Situating Climate Security, The Department of Defense's Role in Mitigating Climate Change's Causes and Dealing with its Effects; Strategic Insights; v. 9, issue 2 (Fall 2010) pp. 13-25.
Loading...
Authors
Clausen, Daniel
Clausen, Michael
Subjects
Advisors
Date of Issue
2010
Date
2010 : Fall
Publisher
Monterey, CA; Naval Postgraduate School
Language
Abstract
An Emerging Security Focus: Climate Security. A new concern is circulating among policymakers, think tanks, and scholars: securing the planet’s climate. For those who debate what counts as “national security,” the question over whether climate change should be framed as a security issue has been argued along well-worn lines. For those who seek a more expansive definition of security, one that reaches beyond military threats, the threat of climate change is another reason why the lines of security need to be re-drawn. For those who see the inclusion of climate change as a threat to the notion of security as the protection of the state in a competitive international system, widening the term to encompass climate change threatens to draw attention away from traditional threats (future peer competitors like China and a resurgent Russia) and the “new nontraditional” threats (rogue states and transnational terrorism). At the most basic level, the inclusion of environmental threats in a security paradigm risks confusing national security with foreign policy and global politics. As this article will show, however, in many ways this debate has already become obsolete. Since the issuance of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates, the publication of a bevy of key reports by respected think tanks, and most recently the latest Defense Department Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) and the National Security Strategy (NSS), climate security has increasingly become recognized as a legitimate object of national security thinking.
Type
Article
Description
This article appeared in Strategic Insights, v.9, issue 2 (Fall 2010) pp. 13-25.
Series/Report No
Department
Organization
Naval Postgraduate School (U.S.)
Identifiers
NPS Report Number
Sponsors
Funder
Format
Citation
Strategic Insights, v.9, issue 2 (Fall 2010) pp. 13-25.
Distribution Statement
Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited.
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.