Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
and migration waves. Crucially, analysts have increasingly drawn attention to the more
indirect changes that are also possible to the general contours of international relations.
Climate change has increasingly been recognised as a likely proximate cause of con
ict
and tension, but also an underlying shaper of the way in which international relations
are conducted. A striking breadth of myriad political, social, economic and strategic
impacts is now traced back to climate change. Taking on board the full implications of
all this analysis invites consideration of how climate security is being dealt with at all
levels of European Union (EU) foreign and security policy.
All this informs the challenge for EU policy. The wide-ranging consensus is that
the e
ects of climate change are likely to be deep and broad enough to require
priority attention not just in terms of direct climate negotiations but across the
gamut of foreign policies. From the often bewildering litany of predictions, it is
useful to extract a concise number of possible outcomes at the level of concrete
policy responses. This provides us with a more operational template, against which
to evaluate EU policies in the chapters that follow:
Prediction
:
ict, driven by climate-related stresses; increased
frequency of natural disasters.
Policy challenge
: To prepare for climate-related military missions and con
More violent con
ict prevention.
Prediction
: More acute tensions across borders.
Policy challenge
: More structured diplomacy and incentives focused on climate-related
global dynamics.
Prediction
: Resource scarcity and economic stresses.
Policy challenge
: Economic and development policies broadened to temper such risk.
Prediction
: Climate change as additional cause of shifts in global power.
Policy challenge
: To deal with and pre-empt new patterns of international alliances.
Predictions:
Stresses to democracy.
Policy challenge
: To move away from state-centred approaches to security.
Prediction
: Unpredictability.
Policy challenge
: More agile response mechanisms at all levels.
There are, of course, discordant voices that question the geo-strategic reading. In a
sense, the doubters make it even more necessary to assess actual policy reactions. It
might be said that the EU faces the challenge of avoiding two opposite risks: the
rst, of under-reacting; the second, of over-securitising climate change. It is this kind
of di
cult balance that this topic also sets out to investigate, as the EU grapples with
the climate security agenda. Je
rey Mazo points out that the academic literature has
stagnated at the stage of issuing dire warnings and generic predictions, and that more
