Environmental securitization ensures the militarization of the environment

Ethical questions and debates loomed large over such attempts to broaden the security agenda. The attempts to broaden this agenda to include issues such as environmental change were driven by normative commitments to addressing such problems, underpinned by the idea that with their designation as security threats would conic increased political profile, attention, funding and priority for these " neglected" issues. Indeed authors advocating the "broadening" of security in this way frequently emphasized the opportunity costs of the billions of dollars spent by states on armies and tools of war relative to more important priorities such as official development assistance or renewable energy (Mathews 1989). It is no coincidence, in this sense, that a range of authors arguing for the redefinition of security to include environmental concerns were affiliated with environmental NGOs or think-tanks aimed at mobilizing responses to environmental change (see Hartmann 2009; McDonald 2013a). There is much that is intuitively appealing about the attempt to lift issues such as environmental change onto the security agenda as a means of challenging the traditional association of security with the state and war, not least given the problematic priorities underpinning this discourse of security. Yet, while working from assumptions about the mobilizing power of security, these accounts failed to reflect on the politics of security itself. As Daniel Deudney (1990) asked, is it wise to assume that "security" has this progressive effect; that promoting environmental issues to the realm of security won't bring with it a militarization of such problems and logics of exceptionalism? Such a failure to systematically examine what security does is problematic: it opens "broadeners" up to the criticism that theirs is a project that potentially invites illiberal political practices and institutions to hold sway over the management of pressing transnational political problems like climate change and environmental degradation. In a more fundamental sense, the "broadening" agenda also risks leaving security power and legitimacy where it is. There is a danger that without redefining who security is actually for, issues such as environmental change might come to be seen as security threats to the extent that they are solely understood as threats to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the nation-state. Not only might we fail to challenge the statism of contemporary global politics, but we risk encouraging perverse responses to problems such as environmental change. States might recognize climate change as a threat, but if such a response is oriented towards realist strategic concerns, states with relative self-sufficiency may build physical barriers (even walls) around their borders to protect against an influx of so-called " environmental refugees" a scenario anticipated in a 2003 Pentagon report on the national security implications of climate change (Schwartz and Randall 2003). These issues are discussed in more depth in Chapter 4. In our view, security ethics is best honoured by more fundamentally questioning the meaning, structure, and ends of security. If we simply add poverty, environmental change, or disease to the list of challenges to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the state, we leave other key constituent elements of security in place, and enable existing security providers to embrace and potentially co-opt this "broader agenda", blunting more radical critiques of the association of security and the state system. Indeed it is probably no coincidence that recognition of the "broader range of threats" to security has found its way in to security statements and agenda of existing institutional security providers.