Climate securitization is crucial to reaching a real solution

Widespread association of climate change with security means that in the most general, colloquial, sense climate change has already been ‘securitized’ – certainly in Europe and among many in the policy community. Early reports linking security and climate change were received with considerable skepticism as doomsday scenarios dealing with a remote future, but in a relatively short space of time the link has come much closer to being accepted as part of mainstream thinking. Key proponents have been the United Kingdom and the EU, as well as small island developing States in the Pacific. If, however, one applies to climate change the theoretical postulate of the Copenhagen School that securitization has not occurred until extraordinary measures have been adopted, this would suggest that climate change will not have been fully securitized until international security institutions, led by the UN Security Council, assume a lead role in the global policy response. The Council may have nudged closer to adopting a Chapter VII decision overtly on climate change by adopting a Presidential statement on the subject at its 2011 debate on climate change, and by the enthusiasm with which the United States appeared to participate in the debate.

If climate change were to be fully securitized and the Security Council to take a lead role in the global response to climate change mitigation and adaptation, we may well witness a far more streamlined and efficient response. We already know what needs to be done in terms of minimizing the rupture in the carbon cycle and adapting to the changes already in train. The governance problem with which the world is struggling is that of how to bring it about, particularly when the action required of wealthy countries is politically unpalatable to domestic constituencies, certainly within the timeframe needed to avert catastrophic environmental change.