4. What are the main problems with describing climate change as a security issue?
The fundamental problem with making climate change a security issue is that it responds to a crisis caused by systemic injustice with ‘security’ solutions, hardwired in an ideology and institutions designed to seek control and continuity. At a time when limiting climate change and ensuring a just transition requires a radical redistribution of power and wealth, a security approach seeks to perpetuate the status quo. In the process, climate security has six main impacts.
1. Obscures or diverts attention from the causes of climate change, blocking necessary change to the unjust status quo. In focusing on responses to the impacts of climate change and the security interventions that might be required, they divert attention from the causes of the climate crisis – the power of corporations and nations that have contributed most to causing climate change, the role of the military that is one of the biggest institutional GHG emitters, and the economic policies such as free trade agreements that have made so many people even more vulnerable to climate-related changes. They ignore the violence embedded in a globalised extractive economic model, implicitly assume and support the continued concentration of power and wealth, and seek to stop the resulting conflicts and ‘insecurity’. They also do not question the role of security agencies themselves in upholding the unjust system – so while climate security strategists may point to the need to address military GHG emissions, this never extends to calls for closing down military infrastructure or to radically reducing military and security budgets in order to pay for existing commitments to provide climate finance to developing countries to invest in alternative programmes such as a Global Green New Deal.
2. Strengthens a booming military and security apparatus and industry that has already gained unprecedented wealth and power in the wake of 9/11. Predicted climate insecurity has become a new open-ended excuse for military and security spending and for emergency measures that bypass democratic norms. Nearly every climate security strategy paints a picture of ever-increasing instability, which demands a security response. As Navy Rear Admiral David Titley put it: ‘it’s like getting embroiled in a war that lasts 100 years’. He framed this as a pitch for climate action, but it is also by default a pitch for ever more military and security spending. In this way, it follows a long pattern of the military seeking new justifications for war, including to combat drug use, terrorism, hackers and so on, which has led to booming budgets for military and security spending worldwide. State calls for security, embedded in a language of enemies and threats, is also used to justify emergency measures, such as the deployment of troops and enactment of emergency legislation that bypasses democratic bodies and constrains civil liberties.
3. Shifts responsibility for the climate crisis to the victims of climate change, casting them as ‘risks’ or ‘threats’. In considering the instability caused by climate change, climate security advocates warn of the dangers of states imploding, places becoming inhabitable, and people becoming violent or migrating. In the process, those who are the least responsible for climate change are not only the most affected by it, but are also viewed as ‘threats’. It is a triple injustice. And it follows a long tradition of security narratives where the enemy is always elsewhere. As scholar Robyn Eckersley notes, ‘environmental threats are something that foreigners do to Americans or to American territory’, and they are never something caused by US or Western domestic policies.
4. Reinforces corporate interests. In colonial times, and sometimes earlier, national security has been identified with defending corporate interests. In 1840, UK Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston was unequivocal: ‘It is the business of the Government to open and secure the roads for the merchant’. This approach still guides most nations’ foreign policy today – and is reinforced by the growing power of corporate influence within government, academia, policy institutes and intergovernmental bodies such as the UN or the World Bank. It is reflected in many climate-related national security strategies that express particular concern about the impacts of climate change on shipping routes, supply chains, and extreme weather impacts on economic hubs. Security for the largest transnational companies (TNCs) is automatically translated as security for a whole nation, even if those same TNCs, such as oil companies, might be the chief contributors to insecurity.
5. Creates insecurity. The deployment of security forces usually creates insecurity for others. This is evident, for example, in the 20-year US-led and NATO-supported military invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, launched with the promise of security from terrorism, and yet ended up fuelling endless war, conflict, the return of the Taliban and potentially the rise of new terrorist forces. Similarly, policing in the US and elsewhere has often created increased insecurity for marginalised communities who face discrimination, surveillance and death in order to keep wealthy propertied classes secure. Programmes of climate security led by security forces will not escape this dynamic. As Mark Neocleous sums up: ‘All security is defined in relation to insecurity. Not only must any appeal to security involve a specification of the fear which engenders it, but this fear (insecurity) demands the counter-measures (security) to neutralize, eliminate or constrain the person, group, object or condition which engenders fear’.
6. Undermines other ways of dealing with climate impacts. Once security is the framing, the question is always what is insecure, to what extent, and what security interventions might work – never whether security should even be the approach. The issue becomes set in a binary of a threat vs security, requiring state intervention and often justifying extraordinary actions outside the norms of democratic decision-making. It thus rules out other approaches – such as those that seek to look at more systemic causes, or centred on different values (e.g. justice, popular sovereignty, ecological alignment, restorative justice), or based on different agencies and approaches (e.g. public health leadership, commons-based or community-based solutions). It also represses the very movements calling for these alternative approaches and challenging the unjust systems that perpetuate climate change.
See also: Dalby, S. (2009) Security and Environmental Change, Polity. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Security+and+Environmental+Change-p-9780745642918
Patriarchy and climate security
Underlying a militarised approach to climate security lies a patriarchal system that has normalised military means to resolve conflict and instability. Patriarchy is deeply embedded in military and security structures. It is most evident in the male leadership and domination of military and para-military state forces, but it is also inherent in the way security is conceptualised, the privilege given to the military by political systems, and the way military spending and responses is barely even questioned even when it is failing to deliver on its promises.
Women and LGBT+ persons are disproportionately impacted by armed conflict and militarised responses to crises. They also carry a disproportionate burden of dealing with the impacts of crises such as climate change.
Women are notably also at the forefront of both the climate and peace movements. That is why we need a feminist critique of climate security and look to feminist solutions. As Ray Acheson and Madeleine Rees of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom argue, ‘Knowing that war is the ultimate form of human insecurity, feminists advocate for long-term solutions to conflict and support a peace and security agenda that protects all peoples’.
See also: Acheson R. and Rees M. (2020). ‘A feminist approach for addressing excessive military spending’ in Rethinking Unconstrained Military Spending, UNODA Occasional Papers No. 35 , pp 39-56 https://front.un-arm.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/op-35-web.pdf