Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Elinor Ostrom o
ers a perspective that stands in contrast to the environmental
security school, by showing how scarcity of resources might lead to cooperation
and sustainable use instead of con
icts.
44
Climate experts have recently begun to
assemble data designed to show how climate policies can be integral to spurring
more harmonious global coordination on a whole range of security- and health-
related problems.
45
If the International Energy Agency (IEA) is right that $5 trillion needs to be
mobilised by 2050 for low carbon investments, then more integrated international
markets are needed to send the right price signals. Market competition across borders
is most likely to
nd the best low carbon solutions. From this institutionalist per-
spective, the germane question is how international institutional structures need to be
revised to adapt to changing conditions, so as to preserve and deepen cooperative
interdependence, not to re-invent geopolitical realism.
46
International trade and
competition will deepen in order to ensure that new green innovations are taken up
around the world.
47
From this perspective, the self-help approach is simply not ten-
able: international cooperation will be forthcoming as a structural necessity.
Chiming with this liberal security framework, many experts predict a new cli-
mate-security governance model, involving both public and private capital work-
ing together. The rise of climate change challenges is now commonly related to
the increasing prevalence of hybrid forms of governance, entailing synthesis
between traditional state and international bodies, on the one hand, and trans-local
networks linking cities and regions, on the other hand
forms of agenda-setting
that focus on the need for inter-societal and not just inter-state security.
48
A green-
active civil society will be crucial to providing information and solutions to the
broader impacts of climate change, while vibrant democracies can be more
responsive to the emergence of new strategic challenges. Increasingly, strategies for
addressing climate change cannot be de-linked from those aimed at deepening
global democracy.
49
For other writers, in contrast, climate change is prime accelerator of a zero-sum
logic returning to international politics.
50
Climate change has certainly been seen as
connected to the rubric that associates successful
-
with antagonistic
and exceptional counter-measures.
51
Experts see the main geo-strategic impact as
'
securitisation
'
owing from global
institutions
losing their credibility and being increasingly
ignored as they are unable to
nd their way through the divisive politics of a global
deal on emissions.
52
Critical analysts insist that zero-sum rivalry is built into the
very way in which militaries have pushed climate security onto the policy agenda:
a form of securitisation, they argue, that e
ectively precludes positive cooperation
with and from non-Western states.
53
Clive Ponting has chronicled how environmental
stress and depletion have
engendered con
ict throughout history. Examples include
ghting associated with
