New CFR report

The Council on Foreign Relations published a new report by Joshua W. Busby a few days ago called "Climate Change and National Security - An Agenda for Action" (overview and full report). The special report focuses on implications for US national security and offers policy recommendations.

CNA Report

A group of retired admirals and generals from the US Military produced an interesting report for the Pentagon on climate change. The study argues that climate change poses a variety of serious threats to the national security of the US, and at the very least will be a "threat multiplier" exacerbating conflicts in already unstable regions.

The concept of security

At the request of the British Government, the UN Security Council debated climate change for the first time earlier in 2007.

Environmentalists and some policy-makers--including the British Foreign Secretary (who brought the topic to the Security Council)--tend to agree that it makes sense to frame climate change as a security issue. For political scientists and analysts this matter is more ambiguous. What is security from a conceptual and analytical perspective?

The traditional definition of security can be described as the absence of organized violence. There is much debate on whether the concept of security is widening and/or deepening. For example, Joseph Nye uses a wider definition: national security is the “absence of threat to major values.”

Rising sea levels, increased frequency and intensity of natural disasters and other effects of climate change may cost more human lives than some traditional security threats. Moreover, rising sea levels could destroy physical assets in coastal areas on a large scale, especially in poor countries which lack the economic capacity to adapt. Considering the potential loss of human lives and economic assets as a result of climate change, there is something to be said for a wider concept of security.

However, others argue that security and conflict should not be linked to climate change, as there is little empirical evidence establishing a clear link between climate change and conflict. It is also pointed out, that connecting conflicts such as the one in Darfur with climate change "lets tyrannical governments off the hook" too easily.

While the working group found a broader conception of security more convincing, the debate will continue.

More conceptual thinking on the definition of security can be found here.

BALDWIN, D.A. 2001, "The concept of security", Review of International Studies, vol. 23, no. 01, pp. 5-26.
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=73035
(excellent article by Princeton political scientist David Baldwin; gated version, but well worth obtaining)

SECURITY AS AN ANALYTICAL CONCEPT by Czesław Mesjasz
http://www.afes-press.de/pdf/Hague/Mesjasz_Security_concept.pdf
(publicly available)

Tarry, S. 1999, "Deepening and Widening: An Analysis of Security Definitions in the 1990s", Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, Fall 1999.
http://www.ciaonet.org/olj/jmss/jmss_1999/v2n1/jmss_v2n1c.html
(publicly available)

Climate Refugees - numbers by region

Table 1 of the article by Norman Myers (1993) Environmental Refugees in a Globally Warmed World published in Bioscience (accessible via JSTOR) contains an estimate of 150 million climate refugees by 2050.

Welcome

Welcome to this blog!

We, the members of the Climate Change and Security Student Working Group at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, will present the results of our bi-weekly meetings here. Our group members have backgrounds in economics, international relations, environmental studies, natural sciences and law.

We are concerned with the following core questions:

Is climate change "just" an environmental issue with economic implications or is it also a cause of national and international security problems? What are potential threat scenarios and consequences? What might be possible solutions and who will address this?

Our group started by discussing the meaning of the term security and whether the traditional narrow concept of security is still sufficient today. There will be more on this in a separate post.