Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Implications: national versus human security?
Assessments of the security implications arising from both existing and projected
impacts of climate change vary widely, depending on whether they are analyzed
from the standpoint of national security, human security or ecological security.
National security analysts typically focus on external threats to the state's
territorial integrity and strategic interests. From this conventional perspective,
climate change is a 'threat multiplier'. Its direct and indirect impacts include
the instability and possible violent conflict that may flow from the increasing
incidence of extreme weather events, increasing resource scarcity (such as water,
arable land and energy resources), the mass movement of so-called 'climate
refugees', the spread of infectious diseases, instability arising from food shortages
and rising food prices, damage to critical infrastructure, disputes arising from
access to new shipping lanes, and sea level rise (which can also lead to loss of
territory and disputes over maritime boundaries and access to offshore resources)
(Busby, 2007; 2008; CNA, 2007; Paskal, 2007; Dupont, 2008a, b; Jasparro and
Taylor, 2008; Briggs, 2012). Strategic analysts have also identified a range of
direct and indirect 'threats' arising from climate change to the military itself,
such as threats to the integrity of coastal bases and other assets through sea level
rise and extreme weather (CNA, 2009).
In contrast, a human security perspective emphasizes the multiple and inter-
secting ways in which climate change threatens the wellbeing of individuals
and human communities, including physical and mental health, economic
livelihood, community resilience and identity and belonging (UNDP, 1994;
CHS, 2003; Matthews et al., 2010; Altman et al., 2012). Although there are
broad and narrow approaches to understanding human security (the former
emphasizing freedom from fear and freedom from want, as well as acute and
chronic threats to human wellbeing; the latter focusing on acute threatens to
physical and psychological safety), both take a people rather than state-centred
perspective and focus on a wider variety of threats - traditional and non-tradi-
tional, external and internal (Owen, 2004).
Finally, environmental security extends this frame further by including
ecosystem integrity and biodiversity protection as core security referents, not
simply for their fundamental role in underpinning and safeguarding human
security but also because nonhuman species are morally entitled to protection in
their own right (Dalby, 2009).
Security is a primordial and deeply politicized concept (Booth; 2005: 23;
McDonald, 2012a). It is something that everyone accepts as vital, but there is
much dispute over the fundamental security referent, the response to insecurity
and the conditions
for producing lasting security. Traditional security analysts
have resisted efforts to broaden the security referent, even though they increas-
ingly acknowledge a growing range of 'non-traditional' sources of insecurity,
including climate change. In contrast, as Ole Weaver points out, '[t]he discourse
on “alternative security” makes meaningful statements not by drawing primarily
on the register of everyday security but through its contrast with national
