Discourses of climate security

Political Geography 33 (2013) 42e51

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Discourses of climate security Matt McDonald* School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland, c/o POLSIS, Brisbane, Qld 4072, Australia

a b s t r a c t Keywords: Climate security Discourse analysis Environmental security Securitization

Global climate change has been increasingly defined as a security threat by a range of political actors and analysts. Yet as the range of voices articulating the need to conceive and approach climate change as a security issue has expanded, so too has the range of ways in which this link has been conceptualized. This article systematically maps different approaches to the relationship between climate change and security as climate security discourses, divided here between national, human, international and ecological security discourses. In exploring the contours of each, the articles asks how the referent object of security is conceptualised (whose security is at stake?); who are conceived as key agents of security (who is responsible for/able to respond to the threat?); how is the nature of the threat defined; and what responses are suggested for dealing with that threat? Systematically mapping these alternative discourses potentially provides a useful taxonomy of the climate changeesecurity relationship in practice. But more importantly, it serves to illustrate how particular responses to climate change (and the actors articulating them) are enabled or constrained by the ways in which the relationship between security and climate change is understood. The article concludes by suggesting that the most powerful discourses of climate security are unlikely to inform a progressive or effective response to global climate change. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Global climate change has increasingly been defined and approached as a security issue in contemporary global politics. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has held two debates on the international security implications of climate change in recent years (2007 and 2011), the UN General Assembly (UNGA, 2009) commissioned a report on this issue in 2009, while the security threats associated with global climate change have also been identified and explored by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP, 2007), the UN Development Program (UNDP, 2007), and the UN Secretary General (Moon, 2007). Regional organizations from the European Union to the Pacific Islands Forum have identified climate change as a current and growing security threat, while climate change has found its way into national security statements of key political institutions throughout the world, from the USA to the UK, Australia, Russia, Finland and Germany, among many others (see, for example, Brzoska, 2010). And of course, the security implications of climate change have been identified and explored by public policy-oriented think tanks, not-for-profit non-governmental organizations, and academic analysts. Crucially, however, as the range of voices articulating the need to conceive and approach climate change as a security issue has expanded, so too has the range of ways in which this link has been

* Tel.: þ61 733653042. 0962-6298/$ e see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2013.01.002

conceptualized. While some focus on the threat that climate change poses to long-term human security (eg Matthew, Barnett, McDonald, & O’Brien, 2010; UNDP, 2007), others emphasize the threat posed to the nation-state in terms of traditional concerns with sovereignty and territorial integrity (eg Campbell, 2008; Schwartz & Randall, 2003). And following these distinctions, some conceptualizations encourage mitigation practiced across a range of both sub-national and trans-national contexts to minimise the threat itself (eg Brown & McLeman, 2009; Spratt & Sutton, 2008), while others encourage adaptive measures to defend the state and its key interests from manifestations of climate change (eg Busby, 2008; Podesta & Ogden, 2008). In short, while the idea of climate change as a security threat is gaining both academic and practical purchase, important differences in the logic of this link suggest radically different responses to climate change as a security concern. Given that these different framings inform proposed (and enacted) policy responses to climate change, acknowledging and exploring the contours of these distinctions is important in making sense of how climate change is addressed in different contexts. This article maps different conceptualisations of ‘climate security’ as ‘climate security discourses’: frameworks of meaning that provide the lens through which climate change is conceptualized and addressed in particular contexts. Following Hajer (1995:44), a discourse is understood here as ‘a specific ensemble of ideas, concepts and categorizations that are produced, reproduced and

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transformed in a particular set of practices and through which meaning is given to physical and social realities’. Such an understanding builds on Foucault (1977), who points to the ways in which discourses constitute ‘reality’: imposing a partial vision of reality as fixed, timeless and universal; setting the terms for discussing or debating particular issues; defining subject positions and the relationship between authorities and the governed; and even constructing the identities of people and communities. Yet Hajer’s (1995) conception of discourse challenges the Foucauldian tendency to identify and examine a unitary and dominant framework of meaning. Instead, his analysis suggests that only some discourses become dominant or hegemonic in particular spatial and temporal contexts, and that we would do well to recognise the existence of multiple discourses competing to define the way societies engage with (in this case) climate change, along with the dynamics of that competition (see also Dryzek, 2005). This understanding of discourses informs the analysis to follow. This article maps these different discourses e primarily as articulated by policy makers but also by a combination of lobbyists, environmental advocates and academic analysts e and asks how the referent object of security is conceptualised (whose security is at stake?); who are conceived as key agents of security (who is responsible for/able to respond to the threat?); how is the nature of the threat defined; and what responses are suggested for dealing with that threat? Systematically mapping these alternative discourses potentially provides a useful taxonomy of the climate changeesecurity relationship in practice, building on earlier claims that different conceptions of the climateesecurity relationship entail different sets of assumptions about who is to be secured and from what threats (eg Brzoska, 2010; Floyd, 2008; Trombetta, 2008). But recognising multiple climate security discourses at play is also crucial in a political sense. The analysis here suggests that what is at stake is the nature of the response to climate change itself. When particular discourses are advanced or embraced, especially by representatives of political institutions, these discourses serve to legitimize some practices and the actors engaged in them while marginalizing others. Coming to terms with the contours, logics and implications of different discourses of climate security, then, is important for coming to terms with the broader politics of climate change. This article proceeds in four stages. The first section briefly examines the evolution of engagement with the climate changee security relationship in both academic and political debates. The second section outlines the methodology of discourse analysis employed here, justifying the selection of texts examined and the utility of this approach for exploring dynamics of climate politics. The third section e and the bulk of the analysis e identifies and interrogates four climate security discourses organized around different conceptions of the referent object of security. These include climate security discourses focused on national security, human security, international security, and ecological security. In each, the paper identifies who is advancing these discourses and how these discourses conceive of the actor in need of protection, the agent of security, the nature of the threat, the suggested responses to climate insecurity and the broader political implications of these conceptions. The final section reflects on what this analysis means for the way we think about the relationship between security and climate change and the politics of responses to climate change itself. Climate change and security Global climate change emerged as a significant international political issue in the 1980s, when the science of climate change began to solidify and momentum for international political action

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developed. The climate change regime that emerged from the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992 centred around the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), itself based on the scientific assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The most recent synthesis report of the IPCC (2007) concluded that global climate change is ‘very likely’ to have a human cause, and that temperatures were probably going to increase by 1.8e4  C by the end of the century in the absence of mitigation efforts. The effects of such a change (from a rise in sea levels and associated threats to lowlying lands to changing patterns of rainfall, increasing severe weather phenomena and an increase in vector-borne disease) would be most significantly felt in the developing world, where large populations rely on land that is already at the limits of environmental viability, and where state capacity to adapt to or respond to manifestations of climate change is most limited (eg Patz et al., 2005; UNDP, 2007). And aside from the threat climate change poses to biodiversity, the 2006 Stern Review of the economic costs of manifestations of climate change commissioned by the UK government (Stern, 2006) estimated that the costs could amount to 20% of global GDP. It was the scale and scope of climate change that encouraged a range of actors to suggest that climate change should be conceived and approached as a security threat. Initial claims along these lines suggested that the threat that climate change posed to the long-term survival of life on the planet warranted its consideration as a security issue of the first order (see Brown, 1986, and more recently Mabey, 2007; Spratt & Sutton, 2008). For these advocates of a climate-security link, defining climate change as a security issue was seen as a manner of challenging dominant (narrow) accounts of security and elevating climate change to the ‘high politics’ realm of security where it would attract the priority and funding it deserved. Beyond this security-survival link, which loosely mapped on to the arguments of the so-called ‘first generation’ of environmente security proponents (see Ronnfeldt, 1997), others began to explore the relationship between climate change and traditional conceptions of security associated with the threat of armed conflict (eg Homer-Dixon, 1991, 1999; Myers, 1989). While given impetus of late by UN agencies’ attempts to link conflict in Darfur to the effects of climate change (see Moon, 2007; UNEP, 2007), initially climate change did not feature prominently as a mooted cause of environmentally-induced conflict. To the extent that climate change was seen as a cause of conflict, it was viewed as potentially intersecting with other sites of environmental conflict such as contestation over trans-boundary water resources (eg Gleick, 1993). This changed markedly as climate change began to dominate the global environmental agenda, with a range of analysts suggesting the possibility of climate change ushering in an era of international instability and conflict as political institutions struggled to respond to new sets of challenges associated with failed states, population movements, and material deprivation (eg Campbell, 2008; Dyer, 2008; Mazo, 2010; Podesta & Ogden, 2007; WGBU, 2007). While these analysts can be seen as proponents of a climatesecurity link, others were more sceptical about this link on analytical and normative grounds. Aside from those questioning the empirical links between climate change and conflict (eg Gleditsch & Nordas, 2007; Saleyhan, 2008), some suggested that focussing on the intersection between failed states, environmental change and conflict risked positioning the developing world as a source of threat and prioritising the needs of states. This was prominent in critical geopolitical analyses of discourses of environmental conflict (eg Barnett, 2000; Dalby, 1999, 2002. See also Le Billon, 2001). Daniel Deudney (1990), meanwhile, warned that promoting

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environmental change as a security issue in general could encourage a military response: a response inconsistent with both the requirements for an effective solution to problems of environmental change and with proponents’ goals of challenging existing discourses of security in global politics. This critique presaged many of the concerns articulated by so-called Copenhagen School theorists of ‘securitization’ (eg Buzan, Wæver, & de Wilde, 1998; Wæver, 1995). Ole Wæver (1995) in particular suggested that while issues such as climate change could come to be constructed as security threats through being articulated and accepted as a security threat, security itself has a logic that encourages urgency and exceptionalism, and a meaning tied to the military, defence and the state. As such, for Wæver (1995) those concerned with promoting progressive responses to issues such as climate change may be better placed pursuing desecuritization: the removal of issues from security agenda and into the realm of normal politics, where they can be openly debated and discussed. Despite these concerns, momentum has developed behind the idea of a climate changeesecurity link, especially as science associated with climate change has hardened and its effects look less avoidable. Both building on and reinforcing academic interest in this relationship, a range of representatives of key political institutions have acknowledged the potential security implications of climate change and in some instances incorporated climate change formally into security policy. The UN Human Development Program’s 1994 Human Development Report (UNDP, 1994) identified climate change as a threat to human security. More recently, UN Security Council discussions in 2007 and 2011, along with UN General Assembly debates in 2008 and 2011, focused on the implications of climate change for international stability and conflict. This was reflected in the more specific suggestions of a relationship between climate change and conflict in Darfur put forward by the UN Environment Program and the UN Secretary-General in 2007. And a range of states and regional organizations e including France, Australia, Finland, the United Kingdom and the European Union e have formally incorporated climate change into security institutions and policies (see Dupont, 2008). Of course, the above account of the ‘evolution’ of climatee security thought is partial and risks suggesting artificial boundaries, for example between those with a concern for human wellbeing on one hand and conflict on the other (eg Barnett & Adger, 2007). Nevertheless, this broad progression (from survival to conflict, for example) captures key trends in these debates that have been identified in a range of accounts of climate (and environment) security literature (eg Levy, 1995; Ronnfeldt, 1997). It should also be noted that while some interventions continue to be articulated in the face of compelling analytical and normative critique, and remain stubbornly embedded in popular consciousness (future projections of environmental refugees or water wars, for example), debates about the relationship between climate change and security have come a long way since early iterations. Climate change certainly occupies a far more central role in considerations of the relationship between the environment and security; climate change seen is now more likely to be conceptualised as a ‘threat multiplier’ than a cause of conflict; and definitions of human security, for example, have increasingly moved towards a focus on social and community-based variables of vulnerability and resilience rather than material conditions of survival (see Barnett et al., 2010:18). As conceptualizations of the climate security relationship become more specific and (at least in some cases) more nuanced, differences between framings of this relationship become even more visible and politically significant. At the broadest level, these differences concern how we should make sense of this threat; whether we should conceive and approach climate change as a security issue; and who should (or can) respond to climate change

and how. Exploring these differences and their political implications of these discourses is the focus of the remainder of this paper. Discourse analysis and climate security As noted, this paper endorses Hajer’s (1995:44) conception of a discourse. These frameworks of meaning e in this case of security, climate change and its relationship e can be powerful and indeed constitutive. If they become dominant, they can define terms of debate about particular issues, become incorporated into political institutions, or require actors seeking credibility in a given domain to ‘draw on the ideas, concepts and categories of a given discourse’ (Hajer, 1995:60). The suggestion that discourses can come to be constituted in and through a range of practices is taken further in the analysis of Müller (2008), who draws on Laclau and Mouffe (1985) in pointing to the role of non-linguistic (often everyday) practices in defining and reinforcing particular discourses. And in her recent analysis of climate discourses, Kate Manzo (2012) points to the role of visual representations, specifically cartoons, in communicating and constituting climate change in various ways. While these are important components of discourses, in the analysis that follows my focus is predominantly on the textual and speech dimensions of discourse, not least as this is more conducive to an analysis of the contours of a range of discourses and the political actors attempting to advance them. The four climate security discourses I address here are selected and grouped according to their definition of the referent object: the question of whose security is under consideration. The respective answers to this question identified here are ‘people’ (human security), ‘nation-states’ (national security), ‘the international community’ (international security) and the ‘ecosystem’ (ecological security). Of course, as John Dryzek (2005:8e19) has noted in his broader analysis of environmental discourses, there are always feasible alternatives to any grouping of discourses, and distinctions between frameworks of meaning such as these are imperfect and permeable. Nevertheless, the distinction along the lines of referent object maps on to the central orienting question in debates about security (see Booth, 1991); follows key distinctions about the frames of reference for the politics of a response to climate change; and situates relevant constituents in their different (if overlapping) spatial and even temporal contexts. A case can certainly be made, at least in terms of the first three discourses of human, national and international security, that these frameworks of meaning dominate responses to the question of who security is for regarding climate change. This is particularly the case as interventions on climate security by key political actors (states and IGOs in particular) work with one or more of those conceptions of referent object, as the subsequent analysis demonstrates (see also Brzoska, 2010). In turn, these discourses also serve to provide a philosophical anchoring for claims about how we should subsequently respond to climate change, and who is responsible for (or capable of) acting as agents of climate security. In large part, this is why an analysis of discourse is so important: it allows us to recognize how different interpretations of climate change and its relationship to security encourage particular political responses to them, legitimise those actors undertaking such responses, and even define the terms of debate regarding the issue itself. In the analysis that follows, the voices of state and IGO representatives are examined closely as central proponents of climate security discourses and ultimately as envisaged agents of climate security provision. This question of voice is important. Exploring which actors are articulating or working with particular discourses and why is often important in making sense of the capacity for these discourses to become dominant. Of the discourses explored here, the three most prominent (national, human and international

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security) have been articulated and embraced by the representatives of states and IGOs as a means of advancing their own political agenda and encouraging particular sets of response to climate change. The exception of those discourses explored here is that of ecological security, which is rarely if ever articulated by key policymakers. Examining this discourse serves a slightly different function: to provide a neglected spatial and even temporal framing of climate security, while reminding us of the existence of alternative (even dissident) discourses, often invisible to the dynamics of policy debate. While therefore focussing on what are widely held to be key interventions and texts on climate security by the representatives of political institutions (in national security statements and UN reports, for example), these are augmented with a focus on texts produced by lobbyists, non-governmental organizations and academics. The point here is not to cover comprehensively all those whose conception of climate security might fall within one or more of these discourses. Rather, it is to use an indicative range of voices to demonstrate the extent to which these discourses are articulated across multiple media and settings, and to provide a robust account of the contour of those discourses. In this, my analysis follows Lene Hansen’s (2006:74) argument that body of texts examined in meaningful discourse analysis should be made up of ‘key texts that are frequently quoted and function as nodes within the intertextual web of debate, as well as a larger body of general material that provides the basis for a more quantitative identification of the dominant discourses’. The voices consulted in the following are, therefore, heterogenous while being necessarily selective and partial. They do, however, serve to map on to central spatial imaginaries regarding climate change, while engaging with the key contours of debate about the problem itself, how we might respond to it, and who is capable of or responsible for that response. In each of the discourses identified here, choices of referent object encourage and in many cases are explicitly tied to particular political responses and the agential capacity of the actors articulating them. Different responses identified here range from an orientation to mitigation or adaptation, national/local strategies or international cooperative efforts, even energy-oriented policy practices or military strategic ones. Indeed Mike Hulme’s (2011) analysis reminds us that climate change needs to be understood not simply as a physical or scientific ‘problem’, but as a site of contestation between different actors with different conceptions of what climate change signifies and how we might respond to it. Given the increasing prominence of ‘security’ as a label applied to the challenges of climate change, exploring the different meanings of climate security is important for understanding the multiple means and agents envisaged for responding to climate change itself. Climate change: a national security threat Among the most prominent contemporary discourses of climate security has been that which focuses on the threat that manifestations of climate change pose to the security of the nation-state. The prominence of this discourse is hardly surprising. For many, security (in both theory and practice) is synonymous with the nation-state and the preservation of its sovereignty and territorial integrity, particularly from external threat (see Walt, 1991). In this sense, a ‘national security’ discourse builds upon earlier research emphasising the relationship between climate change and armed conflict (eg Kaplan, 1994; Uvin, 1996), and suggesting threats to the sovereignty and institutional capacity of the state (eg Levy, 1995). Yet of course, there is nothing inevitable about the dominance of a discourse that focuses on the preservation of the nation-state in the context of a problem that seems to precisely challenge the relevance of territorial borders.

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The national security discourse has been consistently advanced by representatives of existing national security institutions and by those attempting to speak to policy-makers. Key security statements from the Departments of Defence in the United States and Australia, for example, have both embraced the idea that climate change should be considered a national security threat requiring incorporation into the considerations and policies of the national security establishment (DOD, 2009; Floyd, 2010). In its 2009 Defence White Paper, the Australian Department of Defence (2009:29) noted that trends such as global demographic change and population movements, environmental and resource pressures (whether caused by climate change or other dynamics)...will increase the risk of conflict over resources, political instability in fragile states and potentially destabilising mass migration flows. Some 15 years earlier, the US Department of Defence had defined climate change as a possible type of ‘environmental security threat’ that undermined ‘DOD’s ability to prepare for or carry out the National Security Strategy or create instabilities that can threaten US National Security’ (in Floyd, 2010:89). For cynics, the attempts by Defence Departments to embrace the threat posed by climate change can be viewed as attempts to retain existing budgets in a new global security environment, particularly in a postCold War era (eg Floyd, 2010; Hartmann, 2009). Within this discourse e given the continued focus on responding to the threat of conflict e the central agent of security remains the state and in particular the military. If this national security discourse has been embraced by some state defence establishments, it has also been embraced by publicpolicy oriented think tanks attempting to speak to policy-makers. This has been particularly prominent in the United States, with a range of think-tanks and their representatives pointing to the role of climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’ (CNA, 2007:5): complicating US national security policy and contributing to unrest that could directly challenge US national security. The Center for Naval Analysis (CNA, 2007), the Center for a New American Century (Burke & Parthemore, 2008), the Brookings Institute (Campbell, 2008), and the Council on Foreign Relations (Busby, 2007) all produced reports examining the implications of climate change for US national security, building on growing international public concern with climate change in the period 2006e2007 (see Oels, 2012:192). Similar publications (focussing on the national security implications of climate change) emerged from public policy-oriented think tanks in the UK (IISS, 2007) and Australia (Bergin & Townsend, 2007). Representatives of these institutions also sought to impact on academic debate, outlining the strategic implications of climate change (eg Dupont, 2008) and the nature of the threat posed to US national security (Busby, 2008). The responses to climate change envisaged or suggested by this national security discourse certainly includes recognition of the need for mitigation strategies, but largely focuses on the ways in which states might adapt to manifestations of climate change. In broad terms, the suggestion here is that militaries and defence establishments should become more aware of potential axes of (climate-induced) conflict and develop responsive strategies to better secure and protect national interests in this changing strategic era (eg Brzoska, 2010; Podesta & Ogden, 2007:132e4). For Joshua Busby (2008:500), ‘adaptation and disaster risk reduction strategies should be the priority response for climate security concerns...’. Clearly, national strategies of adaptation have some role to play in responding to the threat posed by climate change, not least given that some manifestations of climate change are now unavoidable. However, they can also encourage perverse responses that do not

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address the causes of climate change and even position those affected most by it as threatening. This danger was evident in a 2003 Pentagon-commissioned report on the national security threats associated with an abrupt climate change scenario. Here, the authors suggested that some relatively self-sufficient states might seek to develop more effective border control strategies to ensure that large populations displaced by manifestations of climate change (whether rising sea levels or extreme weather events) could be kept on the other side of the national border (Schwartz & Randall, 2003). And while such mooted responses to climate change are extreme, they are ultimately logical extensions of a discourse oriented towards the immediate security concerns of the nation-state. The national security discourse has enjoyed political traction, and has potentially served to raise the profile of climate change as an issue within the developed world (see Brown & McLeman, 2009; Harris, 2012; Schoch, 2011). For national defence establishments, this discourse also discourages radical reconfigurations of security jurisdictions and budgets: clearly in the interests of those organizations. And while some think-tank representatives and analysts have presented their focus on the national security implications of climate change as an analytical rather than normative choice (eg Busby, 2008: 503; Levy, 1995), it is far more difficult to accept that such choices do not have normative implications, potentially feeding perverse policy responses to environmental change and human vulnerability. As noted, a national security focus encourages viewing climate change as a threat to the extent that it precipitates military threats, undermines national economic growth or undermines the national ‘way of life’. This focus could also encourage an increase in military budgets to respond to potential insecurities in environmental ‘hotspots’, for example (see Matthew, 2002; Scott, 2008; WGBU, 2007). Further, people displaced by environmental disasters or environmental stress may be positioned as threats to the security of the state rather than as those in need of being secured (see Campbell, 2008; CNA, 2007; Podesta & Ogden, 2007e 8). Taken to an extreme, those states relatively well placed to adapt to the effects of climate change might seek to protect themselves from those unable to do so (Schwartz & Randall, 2003). Climate change: a human security threat Of course the most obvious response to the potentially perverse implications of a national security discourse regarding the securityclimate change link is to focus on an alternative referent object. Most prominent here has been the discourse of human security. This discourse, advanced initially through the 1994 UNDP Human Development Report (UNDP, 1994), seeks to orient security around the wellbeing of people rather than states. This reorientation of security is built on two central claims. First, that states are at best unreliable in providing security for their citizens, and in some cases directly undermine the wellbeing of their own populations. Second, that the realities of contemporary global politics are such that a focus on the preservation of state sovereignty and territory no longer reflects the security concerns of most people or the nature of contemporary security challenges. The human security discourse regarding climate change has been embraced and/or advanced by some UN agencies and even a number of states. Most prominent of the former has been the United Nations Development Program, which was central to the development of this discourse. The UNDP’s initial human security formulation recognised environmental security as a core component of human security and sought to illustrate the ways in which issues such as climate change could threaten security defined in terms of ‘human life and dignity’ (UNDP, 1994: 22). Ultimately, the UNDP and other early advocates of a human security approach

focused their attention on the question of material needs, emphasising the confluence between developmental imperatives and security (eg Page & Redclift, 2002). Here, (human) security could be understood as a universal material condition, one potentially undermined by manifestations of climate change (see Dalby, 2009:129). A human security discourse regarding climate change was also embraced in the 2009 UN General Assembly report, Climate Change and its Possible Security Implications. Here, the report explicitly noted its focus on ‘the security of individuals and communities’, and its endorsement of the notion of human security as outlined in the UNDP’s (1994) Human Development Report (UNGA, 2009. See also Oels, 2012). Such an embrace is telling given the concerns outlined by prominent UNGA members and groupings (the Group of 77 and the Non-Aligned Movement, for example) with the focus on national and international security in the UNSC’s discussions of climate security and the use of the latter as a forum to approach this relationship at all. Recognising the interests of these political actors in advancing particular discourses can also encourage us to recognise the different framings of climate security relations within states themselves across different agencies. In her analysis of climate security discourses in the United Kingdom, Katie Harris (2012:15) suggests that while the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) ‘frames climate change in terms of its possible implications for domestic and international security’, for example, the Department for International Development (DFID) ‘frames climate change with a focus on vulnerability (and) poverty reduction’. The latter is particularly consistent with the human security discourse, and encourages a focus on the use of overseas development assistance to minimise vulnerability and enhance adaptive capabilities in the developing world. The most sophisticated conception of climate change as a human security issue has come through the Norwegian governmentfunded Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) project based in Oslo. Analysts associated with the GECHS have defined human security as a situation in which individuals and communities have the options necessary to end, mitigate, or adapt to threats to their human, environmental and social rights; have the capacity and freedom to exercise these options; and actively participate in pursuing these options (Barnett et al., 2010:18). In their work these scholars emphasise the range of ways e as manifestations of climate change meet with structures of political, economic and social inequality e that people and communities might be deprived of the ability to exercise control over their own lives. They also emphasize that a holistic and wide-ranging concept such as human security provides a strong basis for developing an integrated view of the multifaceted relationship between material climatic conditions and effects, global structures of inequality, and community-based understandings of core values in need of protection and adaptive capacity at their disposal (see Barnett, 2003:14; O’Brien, 2006). A broad range of practices are suggested as responses to the human security threats posed by climate change. For the UNDP and UK’s DFID, mitigation and the redistribution of material resources is seen as central for providing security for populations vulnerable to climate change in general. For the GECHS project, adaptation features more strongly in terms of the resilience of communities threatened by climate change, but the central focus here is on mitigation strategies and overturning existing structures of inequality that will in turn allow vulnerable communities to become masters of their own destiny (see Barnett, 2003; Brown & McLeman, 2009:294e5). The cosmopolitanism associated with the human security discourse, concerned as it is with challenging the

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moral constraints imposed by statism and emphasising instead universal human rights and the universality of moral obligation, also implies a commitment to mitigation efforts. Ultimately, those advocating a link between climate change and human security are attempting to mobilise environmental action without defaulting to the state as security referent and provider. In early UNDP iterations, the human security concept was originally seen as a way of reorienting state security practices, priorities and (crucially) funding away from military preparedness and towards redressing global inequality. This clearly reflects the goals of UNDP, concerned as it is with mobilising responses to poverty and underdevelopment. The GECHS project, meanwhile, builds on this goal while simultaneously attempting to avoid articulating a universal liberal vision of security to be applied to other communities, and to avoid the dangers of securitizing an issue such as climate change. There is recognition here that broadening the range of security risks without explicitly identifying a referent object that is not the state most often operationalizes state monopolization of responses to meet the new security challenges (Barnett et al., 2010: 6). Yet while explicit about the pathologies associated with ‘securitization’ and the need to avoid defaulting to states, militaries and exceptionalism, this discourse has fallen short in providing clear ideas about agency. Indeed the human security discourse more broadly has been criticised as enabling states to coopt an apparent cosmopolitan political agenda into existing state institutions (see Chandler & Hynek, 2011). While agency is understood as residing more with communities themselves than is acknowledged in depictions of ‘vulnerable’ communities, for example, (see McNamara & Gibson, 2009) there is also recognition that the conditions of their vulnerability (exposure to the effects of climate change as well as economic inequality, political oppression and social exclusion, for example) may be beyond their control. In this sense, agency itself becomes far more complicated and contestable within the human security discourse, and this ambiguity creates space in which states and militaries can reassert themselves as central security providers (see Hartmann, 2009). Climate change: an international security threat The third prominent discourse linking climate change and security to be addressed here focuses on climate change as a threat to international security. In many ways this discourse sits between the national and human security discourses: there is an emphasis on the dangers that climate change poses to stability and the status quo that is reminiscent of the national security discourse, but there is also strong emphasis on the need for internationalism in response to climate change and a central role for global cooperation. The referent object of security in this discourse is ultimately international society, climate change is seen as a threat to the norms and rules of this international society (particularly in terms of the maintenance of a particular global order), international organizations are seen as key agents for providing security, and international cooperation in terms of both mitigation and adaptation efforts are seen as crucial to the response to this threat. The link between climate change and international security has been most powerfully advanced by representatives of international organizations. As noted, both the UNEP (2007) and the UN Secretary-General (Moon, 2007) attempted to link conflict in Darfur to the manifestations of climate change, with climate-induced agricultural challenges encouraging population movements which were seen as triggering confrontation between groups over increasingly scarce natural resources. While these links have

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certainly been questioned (see Brown & McLeman, 2009), they also raise important questions about why particular actors attempt to ‘securitize’ an issues such as climate change. The UNEP’s concern could reasonably be interpreted as attempting to mobilise international responses to environmental change. This was particularly evident in its acknowledged rationale for the report e ‘catalysing action to address key environmental problems’ (UNEP, 2007) e and in recommendations that focused on developing a stronger environmental component to international aid and development projects in Africa (UNEP, 2007: 17). While the UN Secretary-General built on these concerns (Moon, 2007), there was also a clear suggestion that the role of climate change meant that states of the first world had stronger than usual responsibility for considering intervention in Darfur in the face of genocide. These UN-led attempts to link climate change and international stability/security were furthered by other organizations eager to promote stronger international responses to climate change and a more robust role for international organizations. In their report for International Alert, Smith and Vivekananda (2007) identify over 40 states at risk of climate-induced conflict, and outline a policy agenda in response to these threats to international stability that focuses on both the transition to low-carbon economies and the development of adaptive capacity. For the authors, like the UNEP, the latter is to be achieved through the transfer of technology, expertise and resources from the developed to the developing world to enhance their resilience to manifestations of climate change. Representatives of the Brookings Institution have also worked within this international security discourse. Purvis and Busby (2004) suggest that climate change poses a serious threat to international stability, and requires the strengthening of international organizations to coordinate an effective mitigation regime and to ensure sufficient adaptive capacity for developing states in particular. They endorse the focus of UNSC discussions in suggesting that Climate change will trigger profound global change, and these changes could pose genuine risks to international peace and security. Managing these changes will require well-conceived actions within the UN system (Purvis & Busby, 2004:72). The central role of international organizations as key security agents is an important feature of this international security discourse, and is hardly surprising given the prominence of representations of these organizations in advancing it. Rasmussen and Beck (2012:47), for example, suggest that ‘the only institution presently in a position to react to global ‘environmental’ threats to security, such as climate change, appears to be the UN Security Council’. Perhaps predictably, then, this discourse has raised concerns among those for whom the goal of preserving international society from the threat posed by climate change equates to preserving a particular liberal international order and the privileged position of (some) states within that order. Both the 2007 and 2011 debates within the UN Security Council demonstrated some of these issues, with states such as Brazil, China, India and Russia, along with collective groupings such as the Group of 77 and the Non-Aligned Movement, contesting the move to position climate change as an international security issue (see Harris, 2012). More directly, there is also scepticism about the proposed role for the UN Security Council as a central agent of security in this sense. These concerns relate to broader criticisms of the unrepresentative nature of the Council’s membership, and more specifically to the possibility that climate change will be used as a justification for military intervention by powerful states (see Eckersley, 2007; Hulme, 2011:284e7; Scott, 2008). Given the more amorphous nature of notions of international society, the question of the specific form of threat and the selection

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of referent objects is less clear in the international security discourse. While at times the focus is squarely placed on ‘international peace and security’ (Purvis & Busby, 2004:72), largely conceived in terms of international stability, other analyses working with this discourse oscillate between a focus on the state and human welfare. This broadly reflects the tension in international society theory itself between pluralist and solidarist accounts of that society, emphasising order and justice respectively (see Bull, 1995). Jasparro and Taylor (2008), for example, focus on climate change as a transnational security threat, defined as non-military threats that cross borders and either threaten the political and social integrity of a state or the health and quality of life of its inhabitants. They go on to acknowledge that these threats therefore ‘operate at the intersection of often competing notions of human security and traditional understandings of state/national security’ (Jasparro & Taylor, 2008:233). Alan Dupont’s (2008:46) analysis of the strategic implications of climate change also draws on both approaches, suggesting that Climate change of the magnitude and time frames projected by climate scientists poses fundamental questions of human security, survival and the stability of states... For Smith and Vivekananda (2007: 29), a shifting focus is necessary to come to terms with the complex nature of the threat climate changes poses: The consequences of climate change, the incidence of violent conflict and the corrosive effects of state fragility are all major problems. To take them on together is to take aim at a very difficult target. But it is necessary because these problems are not isolated from each other. Of course there is little basis for contesting the idea that climate change poses threats to both state institutions and the survival and livelihoods of people. However the danger here (reflecting the dangers of the human security discourse) is that this lack of specificity potentially enables traditional security actors to position themselves as the key security providers (see Hartmann, 2009). But while advocates of linking human security and climate change have engaged precisely with these types of implications (Barnett et al., 2010), acknowledging the dangers of securitization has not featured in attempts to link climate change, security and international society. Arguably, this is unsurprising if the discourse is one that orients towards the interests of key states in the international system and the maintenance of the international status quo. Ultimately the responses encouraged by the international security discourse focus on the strengthening of international institutions, increasing international cooperation generally, and global approaches to the management of both the problem itself (through mitigation) and its manifestations in particular places (through adaptation). International organizations have a central role to play as agents of security, while the threat posed by climate change is one posed to both people and states as components of a broader conception of international society. In these senses, this discourse orients towards the maintenance of the international system in its current form from the threat climate change poses to the international order. Climate change: an ecological security threat The final climate security discourse to be discussed here e ecological security e is one that has not achieved a position of prominence in debates about responses to climate change. While constituting an obvious fourth image in spatial terms (the

biosphere beyond various form of human communities), this discourse is also examined here as a form of what Jennifer Milliken (1999:243) defines as ‘subjugated knowledges’: frameworks marginal to the conduct of debate or pursuit of policy but which can work ‘to create conditions for resistance to a dominating discourse, and perhaps an exploration of how the dominating discourse excludes or silences its alternative’. It is a discourse that focuses on the need to fundamentally rebalance the relationship between people and the natural environment, orienting around the referent object of the biosphere. It also suggests the need to revisit those political, economic and social structures that serve to both separate people from the environment and give rise to processes of environmental change (eg Barnett, 2001; Dalby, 2009; Pirages & Cousins, 2005). This discourse has been articulated or advanced by a number of environmental NGOs and critically-oriented academic analysts. Of the former, the Friends of the Earth text Climate Code Red (Spratt & Sutton, 2008) advances a discourse of ecological security in focussing on the need for systematic structural change in our relationship to the natural environment. Developing this theme, the Indian NGO Foundation for Ecological Security promotes a model of ecologically-oriented development. The stated aims of the organization include developing initiatives with local community groups and appropriate civil society actors that are ‘ecologically sustainable, socially and ecologically equitable, and provide relief to the poor, in particular’ (FES, 2012). In academic literature, the most explicit discussion of ecological security is advanced by Dennis Pirages (2005:4), who describes it as resting on: ‘Preserving the following four interrelated dynamic equilibriums: 1) Between human populations living at higher consumptions levels and the ability of nature to provide resources and services; 2) Between human populations and pathogenic microorganisms; 3) Between human populations and those of other plant and animal species; 4) Among human populations.’ For Pirages (2005:4), ‘insecurity increases wherever any of these equilibriums is disregarded either by changes in human behaviour or in nature’. So defined, in this discourse ecological balance is that in need of preservation (not necessarily the status quo, given evidence of systematic damage to natural equilibrium), and the nature of the threat posed is wide-ranging. There is also a recognition that moral obligation extends to other living beings, a recognition wholly absent from other discourses of climate security. This is evident also in the FES (2012) commitment to the protection and restoration of biodiversity. Advocates of this view are somewhat reluctant to wholly endorse a discourse of (climate) security, a reluctance reflected in a subsequent reticence to articulate which actors are capable of providing security or how we might craft a feasible political response to insecurity. Notions of agency are understood in vague terms, and to the extent that there is a unifying theme across the discourse on this issue it is one that locates agency in the capacity of people to change their ecological consciousness in such a way as to subsequently change (damaging) political, economic and social structures and practices. Responses to climate change too are less likely to focus on the binary of mitigation and adaptation, and more likely to consider the range of ways in which global climate change is embedded in taken-for-granted forms of cultural practice, political economy and norms of international society (see Dalby, 2002, 2009, FES, 2012). As a set of responses, then, the ecological security discourse encourages us to re-examine the nature of our relationship to the natural

M. McDonald / Political Geography 33 (2013) 42e51

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Table 1 Discourses of climate security. Discourse

Referent

Threat

Agent

Response

National security Human security

Nation-state People

Conflict, sovereignty, economic interests Life and livelihood, core values and practices

Adaptation Mitigation

International security Ecological security

International society Biosphere

Conflict, global stability Challenges to equilibrium associated with contemporary political, social and economic structures

State States, NGOs, international community, communities themselves International organizations People: changing political consciousness

environment, and to fundamentally challenge exiting structures and norms that encourage or even compel environmental change (on this point, see also Barnett, 2001). For advocates of a move to ecological security, therefore, the imperatives of ecological security precisely require the restructuring of society and our relationship with the environment (Barnett, 2001; Dalby, 2009). While this is at heart a normative claim, there is also some suggestion here that recognition of the imperatives of ecological security might increasingly challenge and redefine the way we think about both security and the environment in practice. This is echoed in Julia Trombetta’s (2008) discussion of environmental security. Here, she argues that those concerned about the dangers of securitizing the environment focus exclusively on the impact of a security logic on environmental issues: not the potential for changing pathologies and practices of security associated with the need to consider and respond to environmental change (see also Oels, 2012). The ecological security discourse has not impacted significantly on policy or academic debates. Certainly, the political responses encouraged by this discourse e involving as they do a fundamental challenge to key structures and discourses of global politics e creates no obvious constituencies among those in positions of power to pursue policies that might advance these particular ends. Simon Dalby (2009:54) captures the fundamental nature of this challenge in suggesting that The separation of humanity from an external nature, which we can then somehow both seek protection from and simultaneously seek to “protect”, is a crucial part of what makes us modern. Proponents of this discourse are also less than specific about what would be required to realise a condition of ecological security. Yet to the extent that the practices associated with global climate change flow from dominant modern conceptions of development, the natural world and the necessity of exclusive political entities in the form of states, this discourse is one that most systematically speaks to the nature of the contemporary ecological crisis of which climate change is the latest (and most threatening) development. Conclusion: discourses and logics of climate security The above discussion illustrates that there are multiple ways of conceiving of the relationship between security and global climate change, with different conceptions of who is in need of being secured, from what threat, by what actors, and through what means. The key contours of these distinctions are represented in Table 1. Of course, like any taxonomy, the above distinctions are partial and imperfect, with boundaries between these categories far from fixed or wholly exclusive. It does, however, capture the key contours and emphases of these discourses, and points to significant differences about how we should make sense of the relationship between security and climate change, and indeed whether we

Mitigation and Adaptation Fundamental reorientation of societal patterns and behaviour

should advocate a particular association between climate change and security. The latter point relates to the all-important question of what practices might follow from approaching climate change as a security issue. To return to the central point of this paper, at stake here is not simply that there exist multiple different ways of understanding this relationship analytically, but that different understandings encourage and legitimize different sets of practices with potentially radically different implications for climate change policy and practice. This paper suggests that those discourses of climate security that have achieved most prominence and political support are not those that could feasibly inform an effective global response to global climate change. While the national and international security discourses have found their way into popular consciousness and even become institutionalised in state and intergovernmental institutions, both orient around the preservation of some notion of the status-quo: either the preservation of the sovereignty/territorial integrity of nation-states or the preservation of an international society of states. This orientation is inconsistent with the scale of climate crisis that we now confront, which current practices and institutions should be seen as profoundly failing to address. More importantly, and as noted, the logic of these discourses can encourage perverse political responses that not only fail to respond effectively to climate change but may present victims of it as a threat. This most readily applies to the national security discourse, which can encourage states (including those most responsible for contributing to the problem) to close borders to those displaced by climate change, for example. The above analysis also cautions against either simply rejecting or embracing a climate change-security link. On the environmentsecurity link, for example, those who would see such a linkage as inherently problematic or dangerous (eg Deudney, 1990) risk reifying and responding to a particular discourse of environmental security tied to the preservation of the nation-state and the centrality of military means, for example. As the above analysis has suggested, other environmental security discourses, ones that reject the state, military and exceptionalist practices, can be seen in both public debate and academic analysis. And some discourses (human security and ecological security discourses in particular) precisely reject the role of these orienting concerns, suggesting in the process a basis for rethinking our relationship to the natural world and what we mean by ‘security’. Discourses of climate security matter. They serve to define who is in need of protection from the threat posed by climate change; who is capable of providing this protection; and (crucially) what forms responses to these threats might take. The dominance of discourses associated with national and international security (evidenced in the national security strategies and institutional arrangements of states, along with discussions in the United Nations Security Council) suggest an orientation towards the preservation of some version of the status quo. Indeed it is significant to note that those voices most opposed to UNSC discussions on the international security threats of climate change in 2007 and 2011 (the

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NAM, G77, China, Russia, India and Brazil) have been those states most sceptical about the legitimacy of that international order itself. Perhaps more importantly, an orientation towards the preservation of the status quo appears inconsistent with the scale of the challenge climate change poses, which requires a fundamental reexamination of the nature of our relationship to the world in which we live. In this sense, the ecological security discourse offers the most hope for orienting progressive and effective responses to climate change, yet its marginalization from contemporary debates about climate security could certainly justify scepticism about the value of a climate change-security framing and the prospects for responding effectively to climate change more generally. Acknowledgements Funding for the research in this paper was provided through a UQ Early Career Researcher Grant Award. For their feedback on an earlier version of this paper I am particularly grateful to Ashleigh Croucher, the anonymous reviewers and James Sidaway.

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