The Energy-Climate Complex: Is Climate Change a National Security Issue?
Publisher: Issues in Science and Technology
Author(s): Richard A. Matthew
Date: 2013
The case for linking climate change and national security is robust but imperfect, and today there is a serious debate about whether it makes sense. Around the planet there is growing momentum to define climate change as a security issue and hence as an agenda-topping problem that deserves significant attention and resources. In December 2010, for example, while poised to start a two-year term on the United Nations Security Council, Germany announced its intention to push to have climate change considered as a security issue in the broadest sense of the term. Germany’s objective captures a sentiment that has been expressed in many venues, including several recent high-level U.S. national security documents. The May 2010 version of the National Security Strategy repeatedly groups together violent extremism, nuclear weapons, climate change, pandemic disease, and economic instability as security threats that require strength at home and international cooperation to address adequately. The February 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review links climate change to future conflict and identifies it as one of four issues in which reform is “imperative” to ensure national security. This sentiment has met resistance, however, and today there is a serious debate about whether linking climate change to security, and especially to national security, makes sense.