International Security Studies

theLonelyWolf

Security_Studies_An_Introduction_----_Part_4_Contemporary_Challenges_.pdf

Home >Business & Finance homework help >International Security Studies

526

CHAPTER 35

Environmental change Simon Dalby

ABSTRACT

In this chapter, students will learn about the Anthropocene and how humanity has become a force shaping the planetary system with major consequences for the theory and practice of security. It analyses how changes in climate security are prompting armed forces around the world to prepare for new circumstances and roles, and how far international treaties such as the 2015 Paris Agreement can curb the negative consequences of climate change. It also discusses whether new thinking about global resilience and transition strategies to more ecologic - ally benign modes of living, including by developing post-fossil fuel economies, offer a solution.

CONTENTS

z Introduction: the Anthropocene 527 z Earth system boundaries/safe operating space 528 z Climate security and militarization 530 z A climate for peace? 534 z Global resilience? 536 z Climate geopolitics 538 z Anthropocene security 539

Williams, P. D., & McDonald, M. (Eds.). (2018). Security studies : An introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from monash on 2020-05-26 14:57:06.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

8. T

ay lo

r &

F ra

nc is

G ro

up . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

z Introduction: the Anthropocene In May 2011 The Economist magazine printed a cover story on the theme of ‘Wel - come to the Anthropocene’. Magazines dealing with global economics and politics don’t usually give geological issues top billing, so clearly something of significance is happening here. The term Anthropocene was beginning to be used in 2011 as a new word in Earth system science to emphasize the dramatic scale of transforma - tions that mostly the rich and powerful parts of humanity have unleashed. The term Anthropocene suggests that humanity has become a force shaping the planetary system quite profoundly, on a scale that requires Earth system scientists to consider the present as a new geological period in the planet’s history.

In short, we live in an increasingly artificial world, one of cities, roads and agri - cultural landscapes that have completely transformed terrestrial ecosystems over much of the fertile part of the planet. Powering this transformation is the combustion of fossil fuels, coal, oil and natural gas that are literally turning rocks into air. This is changing the composition of the atmosphere in a number of ways that is causing more heat from the sun to be trapped and as a result accelerating climate change. The Anthropocene suggests that the rich and powerful decision makers in the global economy are increasingly shaping the future of the planet’s essential biolo - gical systems, and hence humanity’s future in a rapidly changing biosphere. This is the new context for studying security and making policy in this age of the Anthro - pocene.

Whether climate change will cause armed conflict is one of the new questions on the agenda for security studies; fears of climate migrants have long fuelled xenophobic nationalism (White 2014). Some low-lying states are facing entirely predictable inundation in coming decades: what can security possibly mean for them? None of them has military options to defend against the destruction of their territories, damage caused indirectly by the profligate use of fossil fuels by other states. National security might normally mean the long-term survival of the state, but in the case of the island atoll states in the Pacific and Indian Oceans they are unable to ensure their future territorial integrity. This might be secured by an international agreement to rapidly reduce the use of fossil fuels, an arrangement that, despite the tentative steps forward in the Paris Agreement of December 2015, has yet to emerge as a comprehensive programme to tackle climate change.

Security is now partly about the conditions for particular peoples in these new circumstances of rapid change, and where and when they can live safely in the manu - factured buildings, transportation systems and infrastructure that make urban life possible for the majority of us (Graham 2016). Human security is also very much about how we will feed ourselves and supply water and breathable air to coming generations and more immediately about how people dispossessed by the rapid extension of the global economy will find their means of livelihood. The most import - ant questions of global security are ones concerning which societies will shape both the future configuration of the global climate, with all that means for agricultural production and reliable supplies of food for a still growing population, who will decide on how hot the planet will get, and with what consequences for people unable to easily adapt to rapidly changing conditions.

E N V I R O N M E N T A L C H A N G E

527 Williams, P. D., & McDonald, M. (Eds.). (2018). Security studies : An introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from monash on 2020-05-26 14:57:06.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

8. T

ay lo

r &

F ra

nc is

G ro

up . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

z Earth system boundaries/safe operating space The Anthropocene, ‘the age of humanity’, is a departure from the previous geological period, termed the Holocene, or ‘recent past’. This period, going back approximately 12,000 years since the last advance of the glaciers, was an unusually stable period in the planet’s history. Humanity has thrived through a period where climate fluc - tuations were relatively minor, a stable period where, despite small variations in the climate, agriculture could be reliably undertaken over extended periods. Prior to that ice grew and retreated fairly frequently, and rapid fluctuations in ecological conditions were the norm. Humanity lived then in small mostly nomadic groups despite having basic technology and the ability to use fire for cooking and heating.

But, once the glaciers retreated at the beginning of the Holocene and humanity spread rapidly, larger agglomerations and population growth became possible. These stable conditions that facilitated the flourishing of humanity are now coming to an end; this is what the Anthropocene means in practice (Davies 2016). But the world isn’t slipping back into another ice age, something that would happen were it not for humanity’s changes to the system; we are, as a result of the extraordinary expan - sion of the global economy since the middle of the twentieth century, accelerating towards a situation of rapid global warming (McNeill and Engelke 2016). Glaciers and polar icecaps are receding very quickly and weather is becoming increasingly extreme and less predictable. If this trend is to be arrested, and for humanity to live in conditions approximating those that have allowed us to thrive over the last few millennia, a matter of having a ‘safe operating space for humanity’, then radical changes will be needed very soon to our habits of profligate combustion, because it is the waste gases from all our burning that are heating the planet.

Climate change is key, but it is playing out in a world altered in numerous other ways too. One influential attempt to summarize these many changes is the ‘Earth system boundaries framework’ (Rockström et al. 2009; Steffen et al. 2015). Human - ity is pushing a number of crucial ecological systems beyond what seem to be safe boundaries; straining the systems in ways that may lead to dangerous disruptions to how the system has operated through most of the Holocene. This framework posits nine key ecological boundaries to the ‘safe operating space’ of the Earth system (see Figure 35.1). Climate change is the first and probably the most important com - ponent. Second is the rapid decline in biospheric integrity due to the exter mination of many species and the related destruction of many biodiverse systems and loss of genetic material. The depletion of stratospheric ozone is the third system boundary, one that humanity inadvertently endangered with the widespread use of chloro - fluorocarbons but which has been partly solved by international agreements to ban the production of these and related chemicals.

Oceans are crucial to life on Earth and the fourth system boundary concerns the acidification of ocean water. As carbon dioxide levels rise owing to humanity’s com - bustion of fossil fuels as well as forests, oceans are becoming more acidic. They are absorbing more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere because of its growing concen - tration there and this endangers numerous marine animals and ocean eco systems. Oceans are also vulnerable to the fifth boundary, the rapid increase in the flows of nitrogen, phosphorus and other minerals from agriculture and urban activities into

528

S . D A L B Y

Williams, P. D., & McDonald, M. (Eds.). (2018). Security studies : An introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from monash on 2020-05-26 14:57:06.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

8. T

ay lo

r &

F ra

nc is

G ro

up . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

the waters of the planet. This pollution is related to the sixth boundary, the rapid change in land use as urbanization and agriculture expand their reach. This expansion of human reach on land leads to the seventh Earth system boundary that relates to the use of fresh water, and the wholesale damming and appropriation of river waters for human use with all the consequences for ‘natural’ ecosystems.

The atmosphere too is being changed by the addition of numerous nitrates, sulphates and other aerosols including soot from combustion. This eighth system boundary is of particular concern in Asia both because of the direct health con sequences for people and animals living there but also because of fears that this pollution might also disrupt the monsoon rains and result in further agricultural problems where so much of humanity is dependent on rice cultivation. Finally, the ninth boundary of concern is the matter of the introduction of numerous ‘novel’ entities into the Earth system, new chemical substances, micro- and macro-plastics, with potential but as yet mostly unknown hazards to living things and the Earth system generally.

The Earth system boundary formulation suggests that if humanity is to flourish in the future it’s a reasonable assumption that the planet has to be maintained within

E N V I R O N M E N T A L C H A N G E

529

BI OG EO

C H

EM IC

A L

FL O

W B

O U

N D

A R

A e ro

so l L

o ad

in g

Glob al

os ph

or us

N it

ro g

e n

O zo

n e D

e p

le tio

nA tm

o sp

h er

B io

d iversity Loss

Change in Land Use Fresh wat

er Us

C yc

S trato

sp h

e ric

Ocean Acidification

Climate Change

C he

m ic

al Po

llu tio

FIGURE 35.1 Planetary boundaries for a safe operating space for humanity

Williams, P. D., & McDonald, M. (Eds.). (2018). Security studies : An introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from monash on 2020-05-26 14:57:06.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

8. T

ay lo

r &

F ra

nc is

G ro

up . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

the parameters that shaped the remarkably stable period of the Holocene. Hence the Holocene provides the conditions for a ‘safe operating space’ of the Earth for the future of humanity. Maintaining these conditions is thus the priority for any notion of global environmental security, but how to accomplish this given the ‘growth’ dynamics at the heart of the current global economic system is far from clear. Nightmare scenarios suggest that as ecological systems are pushed across the Earth system boundaries humanity will be riven by conflict as political elites struggle to control increasingly scarce resources. Erecting fences and militarizing frontiers to deal with migrants displaced by environmental change just aggravates the violence of rapid change, rendering those forced to move doubly vulnerable (Jones 2016). Proponents of technological innovation suggest that we will invent our way out of difficulties and produce new ways of life and technologies to solve problems as they arise, but only if industrialists and financiers focus on making sustainable economies and soon (Rockström and Klum 2015).

Traditional environmentalism, while effective at tackling some of the worst symptoms of industrialization, has failed to constrain the overall damage to the Holocene conditions for humanity, not least because of its inability to grapple with the consumption culture that demands ever more ‘stuff’ for international markets (Dauvergne 2016). At the heart of environmental security lies the question as to what is to be secured, this ever-growing economy and the economics of more, or some new forms of human activity that take the Earth system boundaries seriously as the premises for security policy and economic thinking (Gopel 2016). In particular, security studies has to grapple with the question of what, in these circumstances, is the role of military agencies in such a rapidly changing world? Who or what are they going to protect from which threats defined by what political agencies? Crucially, can the transformations that are necessary if humanity is to live within the Earth system boundaries be undertaken peacefully (Brauch et al. 2016)? If so, what kind of security concepts should we use to think about the Anthropocene (see Box 35.1)?

z Climate security and militarization Since the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, increasingly alarming statements have been issued by military agencies, in the US in particular, but else - where too, about the potential security dangers that climate change presents to many societies, and to the national security of metropolitan states in particular. A series of reports in 2007 and 2008 highlighted the risks to political stability in poorer parts of the world and suggested that these might inflame insurgencies and spread terrorism too (CNA 2007; Campbell et al. 2007; German Advisory Council 2008). Disasters requiring military intervention to aid with rescue and relief were also highlighted. Given that military institutions often have the heavy equipment, ships, communications gear, helicopters and all-terrain vehicles that are useful in responding to emergencies, they are often the ‘first responders’ in disaster situations.

Some of these formulations included the idea of climate change as a ‘threat multi - plier’, a phenomenon that would in future crises make violence more likely. Hence the US military in particular needed to be prepared for more violent conflicts made more likely as environmental change accelerated. This formulation found its way

530

S . D A L B Y

Williams, P. D., & McDonald, M. (Eds.). (2018). Security studies : An introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from monash on 2020-05-26 14:57:06.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

8. T

ay lo

r &

F ra

nc is

G ro

up . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

531

into the 2009 UN Secretary-General’s report on climate and security, discussed in the lead-up to the 2009 Copenhagen climate meetings. While this formulation of security was frequently rejected by governments in the Global South, who preferred to think about climate change as a problem of development and insisted that sustain - able development was the appropriate policy framework for dealing with climate (Dalby 2016), it is significant in that various states were attempting to raise the issue

BOX 35.1 Forms of environmental security thinking

Cooperative security focuses attention on how states, militaries and other insti - tutions can work together for common benefit, on such things as shared rivers or waterways, but also on how such efforts and the habits of working together can prevent conflict occurring in crisis situations. It is sometimes fairly close to ideas of the new security agenda where states work together to tackle problems that cross national boundaries.

Ecological security is concerned with maintaining the integrity of natural systems on which humanity is dependent, an especially complicated and difficult matter now that humanity is effectively changing the planet’s ecology in the Anthro - pocene.

Climate security, in so far as it aims to keep the planet’s temperature close to what civilization has so far known, is now obviously a key to ecological security.

Environmental security frequently refers to discussions about the risks of environ - mental change causing armed conflict, but also refers to assumptions that resource management strategies, conservation techniques and pollution preven - tion can maintain the parts of the natural world that humanity uses in conditions that allow for the continued use by the economy.

Human security focuses on vulnerable people and the provision of the essential needs for people to thrive in their particular places. As humanity increasingly lives in cities and requires commodities from all over the planet to supply the global economy that keeps us alive, infrastructure and trade become more important in providing this form of security.

Global security has traditionally focused on avoiding major international and particularly nuclear wars, which given their immense destructive consequences would render people and states everywhere insecure. Now the question is whether climate change is potentially an equally important ‘global’ consideration.

National security focuses on the state, sovereignty and the military control of national territory, in many cases not the appropriate scale for thinking about climate changes that have global effects. Focusing on ‘threats’ from migration and using huge amounts of fuel to run military institutions suggests that such policies are part of the problem rather than the solution to many climate issues.

E N V I R O N M E N T A L C H A N G E

Williams, P. D., & McDonald, M. (Eds.). (2018). Security studies : An introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from monash on 2020-05-26 14:57:06.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

8. T

ay lo

r &

F ra

nc is

G ro

up . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

of climate as a security threat, and hence a matter of top international priority for the UN. Indeed, the international security implications of climate change also featured in UN Security Council debates in 2007 and 2011 (See McDonald 2013). Subsequently the ‘threat multiplier’ formulation, one that had initially been under - stood as a potential future problem, became rephrased by the CNA Corporation (2014) in terms of a present danger and a matter specifically of climate change as a ‘conflict catalyst’.

In part this discussion draws on a long series of analyses that suggest that environ - mental change will induce conflict (Ide et al. 2016). Some analysts argue that rising temperatures cause conflict even if the precise mechanisms that link extreme weather to social upheaval aren’t clear. If there are clear relationships they don’t obviously lead to warfare even if they may aggravate small-scale social conflict (Buhaug 2015). Research on this point has been especially contentious in social sciences recently because of contrasting methods and assumptions used by various researchers. Even the widely discussed case of Syria (Gleick 2014), where drought apparently drove farmers off the land and into cities, where they were part of the protests that sub - sequently led to civil war, turns out to be much more complicated than media reports and initial analyses suggested (Selby et al. 2017). Other research suggests that larger social problems, international economic disruptions and food price spikes in particu - lar are a much greater cause of social unrest (Homer-Dixon et al. 2015). The Arab Spring protests in 2011 were in part about rising food prices, caused by international market conditions following the summer droughts in Russia in 2010 in particular, rather than about local shortages.

Comprehensive research on water stresses, development and conflict make it clear that governance, or the lack thereof, is key to determining when environmental difficulties lead to conflict, or simply serious suffering on the part of marginal peoples without the resources to effectively cope with novel situations (Zografos et al. 2014). These studies emphasize the need for intelligent development strategies that facilitate the ability to adapt to climate changes in particular as well as other Anthro pocene disruptions. Insofar as climate is thus considered a matter of sustain - able development it’s not clear what role military agencies might play in dealing with it. As Daniel Deudney (1990) noted when environmental security first became a major policy discussion at the end of the Cold War, the military isn’t an agency well suited to dealing with environmental matters. Indeed given the destruction wrought by military actions, and the fuel used in military operations, it is easy to see the military as part of the problem of environmental change rather than part of any solution. Perhaps, however, security agencies have a useful function in raising the alarm about the likely consequences of climate change, and doing so in institutional fora that are more influential than most environmental organizations (Mabey 2007)?

During the Obama administrations in the US these warnings were taken seriously and climate security was integrated into national security strategy documents and into military planning. Not least, this is a very practical matter for the US Navy in particular, as rising sea levels are threatening its facilities quite directly and requiring plans to raise docks and protect port facilities from higher tides and storm surges. Attempts to diversify fuel supplies have led to fairly extensive attempts to use bio -

532

S . D A L B Y

Williams, P. D., & McDonald, M. (Eds.). (2018). Security studies : An introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from monash on 2020-05-26 14:57:06.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

8. T

ay lo

r &

F ra

nc is

G ro

up . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

fuels as an alternative to petroleum, although while this is being talked about as providing ‘green’ or environmentally friendly fuel for the Navy, given how many biofuels are produced and processed it is unlikely many of them are actually helping with climate change reduction (DeCicco et al. 2016).

Critics have been quick to challenge claims that the military is environment - ally friendly or, despite the increasing use of solar power for military facilities and operations, a genuinely ‘green’ institution (Marzec 2015). Just as corporations are increasingly finding ways to ‘financialize’ climate risks, diversifying supply chains, looking for ways to reduce their exposure to environmental disruptions by outsourc - ing potentially dangerous parts of their operations, shifting production and buying carbon offset credits in the growing carbon markets, so the critics argue, climate is becoming militarized and military organizations are intervening to ensure the supply of resources to metropoles even if it involves the violent dispossession of traditional peoples from their lands to supply resources to international markets (Buxton and Hayes 2016).

In part this is about the extension of military operations as part of the global ‘war on terror’ and the extension of ‘security’ modes of governance into many facets of social and economic life. All of this can easily suggest that nature itself is becom - ing a battleground as environmental change accelerates and conflict over access to resources continues (Keucheyan 2016). As noted above, the global economy has expanded rapidly through the period of the Anthropocene now often called ‘the great acceleration’. In part, the ever larger extension of the economy requires more raw materials, more fuel and more agricultural and plantation commodities (Dauvergne 2016). This is key to expanding the landscape changes that are disrupting ecosystems, the question of the sixth Earth system boundary. This formulation is nearly exactly the opposite of the ideas of climate change as a threat multiplier; it suggests quite directly that the violence related to climate is about the extension of the global economy. In the process, it points to both the direct consequences this has for peoples in the way of resource development, and indirectly in terms of their vulnerabilities to storms and droughts made worse as climate change accelerates (Parenti 2011).

One of the more interesting controversies in all this is how the relationship between the military and climate change has played out in Washington, DC. While tra - ditionally the US military was closely aligned with the Republican Party in American politics, on the issue of climate change many Republican politicians, influenced by the campaigns to deny the significance of climate change (Oreskes and Conway 2010), and partly funded by fossil fuel company-derived electoral campaign contri - butions, have actively tried to defund Pentagon initiatives related to climate change (Dalby 2016). The argument between Republican politicians and with the Obama administration over whether ISIS or climate change is the biggest threat to national security and on whether Obama had in fact declared a ‘war on coal’ highlights the importance of the politics of security in terms of who defines what endangers whom. With the accession of the Trump administration in early 2017 and the appointment of Rex Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, to be US Secretary of State, the question of whether US policy will be to act in the long-term interests of a sustain - able biosphere on in the short-term interests of oil company profits became especially

533

E N V I R O N M E N T A L C H A N G E

Williams, P. D., & McDonald, M. (Eds.). (2018). Security studies : An introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from monash on 2020-05-26 14:57:06.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

8. T

ay lo

r &

F ra

nc is

G ro

up . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

acute. In the first few months of the administration a number of executive orders were signed that among other things explicitly removed the obligation of federal government agencies to consider climate change in their planning.

Given the urgency of tackling climate change, if biospheric integrity is taken seriously, environmental activists and opponents of fossil fuel companies have also taken to using military analogies and sometimes explicitly talked in terms of warfare. Australian activists have invoked the image of British war mobilization following the evacuation of Dunkirk as an appropriate model of the kind of economic action needed to tackle the emergency situation of, to use the medical terms warning of imminent death without intervention, a planetary condition of ‘climate code red’ (Spratt and Sutton 2009). More recently, Bill McKibben (2016), the leading spokes - person for the fossil fuel divestment movement, has explicitly invoked war metaphors too, calling for industrial mobilization on a war footing to rapidly produce a solar powered American energy system. His article in the New Republic came complete with graphics showing solar panels and windmills invading a fossil fuel technology territory!

z A climate for peace? The Anthropocene discussion suggests that humanity is fundamentally reshaping many key aspects of the Earth system. Decisions that are made about resource use, which fuels are used and which are left in the ground, are hence key to shaping the human future as well as determining the fate of numerous other species. Thus how the future is shaped, and what future is deemed worth securing, is now key to global politics. So far, climate change and environmental matters are not the priority; old-fashioned rivalries between states continue to be the ‘macro-securitization’ that drives much international policymaking (Buzan and Wæver 2009).

The nationalist rhetoric of 2016 in many parts of the world, only most obviously in the British case of the ‘Brexit’ referendum and the Trump presidential cam - paign in the United States, revived fears regarding international cooperation on many issues, and not just the highlighted themes of trade and migration. The Trump campaign rhetoric frequently denied the reality of climate change and threatened the tentative progress made in international efforts to tackle it codified in the December 2015 Paris Agreement (see Box 35.2). Fears that globalization might once again fail, as it did in 1914, and lead to major conflict (Macdonald 2015) raise part - icular concerns for climate action as clearly international cooperation on this issue is likely to be nearly impossible in a situation of serious global tension if not actual hostilities.

The alternative is to think more imaginatively about international institutions and the possibilities of using United Nations agencies in more imaginative ways that build on human rights and development ideas related explicitly to its mandate of promoting peace (Conca 2015). Security in these terms isn’t about guaranteeing flows of petroleum to international markets. It is about ecological agriculture and land - scapes that can both buffer the extremes of climate while providing food and livelihoods to their inhabitants. It’s about making cities that are liveable but powered by solar or wind energy rather than burning fossil fuels. Efficient high-technology

534

S . D A L B Y

Williams, P. D., & McDonald, M. (Eds.). (2018). Security studies : An introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from monash on 2020-05-26 14:57:06.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

8. T

ay lo

r &

F ra

nc is

G ro

up . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

535

communications should allow for the rapid spread of innovations that can make economies and people more adaptable and less vulnerable to shocks to both economic and ecological systems (Rockström and Klum 2015).

Many of these themes appear in a series of policy papers and reports written around the time of the negotiations for the Paris Agreement in 2015, although many remain aspirations rather than integral parts of international policy initiatives. Nonetheless, clearly the Paris process has been important in making policymakers think much

BOX 35.2 The Paris Agreement on Climate Change

In December 2015 under the auspices of the 1994 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change country representatives in Paris reached an agreement to deal to try to limit climate change. The Paris Agreement entered into force in November 2016, when the requisite number of national signatures was reached.

It is a broad agreement in which each signatory agrees to generate a national system of ‘intended nationally determined contributions’ with the overall goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and hence holding the overall increase in global warming to less than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

It also aims to increase the ability of societies to adapt to climate changes and develop economies that use low fossil fuel energy systems while also providing international financial mechanisms to facilitate climate resilient development.

A global ‘stocktaking’ is planned for 2023 where each states’ commitment plans will be evaluated and further plans made to ‘ratchet up’ ambitions for subsequent years. While many poorer states pushed for compensation arrangements to deal with ‘loss and damage’ caused by climate change, the final agreement didn’t include specific measures that might in some way suggest that large carbon fuel- using states were liable for catastrophic events.

Critics were dismayed that no firm commitments nor any enforcement mechan - isms were part of the deal, and climate scientists were quick to point out that the measures and targets discussed at Paris were nowhere near adequate to meet the two-degree target, much less the more ambitious goal of trying to reach 1.5 degrees. Large amounts of carbon dioxide will have to be removed from the atmosphere later in the twenty-first century if the overall goals of the agreement are to be reached but it is entirely unclear how this might be accomplished.

Nonetheless, the Paris Agreement is the first clear indication that nearly all governments recognize the need to tackle climate change and are prepared to begin the process of decarbonizing their economies in the foreseeable future.

The whole text of the agreement is on the UN website, here: https://unfccc.int/ files/meetings/paris_nov_2015/application/pdf/paris_agreement_english_.pdf.

E N V I R O N M E N T A L C H A N G E

Williams, P. D., & McDonald, M. (Eds.). (2018). Security studies : An introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from monash on 2020-05-26 14:57:06.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

8. T

ay lo

r &

F ra

nc is

G ro

up . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

https://www.unfccc.int/files/meetings/paris_nov_2015/application/pdf/paris_agreement_english_.pdf

more seriously about the long-term consequences of their actions. Climate change has also been integrated into the discussions of the Sustainable Development Goals, the overarching policy framework for development over the period from 2015 through to 2030. Sustainable Development Goal number 13 is the UNFCCC process, of which Paris is the most important international component.

Sustainable development has long been considered part of what is needed to reduce conflict and ensure peace into the future. Recent studies for the G7 and other organ - izations emphasize the importance of making fragile states, those most vulnerable to collapse and conflict given their lack of capacity to handle disruptions, more resilient to change. In A New Climate for Peace: Taking Action on Climate and Fragility Risks (2016) the authors emphasize the importance of fragile states being aided to improve their governance capacity to deal with risk compounded by climate change. Seven risks are identified in particular: local resource competition; liveli - hood insecurity and migration; extreme weather events and disasters; volatile food prices and provision; transboundary water management; sea-level rise and coastal degradation; and various other unintended consequences of climate change. In res - ponse numerous development agenda items are identified that will hopefully both reduce the incidence of armed conflict when adverse climate effects occur and build social and ecological resilience for the longer term.

z Global resilience? Many of the above themes have been reiterated since in reports by agencies such as US AID concerned about potential conflicts related to climate change (Null and Risi 2016), in the Dutch-hosted initiative on ‘planetary security’ and in the Netherlands Institute of International Relations summary report on Towards a Global Resilience Agenda (Mobjork et al. 2016). The situation as of 2016 gave serious reason for concern:

In regards to climate change, a series of temperature records and the growing number and severity of extreme weather events in 2015 and 2016 illustrate what it might mean to leave the planet’s safe operating space. In parallel we have witnessed an unstable international political context. The Middle East remains in turmoil. . . . The number of armed conflicts has risen back to the level that it was in the early 1990s, blowing away the gains of two decades of peace-building efforts. There is a historically high level of refugees and internally displaced people. . . . Overall, the intersection of accelerating impacts of climate change, the continuing increase in numbers of armed conflicts and deepening geopolitical rivalries create a deeply unsettling new normal.

(Mobjork et al. 2016: 1)

While the authors of this paper reiterate the earlier findings of the ‘New Climate for Peace’ agenda, they emphasize that environmental sustainability is now a geo - political interest for the states involved in various rivalries. They are not quite prepared to take the logic of the climate analysis forward to suggest that geopolitics

536

S . D A L B Y

Williams, P. D., & McDonald, M. (Eds.). (2018). Security studies : An introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from monash on 2020-05-26 14:57:06.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

8. T

ay lo

r &

F ra

nc is

G ro

up . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

is actually shaping the future (Dalby 2014), but they hint at just this implication. They note the dangers of geopolitical rivalries rolling back the tentative gains in the Paris Agreement and the need to integrate policies across sectors and agencies too if the goal of making states more resilient is to be accomplished. But more careful thought about the significance of the Anthropocene suggests that more than resilience thinking will be needed, perhaps much more.

Resilience is frequently understood in terms of the ability of ‘bounce back’ after a shock to a system. In terms of environmental security, it is about the ability of a forest to regrow after a fire, an ecosystem to re-establish itself after a flood, and in human terms an ability to avoid serious harm when natural hazards occur or to recover and rebuild after a storm. The larger-scale assumptions in this thinking are mostly that climate change in particular will present larger and more frequent hazards that require better infrastructure and preparation. But the crucial importance of the Anthropocene discussion is that this isn’t enough. Bigger changes are afoot and policies that only focus on ‘doing no harm’ to humans are not enough to deal with the dynamism of ecological and evolutionary systems (Kareiva and Fuller 2016).

Environmental management systems that presuppose that ecosystems are geo - graphically fixed and need to be preserved in perpetuity are no longer the appropriate context for maintaining species diversity. Adaptation planning is in its infancy and the recognition that thinking ahead for how to cope in different circumstances is now key has been slow to spread. Managed relocation from vulnerable coastal locations in particular is important as sea levels rise, but this is in many places still not part of the policy agenda. Managed relocation is going to be key to the survival of peoples living both in small island states facing inundation as well as on vulnerable coastlines in many larger states. Florida, the Mekong Delta, parts of coastal China and Bangladesh face major hazards from rising sea levels; assumptions of fixed geographical contexts for policy are no longer tenable no matter how enthusiastically politicians emphasize sovereign territorial claims.

The implications of this recognition of the dynamism of ecosystems and the large- scale changes that the Anthropocene emphasizes are that much more careful thinking needs to be given to building and planning carefully for the future. In terms of security what is now most important is thinking about how to secure the ability to adapt. As people are forced to move in the face of desertification or rising sea levels they migrate across landscapes already profoundly shaped by human action and where most land is already part of property markets and arrangements that don’t facilitate easy relocation. Marginalized farmers forced to move by either climate change or displaced by corporate land appropriations can’t simply move to another farm unless they have the means to purchase it, or some form of social entitlement to land elsewhere, which very few have (Parenti 2011). Counterinsurgency strategies may only make things worse for dispossessed peoples if they don’t take the practicalities of rural political economy seriously. Understanding rapid rural change as the context for considering rural violence, and not just climate impacts on a supposedly stable situation, is key to thinking through sustainable development practices that are more than extending commercial agriculture and hoping that this traditional form of economic growth will accomplish resilience.

537

E N V I R O N M E N T A L C H A N G E

Williams, P. D., & McDonald, M. (Eds.). (2018). Security studies : An introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from monash on 2020-05-26 14:57:06.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

8. T

ay lo

r &

F ra

nc is

G ro

up . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

z Climate geopolitics Facing such difficulties, scholarly discussions and some policy initiatives are working on transition strategies to more ecologically benign modes of living, designing urban systems that use much less energy and are more liveable in the process, as well as thinking through social strategies to generate political constituencies for such changes (Rockström and Klum 2015). Many innovations are coming from cities and cor - porations rather than governments, not least because they may be more flexible and able to adapt and experiment than states are. This highlights the dilemmas that ecology presents to traditional notions of security. If security is understood as pro - tecting existing arrangements from threatening changes then it may slow or obstruct new modes of doing things rather than act to facilitate the ecologically inspired innovations that the Anthropocene analysis shows are crucially necessary if societies are to flourish in the new rapidly changing circumstances now facing humanity.

Likewise, if the necessity of ending the fossil fuel era is taken seriously (Princen et al. 2015), which is a requirement if environmental change is to be slowed and a ‘safe operating space’ for humanity maintained, then traditional notions of national energy security, understood in terms of reliable reasonably priced sources of fossil fuels, have to be abandoned. Despite the Obama administration’s statements about climate change, traditional discussions of fuel supply frequently dominated energy security policy, heightening the political dilemmas that need attention (Nyman 2015). The rise of solar- and wind-generated electricity and the dramatic reduction in the price of energy they produce has partly undercut the power of the fossil fuel sectors in the US, but much further electrification of industrial and transportation sectors of the economy are needed if climate security is to become the primary policy concern.

These policy dilemmas are even more difficult for states that rely heavily on oil revenues for their national budgets. Saudi Arabia is only the most obvious case, where climate change-mandated restrictions on the use of petroleum will drastically alter national economies. What have to be secured in these cases are the economic innovations that allow states to build post-fossil fuel economies. For states without such strategies it is easy to portray international climate negotiations as a security threat insofar as such measures will undermine the economic activities of the state. Climate change policy might then be seen as a national security threat, something that would then lead to diplomatic strategies to slow international arrangements to deal with climate change. The political, economic and subsequently humanitarian difficulties facing Venezuela after the collapse of oil prices in 2014 is an object lesson in why planning for a post-petroleum world is a necessity.

The alternative, increasingly researched and discussed by scientists and policy scholars, is the possibility of trying to artificially manipulate climate by techniques of climate engineering or ‘geoengineering’ the atmosphere to reduce the intensity of environmental change (National Research Council 2015). The most obvious way of doing this is to try to mimic the effect of volcanic eruptions. Large eruptions often loft sulphate aerosols high into the atmosphere and have a cooling effect on the Earth when they do so. Spraying sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere could, at least in theory, have similar effects, masking the effects of global warming by

538

S . D A L B Y

Williams, P. D., & McDonald, M. (Eds.). (2018). Security studies : An introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from monash on 2020-05-26 14:57:06.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

8. T

ay lo

r &

F ra

nc is

G ro

up . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

reflecting sunlight back into space before it hits the ground or oceans. Critics have numerous objections to such proposals (Hamilton, C. 2013), not least the fact that it would be very hard to predict in advance what effects this might have on weather systems in particular places, or what might happen if once started such a programme was to be abruptly halted for some reason.

For security scholars, the potential armed conflicts that might erupt should one state accuse another of causing damage from storms of agricultural disruptions because of drought caused by a unilateral geoengineering initiative are a key source of concern. For environmentalists horrified at yet further manipulations of the Earth system, such initiatives are anathema. For those engineers worried that conventional environmental policies, including the Paris agreements, are nowhere close to adequate policies to deal with the likely disruptions of the Earth system in the next stage of the Anthropocene, humanity may have no choice but to experiment with such extreme measures if time is to be gained to allow other innovations to eventually deal with the climate crisis (Keith 2013).

z Anthropocene security The Anthropocene thus raises some fundamental questions about how we should now understand security. Crucially, assumptions of a stable context for humanity can no longer be taken for granted. Human actions are changing the world, both directly, through such processes as landscape change, urbanization and global fishing fleet activities, and indirectly in terms of climate change. Once the Anthropocene insights are taken into account it is clear that novel notions of security are needed if humanity is to thrive in the long run and individual states are going to adjust to rapidly changing circumstances.

In light of the Paris Agreement, this all means that security has to now be under - stood both as a matter of maintaining states as reasonably functional entities and simultaneously as agents of change in terms of building adaptable economies that don’t burn fossil fuels or destroy other ecological things that will be needed by future generations. More than this, the Anthropocene makes it clear that humans are much more interconnected both with each other and with the natural world than convent - ional notions of separate sovereign states usually suggest. The rich and powerful parts of our species are making profoundly important decisions about the future of the planet and security strategies need to work this simple but key insight into both how we study security and how security policies are formulated.

However much nationalist politicians might like to pretend that we live in relatively sealed boxes where borders can prevent threats from abroad threatening us, the Anthropocene makes it clear that, as with globalization and economics, the natural world impinges on us, and us on it, much more profoundly than these simple cartographies of separation suggest. What is also clear is that policies based on separation, on reimposing borders in attempts to deal with the consequences of rapid change, are likely to make things worse, and numerous people more insecure. Instead, policies that develop flexible modes of adaptation that take the fate of poor and marginal peoples seriously are a key part of security planning in the dynamic interconnected world that comprises the age of the Anthropocene.

539

E N V I R O N M E N T A L C H A N G E

Williams, P. D., & McDonald, M. (Eds.). (2018). Security studies : An introduction. Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from monash on 2020-05-26 14:57:06.

C op

yr ig

ht ©

2 01

8. T

ay lo

r &

F ra

nc is

G ro

up . A

ll rig

ht s

re se

rv ed

540