Framing climate change in terms of security wrecks mitigation efforts, leads to military intervention, and retrenches security

If we move to the different levels of securitisation, are some normatively preferably to others? On the territorial level, we agree with other scholars106 that the securitisation of climate change in terms of conflicts between groups or states and national security conceptions is hugely problematic. On the positive side, this discourse helps to raise attention and is conductive in forging coalitions between actors that would otherwise not have approached the topic seriously, as has happened for example in US debates107 or UN Security Council meetings.108 However, such an argumentation also detracts the attention from the core issues---slowing down climate change through decisive mitigation efforts---to rather ad-hoc adaptation measures and interferences in risk countries that could in the end take the form of military intervention.109 As a consequence, there is an increasing involvement of military and defence actors in climate politics as well as the adoption of concepts from the climate sector into military planning.110 Actors prepare themselves to cope with climate change’s secondary effects instead of preventing global warming from happening in the first place.111 Moreover, using a territorial securitisation and national security conceptions reinforces Othering and friend-enemy conceptions (in line with the original CS argument) and shifts the attention to questions of security between states, thereby losing sight of the one most severely affected, that is poor populations within those states.