst impacts will be experienced.
Australia’s political, bureaucratic and corporate leaders are abrogating their fiduciary responsibilities to safeguard the people and their future well-being. They are ill-prepared for the real risks of climate change at home and in the region.
The Australian government must ensure Australian Defence Force and emergency services preparedness, mission and operational resilience, and capacity for humanitarian aid and disaster relief, across the full range of projected climate change scenarios.
Building more resilient communities in the most vulnerable nations by high-level financial commitments and development assistance can help protect peoples in climate hotspots and zones of potential instability and conflict.
It is essential to now strongly advocate a global climate emergency response, and to build a national leadership group outside conventional politics to design and implement emergency decarbonisation of the Australian economy. This would adopt all available safe solutions using sound, existential risk-management practices.

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.

The feasibility of green growth is studied in the context of climate change. As carbon emissions are easier to quantify than many other types of environmental pressure, it will be possible to reach a more definite conclusion about the likelihood of green growth than has been possible in the long-standing historical debate on growth versus the environment. We calculate the rate of decoupling between GDP and greenhouse gas emissions needed to achieve internationally agreed climate targets. Next, eight arguments are considered that together suggest that fast decoupling will be very difficult. Subsequently, we examine the main lines of research used by proponents of green growth to support their viewpoint, including theoretical arguments, exercises with integrated assessment models and studies of the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis. It will be concluded that decoupling as a main or single strategy to combine economic and environmental aims should be judged as taking a very large risk with our common future. To minimize this risk we need to seriously consider reducing our dependence on growth. This requires a fundamental change of focus in both economic research and policy.

In this article we examine the role of climate change and climate hazards, their attendant impacts on water and food security in the Arab world, and the inability or unwillingness of governments to cope with these forces in the years leading up to, and during, the Arab uprisings. In one case study we investigate how long-term drought in Syria, large-scale human displacement, and the lack of an effective government response, may have contributed to social and political unrest in Syria, fueling a conflict with significant national, regional and international security dimensions. In a second case study, we explore the phenomenon of hazard globalization, whereby climate hazards have serious implications for food and water security far from the event epicenter.  Specifically, we examine how drought in China and Russia may have influenced the rebellion in Egypt.