The securitization of the environment works to reinforce the squo – makes their impact inevitable

If any issue lends itself towards a critique of the ethical choices and limits of traditional approaches to security, it is environmental change. Until recently, the " environment- was not seen as an issue relevant to the study or practice of security, despite the obvious fact that the natural world provides the conditions for human existence. Where environmental issues are seen as relevant to security, these are often viewed through the lens of national security. This is the case even though ecological zones and national borders do not usually coincide, and even though unilateral state action is insufficient for responding to global environmental change. In discussions of the environment-security relationship, environmental issues are often viewed as relevant to the study and practice of security if triggering armed conflict or related threats to national sovereignty such as large-scale population displacement. At its most ethically perverse, measures to redress environmental change are viewed as threats to the economic security of states. This highlights a more general problem. if security is approached as the preservation of the status quo whether defined in terms of the territorial integrity of the state or the preservation of international order it becomes harder to respond effectively to environmental change worsened by taken-for-granted elements of national and international governance. Simply put, international economic and political governance arrangements (the neoliberal economic system and the interstate system) are failing in their capacity to arrest processes of environmental change at best, and, at worst, are driving these processes of global change. In many ways, then, environmental change represents something of an "easy" case for the global security framework developed in this book. Some environmental issues, and responses to them, can only be approached at the global level. And dominant national security discourses encourage inadequate and in some cases perverse responses to environmental change. However, dynamics of global environmental change do not necessarily represent the easy case for a cosmopolitan approach to security that they may initially suggest. Complex questions arise about whether a cosmopolitan approach can come to terms with obligations to future generations and other living beings; about how we might mobilize responses to global security threats in a world of states; and even about how the "environment" itself is understood and approached. And of course for many, linking security and the environment is fraught in a political sense, either because the language of security does not increase the urgency or priority attached to environmental issues ( McDonald 2012a; Waver 2011), or because it risks endorsing problematic actors and responses to issues of environmental change (see Deudney 1990; Kakonen 1994). This chapter tackles these issues directly, building a case for an approach to environmental change that focuses on the global level, that recognizes obligations to future generations and other living beings, and that emphasizes the responsibility that everyone has to act as global environmental stewards. This case for a global security perspective, however, is preceded by a discussion of the ethical assumptions and implications of attempts to link the environment and security in theory and in practice. Here we suggest the need for attention to how the "environment" itself is understood, and to the key question of whose security is seen as worth protecting or advancing in the context of environmental change in particular. In the latter section of the chapter we focus on global climate change in illustrating the utility of our global security perspective.