Global Environmental Change 13 (2003) 7–17
Security and climate change
Jon Barnett*
School of Anthropology, Geography and Environmental Studies, University of Melbourne, Vic. Melbourne 3010, Australia
Abstract
Despite it being the most studied and arguably most profound of global environmental change problems, there is relatively little
research that explores climate change as a security issue. This paper systematically explores the range of possible connections
between climate change and security, including national security considerations, human security concerns, military roles, and a
discussion of the widely held assumption that climate change may trigger violent conﬂict. The paper explains the ways in which
climate change is a security issue. It includes in its discussion issues to do with both mitigation and adaptation of climate change.
r 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Climate change; National security; Human security; Conﬂict
1. Introduction: delimiting security
That environmental problems can become security
problems is now well recognised in policy, including
United States foreign policy. Surprisingly, despite
climate change being the most prominent and beststudied
of the suite of environmental change problems,
it has thus far received little systematic analysis as a
security issue (for partial connections see Brown, 1989;
Edwards, 1999; Rahman, 1999; Swart, 1996; van Ireland
et al., 1996; Wilson, 1983). This paper systematically
explores the range of possible connections between
climate change and security, including national security
considerations, human security concerns, military roles,
and a discussion of the widely held assumption that
climate change may trigger violent conﬂict. The paper
explains the ways in which climate change is a security
issue. It includes in its discussion issues to do with both
mitigation and adaptation of climate change.
‘Security’ in a general sense is the condition of being
protected from or not exposed to danger. It has
historically been concerned with safety and certainty
from contingency (Dower, 1995). Thus Soroos (1997)
deﬁnes security as ‘‘the assurance people have that they
will continue to enjoy those things that are most
important to their survival and well-being’’ (p. 236).
Depending on who is to be secured, and how environmental
change—and what sorts of changes—threatens
them, environmental change can be considered as a
security issue. However, a question as fundamental as
‘which environmental problems can be considered
security issues?’ has vexed environmental security
scholarship (Barnett and Dovers, 2001; Shaw, 1996).
Following this deﬁnition of security, climate change is
a security issue for some nation-states, communities and
individuals. It is a problem that is complex in origin and
has uncertain impacts. In the case of atoll-countries such
as Tuvalu or Kiribati, for example, there is widespread
agreement that climate change and associated sea-level
rise threatens the long-term ability of people to remain
living on their islands (Barnett and Adger, 2001; Nurse
and Sem, 2001; Rahman, 1999; Watson, 2000). In this
respect it is the most serious form of environmental
change and the most serious security problem that these
countries face. The President of the Federated States of
Micronesia has put this bluntly: ‘‘sea-level rise and other
related consequences of climate change are grave
security threats to our very existence as homelands
and nation-states.’’ (Falcam, 2001).
It is not just small island states which face climate
related security risks. It poses signiﬁcant risks to the
livelihoods, culture and health of many millions of
people in many different social and ecological and
contexts; consider Inuit communities living in the Arctic
circle where snow cover is less predictable and thinner
ice sheets restricts hunting, families living on low-lying
deltas in Bangladesh increasingly prone to ﬂooding, and
people living in areas prone to invasion by malaria
*Corresponding author. Tel.: +61-3-8344-3786; fax: +61-3-8344-
4972.
E-mail address: jbarn@unimelb.edu.au (J. Barnett).
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PII: S 0 9 5 9 - 3 7 8 0 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 8 0 - 8
carrying mosquitoes as a function of changed temperature
and rainfall regimes.
So, climate change is a security issue for certain
communities and countries. Following on from this, in
so far as its failure to reduce emissions may spell the end
of the functionality of atoll-countries, the displacement
of peoples from their homelands, and increased disease
and mortality, then the UNFCCC is a critically
important security treaty.
Advancing this argument that climate change is a
security issue, this paper aims to explore in greater detail
the connections between climate change and security. It
does this by following an heuristic guide to the broader
environment and security literature to assess the array of
linkages between the particular problem of climate
change and security (Fig. 1). It discusses in turn the
origins of the idea that climate change is a security issue,
its national security dimensions, the widely held
assumption that climate change may trigger violent
conﬂict, its implications for the military, the risks it
presents to human security, and the utility of understanding
climate change as a security issue in these ways.
2. Redeﬁning security and climate change
Security is a multifaceted concept. The national
referent dominates discussions of security, large scale
violent conﬂict is the concern that receives the most
attention from policymakers, and developing military
capability to respond to possible violent conﬂicts
consumes large amounts of public resources: an average
of 2.9% of every nation’s Gross Domestic Product was
spent on defence expenditure in 1996 (UNDP, 1998).
However alternative risks to security and alternative
referent objects (such as humans) are increasingly being
considered. One of these risks is environmental change.
Climate change, however, has received little attention in
this process (but see van Ireland et al., 1996; Rahman,
1999).
The beginnings of a climate change—security discourse
can be traced This Endangered Planet (Falk,
1971). Falk outlined what he called ‘the ﬁrst law of
ecological politics’ which is strikingly relevant for the
issue of climate change adaptation, namely: ‘‘there exists
an inverse relationship between the interval of time
available for adaptive change and the likelihood and
intensity of violent conﬂict, trauma, and coercion
accompanying the process of adaptation’’ (p. 353). This
is a truism of contemporary climate change research: the
faster the rate of change, the less time to adapt and the
more ‘dangerous’ climate impacts are likely to be.
Lester Brown’s Redeﬁning National Security (Brown,
1977) was very inﬂuential in forging the links between
climate change and security. Its discussion particularly
focused on food security, a subject which has subsequently
received considerable attention from climate
impacts researchers (Murdiyarso, 2000; Parry et al.,
1999; Sanchez, 2000; Wilkie et al., 1999). Brown argued
that armed forces are incapable of meeting the
challenges posed by climate change, suggesting that
disarmament and budgetary reallocations were important
policy responses. Six years later Wilson similarly
argued that military responses and nation-centred
Realpolitik would not deliver solutions to climate
change. An American, Wilson’s argument that ‘‘sustainable
security for this country rests crucially on an active
and creative participation in the politics of the world
predicament [of environmental change]’’ seems, in
retrospect, extremely prescient.
The publication of Our Common Future in 1987
marked the beginning of the ofﬁcial use of the term
‘environmental security’. By 1989 the argument that
environmental change was a security issue for nations
and people was increasingly made in both environmental
and security journals. The thawing of relations
between NATO and the former USSR, and the sudden
fall of the Berlin Wall explains this expansion in the
environmental security literature: conventional understandings
of security were becoming less relevant, and
environmental concerns were increasingly in the forefront
of public concerns (Dalby, 1992). According to
Smil, environmental security has now replaced the
threat of global nuclear warfare as it shares two
characteristics: both are global in reach and the effects
of both could be highly devastating (Smil, 1997). Indeed,
the landmark international Toronto Conference in
1988—the ﬁrst international meeting of scientists and
national policymakers to highlight the dangers of
climate change—was called The Changing Atmosphere:
Military rolesEnvironmental conflicts
Redefining security
National security
Human security
Fig. 1. A guide to environment-security linkages.
J. Barnett / Global Environmental Change 13 (2003) 7–178
Implications for Global Security. Perhaps overly dramatic,
the conference concluded that: ‘‘humanity is
conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive
experiment whose ultimate consequences could
be second only to a global nuclear war’’. Subsequent
papers which have considered climate change as a
security issue include: Brown (1989), Brown and Kane
(1994), Edwards (1996, 1999), Ehrlich and Ehrlich
(1991), Gleick (1992), Homer-Dixon (1991), Lipschutz
and Holdren (1990), Mathews (1989), Myers (1994),
Page (2000), Rowlands (1991) and Westing (1989).
3. National security and climate change
The potential impacts of climate change on nations
has been considered as a national security issue. Climate
change ﬁgures in the United States’ National Security
Strategy (NSS), although in at times incoherent ways as
in the 1996 NSS which countenanced the possibility that
there might be armed competition between nations for
‘‘dwindling reserves of uncontaminated air’’ (Clinton,
1996, p. 26).
Because sovereignty over delineated territory is the
material substrata of national security, then physical
processes such as sea-level rise pose substantial security
risks: for example a 45 cm rise in sea-level will
potentially result in a loss of 10.9% of Bangladesh’s
territory, forcing some 5.5 million people to relocate
(IPCC, 2001). Equally severe are the risks to small
islands as a result of as rising seas and increasing climate
variability. However, long before evacuation the socioeconomic
impacts of global warming on islands may be
‘‘so profound that they dwarf any strategic issue
currently confronting a major peacetime economy’’
(Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2000, p. 4).
National security also has an internal dimension in
that it is partly a function of state legitimacy. Governments
in states where the material well-being of people is
highly variable to external forces such as changing terms
of trade, or where material well being is in decline, tend
to be relatively more unstable, and the country relatively
more prone to internal violent conﬂict (Rapkin and
Avery, 1986). There is some analysis that suggests that
this may be the case for exogenous environmental
shocks as well, although it should be noted that most of
the time most states manage environmental disasters
without political repercussions (Hauge and Ellingsen,
2001). Climate change may have many other indirect
negative effects that can undermine the legitimacy of
governments, it may: undermine individual and collective
economic livelihood; affect human health through
reduced availability of freshwater and food, and by
exposing people to new disease vectors; undermine state
wealth and military capability; and exacerbate inequalities
between people.
The impacts of climate change will have ﬁnancial
costs, and in some cases these are sufﬁciently large to
justify understanding climate change as a security issue.
Consider, for example, Hoegh-Guldberg et al.’s (2000)
estimate that coral bleaching will reduce future GDP by
some 40–50% by 2020 in smaller Paciﬁc islands,
remembering that these losses are those expected to
occur only as a result of coral bleaching and its knockon
effects. Further, the World Bank estimates the losses
due to climate change in Kiribati to be in the order of
17–34% of current GDP by 2050 (an absolute loss
rather than a reduction in GDP growth) (World Bank,
2000a, p. 7).
Measures implemented to reduce greenhouse emissions
will also impose costs to national economies. It is
US President George Bush’s assumptions about the cost
of reducing emissions and about lost competitive
advantage that apparently underlie US reticence on
the Kyoto Protocol. Similarly, the Australian Government
argued that the Kyoto Protocol would particularly
adversely affect Australia’s economy and so that
country’s ﬁnal Kyoto target was a 108% change above
1990 levels of emissions. But it is the oil exporting
countries who have arguably the greatest to fear from
the Kyoto Protocol. Most models suggest that policies
to implement the Kyoto Protocol (using a carbon tax as
a proxy for response measures) will increase oil prices
and reduce demand in developed countries (which
account for 60% of world oil consumption), thereby
driving down global oil demand, prices and therefore
projected revenues for oil exporters. For example, a
0.45% decline in projected GDP in OPEC countries for
2010 is forecast by Bernstein et al. (1999) (see Barnett,
2001a for a fuller discussion of this issue). However,
these costs of implementing response measures,
although experienced differentially among states, are
nevertheless small relative to the expected costs of
impacts, and so cannot be said to constitute a problem
of such a magnitude to warrant considering them as a
national security issue.
Finally, given the dominant focus of national security
policy on violent conﬂict and transborder incursions, the
issue of whether, and how climate change may stimulate
conﬂicts and increase migration is important. These
issues will be discussed in the following section, however
sufﬁce to say now that violent conﬂict is a security issue
for those states who are directly involved, and may
indirectly affect other states who may choose to or be
obliged to intervene as negotiators or peacekeepers, and
through disruptions to trade.
4. Climate change, violent conﬂict, and migration
It is necessary to be cautious about the links between
climate change and conﬂict. Much of the analogous
J. Barnett / Global Environmental Change 13 (2003) 7–17 9
literature on environmental conﬂicts is more theoretically
than empirically driven, and motivated by Northern
theoretical and strategic interests rather than
informed by solid empirical research (Barnett, 2000;
Gleditsch, 1998). This in part reﬂects the long-standing
difﬁculties in ﬁnding meaningful evidence of the
determinants of violent conﬂict and war at international
and subnational levels.1
On the basis of existing environment-conﬂict research
there is simply insufﬁcient evidence and too much
uncertainty to make anything other that highly speculative
claims about the effect of climate change on
violent conﬂict, a point that both policy makers and
climate scientists should not lose sight of. Ultimately, as
Baechler argues, there is a need for more ‘‘elaborate case
studies’’ which are linked with other studies of conﬂict
that deal with interacting ‘‘crucial issues such as poverty,
ethnicity and state’’ (1999b, p. 108). Only then can
assessments of utility for policy be delivered. Three
criteria can be used to frame and scale such a research
programme: political scale (between or below states); the
nature of governance; and the nature of environmental
(as opposed to resource) changes affected by climate
change. These will now be discussed in turn.
4.1. Political scale
Despite the ambiguity of past environment-conﬂict
research, there is common agreement that there are links
(if vague) between environmental change and violent
conﬂict. However, it has not been shown that environmental
factors are the only, or even important factors
leading conﬂict (Homer-Dixon and Blitt, 1998; Baechler,
1999c). Other factors such as poverty and inequities
between groups, the availability of weapons, ethnic
tensions, external indebtedness, institutional resilience,
state legitimacy and its capacity and willingness to
intervene seem to matter as much if not more than
environmental change per se (see Baechler, 1999b).
Importantly, it has been comprehensively demonstrated
that environmental factors do not, and nor are
they likely to trigger open conﬂict between nation-states
(Baechler, 1999a; Homer-Dixon and Percival, 1996;
Wolf, 1999). So, except in the case of a low probability/
high impact event such as widespread loss of land as a
result of melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet
(causing sea-level to rise by some 4–6 m), climate change
impacts are unlikely to be a factor in violent conﬂicts
between states (van Ireland et al., 1996 are in
agreement). This applies equally to climate change
mitigation, where it seems extremely unlikely that
violence will erupt between states over disagreements
about greenhouse gas emission reductions, although
changes in the political economy of energy resources
may change the nature of competition between states.
Conﬂicts in which environmental change appears to be a
contributing factor tend to be within rather than
between states, and it is at this sub-state level that a
climate change-conﬂict research agenda would most
proﬁtably focus.
4.2. The nature of governance
The political and economic structure of the state is
critical in preventing environmental conﬂicts. Industrialised
economies partake of a global division of labour
and resources which affects a global division of
environmental degradation as environmental externalities
are transferred to developing countries, so they
have tended to experience less environmental damage in
the past 50 years. Also, up to a certain level of mean per
capita income, developed countries tend to have lower
levels of pollution, although as important as increased
wealth is an equitable distribution of power within states
(Torras and Boyce, 1998). In addition, it can be argued
that the levels of wealth in the industrialised world
allows for institutions that provide stability and
resilience to environmental change. Well ﬁnanced
government, the insurance industry, transport and
communications infrastructure, a degree of democratic
participation, and a base level of personal afﬂuence all
seem to help hedge against turmoil in the face of
environmental stress (Barnett, 2001b). Finally, trade
between similarly afﬂuent liberal-democracies assists in
the transfer of goods and services that help enhance
resilience and decrease the likelihood of crises within
states. So, relative to developed countries, developing
countries must contend with more potentially conﬂictinducing
environmental changes. This is not to say,
however, that severe climate impacts, particularly lowprobability/high
impact events such as slowing of the
oceanic thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic,
could not ultimately be a source of destabilisation in the
developed world in the future.
‘Strong states’ with a high trade/GDP ratio tend to be
less prone to internal conﬂicts. Their capacity to foster
collective action and identity mitigates against debilitating
conﬂicts among heterogeneous groups motivated by
either ‘greed’ or ‘grievance’ (Collier, 2000; de Soysa,
2001). They have effective administrative hierarchies
and they control the legitimate use of force, which helps
manage potential internal challengers. They also have
the capacity to mediate impending conﬂicts before they
turn violent. Both democracies and strongly authoritarian
regimes appear to experience relatively less interstate
conﬂicts (Eckstein and Gurr, 1975). Strong and
1
Violent conﬂict is deﬁned here as crises between groups leading to
deaths, a category short of war which is deﬁned as a crises leading to
more than 1,000 deaths (Wallensteen and Sollenberg, 1997). This ﬁts
with Singer’s (1972) typology of conﬂict escalation, starting from
competition, rising to contention, then rivalry, conﬂict, crises, and then
violent conﬂict and ultimately war (Singer, 1972).
J. Barnett / Global Environmental Change 13 (2003) 7–1710
stable states are also more capable of managing
environmental degradation and change, thus Hauge
and Ellingsen (2001) ﬁnd that there is a (albeit weak)
positive correlation between state regime type, environmental
quality, and internal conﬂict. It is states undergoing
marked economic and political transitions that are
relatively more prone to internal violent conﬂict and
state failure (Esty et al., 1999).
There is uncertainty about the extent to which—and
how—poverty and inequality are factors in violent
internal conﬂicts (Boyce et al., 1999; Gleditsch, 2001).
Most researchers agree that relative and absolute
poverty are important variables, however Collier
(2000) argues that this is less to do with resistances to
poverty per se, and more to do with the way inequality
can be discursively used to mobilise large numbers of
people in support of those seeking widespread support
in their quest for power. Regardless, in addition to
focussing at the intra-state level, a climate changeconﬂict
research agenda would most proﬁtably focus on
those transition economies and transition democracies
where income inequalities are high.
4.3. Environmental change: scarcity or abundance?
Throughout the 1990s an argument was developed,
and widely accepted, that scarcity of renewable environmental
resources can contribute to violent conﬂicts
within states (Baechler, 1999a; Homer-Dixon, 1991;
Homer-Dixon, 1999; Kaplan, 1994). This argument has
since been extensively and persuasively critiqued on
methodological, theoretical and policy grounds to the
point where it is adhered to by only an ardent few (who
seem increasingly like the small but ardent climate
sceptics) (Barnett, 2000; Dalby, 1996; Deudney, 1991;
Collier, 2000; Gleditsch, 2001; Hartmann, 2001; Matthew
et al., 2001; de Soysa, 2001; Wolf, 1999). This is an
important point of departure which challenges the
prevailing discourse that climate change may trigger
violent conﬂict. The connections, if any, are more
complex than a simple climate change—scarcity—
conﬂict formulation.
It has recently been argued that it is the abundance of
natural resources, rather than their scarcity, that drives
conﬂict (Collier, 2000; de Soysa, 2000, 2001). Using
statistical modelling, de Soysa and Collier both ﬁnd
scarcity of renewable resources is not correlated with
political instability, nor is ethnic diversity. The issue is
not competition over scarce resources, but rather
competition to gain dominant control over substantial
income generating resources, or more equitable access to
the spoils of resource extraction.
A second important ﬁnding from this research
conﬁrms the ﬁndings of the State Failure Task Force
(Esty et al., 1999) that openness to trade reduces the
likelihood of civil conﬂict. De Soysa (2001) contends
that this is because openness to trade is associated with
bigger and better institutions of governance which are
necessary to mitigate and manage the impact on people
of ﬂuctuations in trade in ways that do not disrupt the
beneﬁts of trade. The implication of this is that
structural adjustment programs which liberalise trade
barriers may well promote peace, yet when ‘good
governance’ programmes affect a contraction in the size
of the state the result may be greater instability (Barnett,
2002; Chossudovsky, 1998).
If it is abundance rather than scarcity, and greed
rather than grievance that are factors in violent civil
conﬂict, then this raises substantial difﬁculties with the
assumption that climate change may trigger violent
conﬂicts. The impacts of climate change will for the
most part make renewable resources more scarce, yet if
scarcity does not play a role in violent conﬂict, then
nether will increased scarcity in a climate changed
future.
There may be other ways that climate change
contributes to future violent conﬂicts, but these are
highly uncertain and will operate through more complex
environmental and social process. For example climate
change may alter the supply of valuable forestry
resources on a global scale so that remaining stocks in
equatorial developing countries become more valuable,
increasing the commercial incentive to capture and
control them via the use of force. In so far as the most
contested resources are metals and gems, however,
climate change is unlikely to affect a shift in global
supply and demand of these. It may also be possible that
as climate change retards growth in climate sensitive
economies this may lead to greater frustration with
political systems unable to deliver jobs, and repeated
failure to do so could cause political instability and
possibly violent conﬂict. Finally, it may be that climate
change stimulates more migration which can be a factor
in violent conﬂict.
4.4. Migration, conﬂict and climate change
The movements of people and subsequent inter-group
rivalry has been a factor in many so called ‘environmental
conﬂicts’ (see Baechler, 1999a; Gizewski and
Homer-Dixon, 1998; Goldstone, 2001; Howard and
Homer-Dixon, 1998; Kl.otzli, 1994; Percival and HomerDixon,
2001; Swain, 1993). The point of contention in
the literature is the extent to which environmental
change is a factor in migration decisions. People rarely
migrate for environmental reasons alone. A range of
factors including economic opportunity operate in
unison, and these are in ﬂux as a consequence of the
economic and cultural effects of globalisation. A
sensitive understanding of the way climate change may
induce more migration in any particular place requires
understanding the way it will interact with other factors,
J. Barnett / Global Environmental Change 13 (2003) 7–17 11
and the ways these factors may change as climate change
will have uneven impacts on even proximate social and
ecological systems.
To say that sometimes the inﬂux of migrants into new
areas can be a signiﬁcant factor in violent conﬂict is
relatively uncontentious. Nevertheless, by no means all,
indeed very few, large scale migrations end in conﬂict, as
Goldstone observes:
the crucial element is not migration per se; economic
migration often leads to substantial beneﬁts for both
migrants and the destination country. What appears
to matter for conﬂict are those cases wherein
migration leads to clashes of national identity
(2001, p. 96).
Identity conﬂicts are no way natural outcomes of
inter-group mixing, rather they are the product of
political forces seeking to gain power or defend against
perceived threats to power. Group identity is socially
constructed and malleable (Walker, 1993). It is therefore
less the movement of people and more the political and
institutional responses to that movement that matters
most in conﬂicts in which immigration is a factor. The
receptiveness of leaders of both immigrant and host
groups is very important for peaceful adaptation and
settlement. Prior negotiation may well pave the way for
peaceful and sustainable relocations.
So, large migrations have at times lead to conﬂict, and
large migrations are likely as a consequence of climate
change. If they are to occur at all, climate-induced
conﬂicts are most likely as a result of migration (van
Ireland et al., 1996; Rahman, 1999). In the ﬁrst instance
it will be climatic extremes and increasing climate
variability that will enhance migration as soils are
degraded, water supplies are contaminated and depleted,
housing, livestock and infrastructure are destroyed,
insurance costs rise and lives are lost. While
communities generally adapt and are generally resilient
to extreme events, climate change may stretch the limits
of adaptability and resilience, making migration an
attractive if not the only option to preserve livelihoods
and quality of life.
Sea-level rise is very likely to induce large scale
migration in the longer-term. According to Nicholls
et al. (1999) by 2080 the ﬂood risk for people living on
islands will be 200 times greater than in a situation
where there was no global warming, by which time up to
70% of the world’s coastal wetlands could be lost.
Therefore, to avoid climate-induced migration and the
subsequent risk of violent conﬂict, slowing the rate and
ultimately reducing the amount of greenhouse emissions,
as well as enhancing adaptive capacity is essential.
It is likely that for those social-ecological systems that
are highly sensitive to climate change existing avenues of
migration will be explored ﬁrst. In developing countries
planning for enhanced internal migration and international
immigration is required given that they are more
vulnerable to the impacts of climate change and most
existing migration is within and between developing
countries. Thus many of the 5.5 million people living on
the Ganges Delta in Bangladesh who will be forced to
relocate with a 45 cm rise in sea-level may seek to move
inland within Bangladesh, but a signiﬁcant number may
seek to move to neighbouring India and Pakistan—and
previous migration of this kind has been a factor in
violence in the region (Swain, 1996). Existing patterns of
‘environmental refugees’ may also be indicative of the
places from where climate migrants might emerge as
these represent movements from areas already under
environmental stress, and therefore susceptible to
further stress due to climate change.2
For those countries already dealing with large inﬂuxes
of migrants, and for those likely to receive increasing
numbers of migrants as a consequence of climate
change, forward looking assessments and forward
planning for climate immigrants should be a policy
priority. Throughout the world immigration policies
require rethinking. Closing out immigrants may be of
marginal effectiveness and, particularly for developed
countries, morally difﬁcult to sustain since it is their
emissions that will have caused the problem. A
potentially more effective and respectable policy option
would be controlled acceptance and resettlement of
immigrants and promotion of racial tolerance domestically.
Carefully timed acceptance of immigrants from
climate sensitive areas from an early stage can ease
adaptation for immigrants and host communities alike.
The challenges to immigration policy are borne out in
the case of the Paciﬁc Islands. It is incumbent on
Australia, New Zealand and the United States to
prepare for greater numbers of Paciﬁc Island immigrants
as these countries are capable of accommodating
larger numbers of people, they already have substantial
populations of Paciﬁc Islanders, and they are in no small
way responsible for climate change. The Prime Minister
of Tuvalu, Ionata Ionata said in February 2000 that
‘‘Tuvaluans are seeking a place they can permanently
migrate to should the high tides eventually make our
homes uninhabitable’’ (Fiji Times February 23). In June
2000, New Zealand said it would accommodate Tuvalu
citizens should they be required to leave their homelands
due to climate change. However, not all Paciﬁc Island
countries are talking about refuge, the Marshall Islands
publicly rejected the topic during interviews at the sixth
Conference of Parties in 2000 (Fraser, 2000), and
Kiribati has consistently refused to consider it, with
climate change ofﬁcer Nakibae Teuatabo saying: ‘‘I
think of emigration as being the stage where you know
2
Environmental refugees is a contentious term, see MacKellar et al.,
1998, and Lonergan and Swain, 1999. For this reason this discussion
avoids the term ‘refugee’ as much as possible.
J. Barnett / Global Environmental Change 13 (2003) 7–1712
you’re losing the battle. We’re nowhere near that’’ (in
Pearce, 2000, p. 47).
To conclude, further research is required before
conﬁdent predictions that climate change will induce
violence can be made. A research programme looking to
empirically investigate climate-conﬂict linkages in greater
detail would be most effectively targeted at the substate
level in countries where governance systems are in
transition, levels of inequality are high, social-ecological
systems are highly sensitive to climate change, and
which have a history of large scale migration.
5. The military and climate change
As the organisations principally responsible for
national security, and commanding a large share of
public resources for that purpose, the world’s militaries
will increasingly have to manage the challenges of
climate change. Militaries are major emitters of greenhouse
gases. A crude indicator of the scale of this can be
gained from taking the share of a country’s GNP spent
on its military as representative of the military’s share of
that country’s overall greenhouse gas emissions (assuming
military emissions per unit of GNP are the same as
the national mean of emissions per unit of GNP).
Following this procedure: military expenditure was
11.7% of 1995 GNP in the Russian Federation, so the
Russian armed forces emits roughly 185 million metric
tons of CO2; military expenditure was 3% of 1995 GNP
in the United Kingdom, so the UK armed forces emit
some 17 million metric tons of CO2; and military
expenditure was 3.8% of 1995 GNP in the United
States, so by this reckoning, the US armed forces emit
some 210 million metric tons of CO2 (data from World
Bank, 2000b). Indeed, worldwide military activity may
be responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than
all of the United Kingdom. In this respect, militaries are
a problem rather than a solution to environmental
insecurity.
Recognising the growing need for national governments
to reduce greenhouse emissions, a number of
armed forces are voluntarily becoming involved in
greenhouse gas reduction programmes. The Australian
Department of Defence has joined the Australian
Greenhouse Challenge and is seeking to cut its greenhouse
gas emissions by 13% by 2004. In February 2001,
the United Nations Environment Programme, The US
Environmental Protection Authority and the US Department
of Defence hosted a conference on ‘The
Importance of Military Organisations in Stratospheric
Ozone Protection and Climate Protection’ which was
attended by representatives from more than 35 countries
and sought to share experiences of greenhouse gas
reduction within the armed forces. The US Department
of Defence claims to have reduced its greenhouse gas
emissions by 20% between 1990 and 1996 (and so could
well give lessons to other Government agencies) (DOD,
2000). Nevertheless, with more than 250,000 trucks,
22,000 aircraft and hundreds of ships, a smaller US
military would yield far greater reductions in greenhouse
emissions than its ecological modernisation (DOD,
2000).
Apart from the emissions arising from military
activity, military expenditure displaces spending on
environmental and social goals. For example, an April
1997 press release from the Australian Ministry for
Defence gave the following annual fuel costs for
Australia’s various weapons platforms: F-111 aircraft—A$8
million; F/A-18 aircraft—A$19 million;
DDG destroyers—A$19 million; and FFG frigates—
A$15 million. The total annual fuel bill for operating
Australia’s eight major weapons platforms in 1997 was
A$48.6 million; to compare, Federal funding for renewable
energy research and development in 1998 was A$16
million (Parer, 1998).
Should climate change have drastic impacts militaries
may become involved in conﬂicts and peacekeeping.
Indeed, this central to the United State Department of
Defense’s environmental security policy:
DOD’s view of ‘environmental security’ [also comprises]
y understanding where environmental conditions
contribute to instability and where the
environment ﬁts into the war and peace equation;
bringing defense-related concerns to the development
of national security; [and] studying how defense
components can be used as instruments of US global
environmental policy (p. 133 of the 1996 Environmental
Change and Security Project Report).
However, such a reactive position, and the subsequent
resources consumed in that quest are unlikely to provide
environmental security.
6. Human security
That climate change poses risks to human welfare is
relatively uncontentious in both climate science and
climate policy circles. People living on atolls, on coasts,
in areas affected by El Nino, in drought-prone areas and
arctic regions are all likely to experience negative
impacts from climate change. It is not only the longterm
change in mean conditions that is the problem, but
also the possibility of increasingly variable (less predictable)
climate, increasingly severe and frequent
extreme events, increasing adjustments in institutions,
and the possibility of violent conﬂicts which may render
welfare and livelihoods less secure. Security in this sense
is human security.
The United Nations Development Program (UNDP)
propose the concept of human security to assist in the
J. Barnett / Global Environmental Change 13 (2003) 7–17 13
framing of development and justice issues, seeing it as
being:
concerned with how people live and breathe in a
society, how freely they exercise their many choices,
how much access they have to market and social
opportunities—and whether they live in conﬂict or
peace.
Human security is not a concern with weapons—it is
a concern with human life and dignity (UNDP, 1994,
pp. 22–23).
This is clearly germane to the impacts of climate
change on individual and community welfare and
livelihoods.
Environmental insecurity in this context is the double
vulnerability of people that arises when underdevelopment
and poverty are compounded by environmental
change (Barnett, 2001b). For example, an ‘average’
woman from the Marshall Islands has a life expectancy
fourteen years less than an Australian woman, her child
is thirteen times more likely to die as an infant compared
to an Australian child, and she earns only 8% of her
Australian counterpart (UNDP, 1998, 1999). There are
therefore clear inequities and injustices between these
two countries regardless of climate impacts. However,
Australians produces ﬁfty times more greenhouse gases
than Marshall Islanders, yet a meter rise in sea-level
would subsume 80% of the Marshall Islands, whereas a
much smaller amount of Australia’s surface is likely to
be ﬂooded (Commonwealth of Australia, 1997; Holthus
et al., 1992; Republic of the Marshall Islands, 2000).3
Australia has much greater wealth as a nation, as do its
people, giving them the resources to adapt at some
economic but little other social cost. The difference is
that for an Australian, climate change is a problem of
adaptation, for a Marshall Islander the problem is a
matter of survival: they are insecure. The are therefore
discrepancies in responsibility for and vulnerability to
climate change, and this underlies the dialectical nature
of human security.
7. Conclusions: problems and possibilities for a climate–
security discourse
It is clear that climate change is a security problem for
some states and people. But, what does it serve us to
speak of climate change in these terms and what are the
implications of doing so? This is an important question
that has been repeatedly taken up in the broader
environmental security literature, although with little
speciﬁc reference to the problem of climate change. The
crux of the problem is that national security discourse
and practice tends to appropriate all alternative security
discourses no matter how antithetical. It absorbs and
then militarises and nationalises other security problems
and referents in ways that neutralise their efﬁcacy whilst
maintaining the power of the security establishment
(Brock, 1997; Dalby, 1994; Deudney, 1991). This has
been the experience of environmental security.
Environmental security was originally written with
the intention of exposing the inadequacy of militarised
practices of security, the porous nature of sovereignty in
the face of environmental change, and to elevate
environmental problems from the level of ‘low politics’
to ‘high politics’ so that states would commit as much
energy and resources to address environmental problems
as they do to other security problems. However,
the result has not been the trading off of military
security for environmental security, or increased resources
and energy to environmental security. Instead,
environmental change problems have been militarised;
the emphasis has been placed on environmental change
as cause of violent conﬂict rather than human insecurity;
and on exogenous environmental threats to the state for
which unspeciﬁed Others were seen to be responsible, as
opposed to attending to domestic causes of environmental
change (Barnett, 2001b).
So, understanding climate change as a security issue
risks making it a military rather than a foreign policy
problem and a sovereignty rather than global commons
problem. This may help justify further securing of the
unsustainable livelihoods of the North in the way of
George Bush Snr at the United Nations Conference on
Development in 1992, and George W Bush over the
Kyoto Protocol. It may also lead to increased attention
on securing territory against undesirable knock-on
effects of climate impacts such as environmental
refugees, and on preparing for conﬂicts in important
trading areas in the way of the formation of the US
rapid Deployment Force after the OPEC oil crises of the
mid-1970s.
Despite these problems with any potential climatechange
security discourse, it may nevertheless have some
utility. Security communicates a certain gravitas that is
arguably necessary in climate change policy. In that
climate change is a security problem for certain groups,
identifying it as such suggests that it is an issue that
warrants a policy response commensurate in effort if not
in kind with war. A critical and ambiguous concept in
the UNFCCC is its reference to ‘dangerous’ levels of
climate change. Security encapsulates danger much
better than concepts like sustainability, vulnerability or
adaptation, and it offers a framework in which danger
can be recast as widespread risks to welfare and (in the
case of small island states) sovereignty. Security can also
serve as an integrative concept which links local (human
security), national (national security) and global (international
security) levels of environmental change and
response. It also integrates mitigation and adaptation as3
This ﬁgure for Australia includes emissions from land clearing.
J. Barnett / Global Environmental Change 13 (2003) 7–1714
both are essential to security from climate risks. Finally,
understanding processes that render insecurity, of which
climate change is an important but not isolated factor,
brings to the fore issues of justice and the global
political-economy. Although it should not be overstated,
security addresses the possibility of violent social
upheaval, and it brings military expenditure and its
environmental impacts into the decision making frame-
work.
The ability of conventional national security discourse
and policy to appropriate climate change is a matter of
how climate security risks are understood, and who
talks about them. Through a grounding in the ﬁndings
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a
climate-change-security discourse could better resist
appropriation from conventional national security as
its key concerns will be rooted in respectable science
rather than conjecture. If used by IPCC scientists a
change-security discourse will have a legitimacy that
renders it less amenable to appropriation and rewriting
by conventional national security institutions. If such a
discourse downplayed and was cautious on the issue of
violent conﬂict and refugees, and if it pointed to the
justice issues that attend climate change insecurities,
then it might helpfully integrate science and policy and
usefully elucidate the nature of the ‘danger’ that the
UNFCCC ultimately seeks to avoid.
Acknowledgements
This paper was prepared as part of a Tyndall Centre
for Climate Change Research Visiting Fellowship in
conjunction with a New Zealand Science and Technology
Postdoctoral Fellowship. Thanks to Neil Adger and
Mike Hulme for helpful comments.
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