The Securitisation of Climate Change

Actors, Processes and Consequences

Thomas Diez, Franziskus von Lucke, Zehra Wellmann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317353058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book provides the first systematic comparative analysis of climate security discourses.

It analyses the securitisation of climate change in four different countries: USA, Germany, Turkey, and Mexico. The empirical analysis traces how specific climate-security discourses have become dominant, which actors have driven this process, what political consequences this has had and what role the broader context has played in enabling these specific securitisations. In doing so, the book outlines a new and systematic theoretical framework that distinguishes between different referent objects of securitisation (territorial, individual and planetary) and between a security and risk dimension. It thereby clarifies the ever-increasing literature on different forms of securitisation and the relationship between security, risk and politics. Whereas securitisation studies have traditionally focused on either a single country case study or a global overview, consequently failing to reconstruct detailed securitisation dynamics, this is the first book to provide a systematic comparative analysis of climate security discourses in four countries and thus closes an empirical gap in the present literature. In addition, this comparative framework allows the drawing of conclusions about the conditions for and consequences of successful securitisation based on empirical and comparative analysis rather than theoretical debate only.

This book will of interest to students of climate change, environmental studies, critical security, global governance, and IR in general.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315665757-1

The climate–security nexus

Droughts that deprive people of food and water; floods that destroy homes; rising sea levels that make whole islands disappear; water scarcity that leads to violent conflicts and mass migration – climate change has long become an issue of security policies (see Brzoska 2012 for an overview). The 2015 United States (US) National Security Strategy lists ‘[c]onfronting climate change’ as a major security threat, along with terrorism, violent conflict, the proliferation of mass destruction and health scares (The White House 2015: 12). The 2003 European Security Strategy (ESS) noted that ‘competition for natural resources – notably water –, which will be aggravated by global warming over the next decades, is likely to create further turbulence and migratory movements in various regions’ (European Council 2003: 3). Five years after its adoption, the European Council concluded in its review of the ESS that ‘the security implications of climate change’ have ‘taken on a new urgency’ (European Council 2003: 14). On the way to a revision of the ESS, the 2015 strategic review argues that ‘climate change and resource scarcity … contribute to international conflicts and are expected to do even more in the future’ (Carson 2011; European Council 2003: 7). On the member state level, the White Paper of the German Ministry of Defence sees climate change as exacerbating the fragility of states and societies in parts of Africa and Asia, even though climate change overall plays a less important role in this document (Bundesministerium der Verteidigung 2006: 21). And the United Kingdom’s National Security Strategy warns that ‘the physical effects of climate change are likely to become increasingly significant as a “risk multiplier”, exacerbating existing tensions around the world’ (HM Government 2010: 17).

The climate–security nexus is part of the wider context of broadening the concept of security, which has taken place since the 1980s. In an influential piece, Richard Ullman (1983: 134) argued against a narrow military conception of security and saw ‘a drastic deterioration of environmental quality’ as a major threat. Since then, environmental security, and climate security with it, has become a standard reference point in security policies. Initially, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) – such as the World Watch Institute, the Climate Institute, the New Economics Foundation or Friends of the Earth – have been crucial in linking climate change to security in order to raise awareness and include the issue on the agenda of political leaders (Oels 2012 a; Myers 1995). Eventually, this policy advocacy contributed to the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), agreed in 1992 at the Rio Summit of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was the first in a series of attempts to commit states to binding targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

As the scientific certainty of the anthropogenic effects on the global climate and the immense cost of adaptation measures turned out to be more robust, the urgent need to take measures to mitigate climate change (i.e. to tackle its causes) or to adapt to its potential consequences has become more widespread. Thus, since the turn of the millennium, the discussion about the possible security effects of climate change has again gained momentum (Brzoska and Oels 2011). Reports on the national level such as the influential Stern Report (Stern 2006) pushed governments to no longer defer policies to combat global warming and its effects. In 2007, even the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) debated the possible implications of climate change on international peace and security (UNSC 2007 a), followed by a report of the Secretary-General (UNGA 2009 b), various General Assembly resolutions (UNGA 2008; 2009a) and two further sessions of the UNSC on the issue in 2011 and 2013 (UNSC 2011 a; 2013).

The puzzle of climate policies and securitisation

Given this strong and established link between climate change and security in distinct contexts, it is surprising that concrete measures to combat greenhouse gas emissions remain contested. It took more than seven years to bring together a sufficient number of states to ratify the Kyoto Protocol for it to take force. Even so, the US as the main emitter of greenhouse gases, after initially signing the Protocol, has never ratified it, while Canada withdrew as a party to the agreement in 2011 when it became clear that it was unable to meet its emission reduction obligations. A series of UNFCCC conferences, most famously in Copenhagen in 2009, has failed to produce an effective successor to the Protocol, and its extension in 2011 weakened its force, not least because even fewer member states agreed to it. Meanwhile, individual states have pursued very different climate policies. While some, notably the EU member states, have stuck to setting binding targets for emission reductions, others have preferred incentives for voluntary behavioural changes of private actors, have focused on adaptive strategies to be prepared for the inevitable, or have continued to privilege economic and energy security interests.

As a consequence, one of the central analyses of a widened security agenda has claimed that climate change has not been effectively represented as a security issue on the global level (Buzan et al.1998: 74, 84, 92). While there have been a number of attempts to securitise climate change, the argument is that these attempts have not been sufficiently accepted to speak of a successful securitisation of climate change. While we take issue with this analysis, as we will discuss in greater detail below, we nonetheless need to recognise that on the present record, the climate–security nexus, while widespread, remains contested and has not translated into policies that are widely seen as necessary and appropriate on a global level. Instead, we see a great deal of variation in the way that climate security is debated and in the way that states react to climate change.

At first glance, economic interests seem to play a major role in explaining this variation – at least state actors tend to cite such interests, such as safeguarding development, energy supplies or employment, in their defence of policies that do not aim at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A closer look, however, shows that the picture is much murkier. How come that Morocco and Mexico are among the top twenty in the Climate Change Performance Index, whereas other emerging economies such as Brazil and Turkey receive a rating of ‘very poor’ (Germanwatch and CAN 2015: 8–9)? Likewise, France and the UK are among the forerunners in their climate policies, whereas Canada and Australia find themselves in bottom place with Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia (ibid.).

The argument we unfold in this book is that the discursive framing of the climate–security issue varies significantly between and within countries. There is thus not only one way to construct climate change as a security issue; there are many different ways of doing so, and these different climate security discourses matter in the legitimisation of specific policies. As such, our normative assessment of whether linking climate change and security is a good (for instance, because it places climate change on the agenda and accelerates political decisions) or a bad thing (for instance, because it enables the military to expand its policy reach and thereby neglect climate policy) depends on the exact ways in which the securitisation of climate change unfolds. How this happens is in turn a consequence of a combination of structural factors such as the historical development of political institutions and the agency of those we will call ‘discursive entrepreneurs’ who are able to shape climate security discourses at particular junctures, and whose framing of climate security thus significantly influences the development of the debate.

While the starting point of this book is thus the empirical puzzle of the multiplicity of climate–security linkages, we use this case to also make a theoretical contribution to the debate about securitisation. In the so-called Copenhagen School of security studies, security does not carry any objective, substantive meaning. Instead, what counts as security depends on the successful representation of something or someone as an existential threat to a referent object (such as the state in traditional military security or the individual in human security) to legitimise extraordinary measures (Buzan et al.1998: 24). ‘Successful’ in this context means that individual securitising moves (the individual speech acts that represent the existential threat) are accepted by their audience and extraordinary measures thus seen as legitimate, even if they do not necessarily have to be implemented (Buzan et al.1998: 25). Many researchers before us have used the issue of climate change to demonstrate the shortcomings of this definition, as we will elaborate below. They have criticised its narrowness, being modelled on the logic of military security; its imprecise definition of extraordinary measures and the audience; and its neglect of routine policies that nonetheless amount to security policies (see, among others, Floyd 2010; Trombetta 2008; Detraz and Betsill 2009; Corry 2012; McDonald 2013). We build on their work to develop a six-fold matrix of securitisation along two dimensions: the level of the referent object (whether climate change is seen to threaten states or other territories, individuals, or the planet as a whole), and the construction of security as an existential threat (as in the original Copenhagen School formulation) or as risk (which, as we will argue, follows a much more diffuse logic). This matrix allows us to trace securitisations in much more detail than the literature has so far done. Furthermore, it allows us to clarify the relationship between security, threat and risk, which the security studies literature has not yet been able to settle satisfactorily, and make these categories available for empirical analyses. Last but not least, our distinction of different climate security discourses and their policy influences also allows us to engage with the normative debate about securitisation, which Wæver (1995) saw as a problematic development in its constraining impact on the political debate, while others have pointed to the potentially positive effects of securitisation in terms of agenda-setting and policy legitimisation (e.g. Elbe 2009; Floyd 2010).

A comparative design

Our study is based on the comparison of climate security debates in four countries: the USA, Germany, Mexico and Turkey. Our choice of a comparative analysis of national debates is driven by our empirical puzzle of diverging policies despite similar economic standing, our hunch that these may be result of different predominant ways to frame climate security in these debates, and our aim to trace the development of securitisation in detail. We are not analysing the global climate change debate and its link to security, not least because this is an issue that the literature has covered extensively (Oels 2011; Detraz and Betsill 2009; Corry 2012). Our comparative approach may run the risk of methodological nationalism, reinforcing the boundaries of states when in fact, climate change debates are transnational to some degree, and pushed forward by transnational actors from international NGOs to expert panels as part of an epistemic community. Yet climate policies ultimately have to be adopted in national contexts, and political debates about climate change, while certainly also taking place on a global elite level, therefore largely take place within national contexts. International and transnational actors clearly influence these debates, but we take care of this by highlighting such linkages – and analysing whether they are successful or not. We thus will show how the EU has been influential in enforcing climate policies in Turkey in the absence of an effective securitisation, whereas the UK-based Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) unsuccessfully tried to securitise climate change in Mexico. All in all, our comparative setup allows us to draw out the distinctive development of the securitisation of climate change in our four cases, and demonstrate how this has affected national climate policies.

We have chosen our case studies on the basis of our research aim of showing the development and impact of divergent climate security discourses. To do so, we selected two country pairs. Each pair has a similar level of economic development but differs significantly in their climate policies. According to 2010 estimates, Germany and the US had a per capita income of 35,700 USD and 47,200 USD, and ranked 10 and 4 respectively in the Human Development Index (HDI). In contrast, Mexico had an estimated income of 12,900 USD per capita, Turkey of 12,300 USD. The two countries ranked 56 (Mexico) and 83 (Turkey) in the HDI. Each pair is also similar in their emission levels. In 1998, the US emitted 20.35 tons of carbon per capita per year and Germany 10.63, whereas the figures for Mexico and Turkey are significantly lower at 1.1 and 0.9 tons of carbon (World Bank 2013 a). While these figures provide only a snapshot and are not the latest available, they are indicative of the countries’ performance during our entire period of analysis from the 1990s to 2014, which roughly covers the period from the early linkages of climate change and security from Rio onwards, through the peak of global securitisation in 2006/7, until the completion of empirical data gathering in the framework of our project.

While the US and Germany are thus very similar in their developmental stage, as are Mexico and Turkey, the picture is very different when we look at their ranking in the Climate Performance Index. Whereas Germany and Mexico are in the top ten in the years 2008–2013 (Germany averages at number 6, Mexico at number 10), Turkey and the US share a rather embarrassing rank 52 (Germanwatch and CAN 2015). Even considering that such rankings have to be taken with a pinch of salt, the status of Turkey and the US as laggards when it comes to climate change policies is undisputed in the literature, whereas both Germany and Mexico are widely seen as relative vanguards, whatever the imperfections of their climate policies may be. Different past impacts of climate change do not explain this variation in policies either. While Germany ranks number 22 in Germanwatch’s Climate Risk Index 1994–2013 (Germanwatch ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Note on translations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Analysing climate security discourses
• 3 The United States: climate change as danger to the state
• 4 Germany: ambivalent forerunner in individual security
• 5 Mexico: a case of politicised securitisation?
• 6 Turkey: no climate for change?
• 7 Conclusion: the politics of securitising climate change
• References
• Index