Warner: Climate change a national security issue

Physics Today ◽  
2009 ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1532673X2110532
Author(s):  
Jason Gainous ◽  
Melissa K. Merry

Research suggests that framing climate change as a national security issue can shape opinion about climate change. This research is less clear about what exactly constitutes a “national security frame” and what aspects of this frame are most persuasive. We use a survey experiment to compare the relative effects of three types of national security frames we identify. Results show that a frame centered on energy dependence had the strongest effect and was the most consistent across partisanship. Surprisingly, the effects ran in the opposite direction for Democrats and Republicans on both outcomes—negative for Democrats and positive for Republicans. We also show that the energy dependence frame moderated the influence of respondents’ affect toward political candidates and parties on their climate change attitudes. The results suggest that the energy dependence frame can shape public opinion, but that it must be tailored to particular audiences to avoid backfire effects.


2019 ◽  
Vol 05 (01) ◽  
pp. 97-116
Author(s):  
Maria Julia Trombetta

Despite the traditional resistance to consider climate change as a national security issue, the security impact of climate change has been increasingly recognized by official discourses in China over the past few years. The Chinese perception on climate change has shifted from a development issue to a security topic; and two driving forces are behind the emergence of the climate security discourse: the shift of China’s economy towards a “New Normal” and the commitments China made in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Meanwhile, two modalities of discourse that characterize the Chinese context are also discerned. One that involves national security has a rather fixed procedure about how security can be spoken of and by whom; the other is more relevant for issues like climate change and air pollution. In both cases, even if the language of security is used with regard to climate issues, they are handled as normal politics and governmental actions are legitimized by the use of security language. Although China has taken on more climate responsibilities, it seems unprepared for global climate leadership because security considerations not only determine the country’s participation but also limit its international commitments in global climate governance.


Author(s):  
Kent Hughes Butts

AbstractIt is time to broaden our thinking on the concept of homeland security and recognize the degree to which environmental security, and in particular climate change, affects US homeland security equities. Understanding how environmental security became a national security issue may be beneficial as the homeland security community seeks to understand the emerging issue of climate change and strategic documents linking climate change and homeland security.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda J. Bilmes

AbstractThe United States has traditionally defined national security in the context of military threats and addressed them through military spending. This article considers whether the United States will rethink this mindset following the disruption of the Covid19 pandemic, during which a non-military actor has inflicted widespread harm. The author argues that the US will not redefine national security explicitly due to the importance of the military in the US economy and the bipartisan trend toward growing the military budget since 2001. However, the pandemic has opened the floodgates with respect to federal spending. This shift will enable the next administration to allocate greater resources to non-military threats such as climate change and emerging diseases, even as it continues to increase defense spending to address traditionally defined military threats such as hypersonics and cyberterrorism.


Author(s):  
Wilfrid Greaves

This article examines the implications of human-caused climate change for security in Canada. The first section outlines the current state of climate change, the second discusses climate change impacts on human security in Canada, and the third outlines four other areas of Canada’s national interests threatened by climate change: economic threats; Arctic threats; humanitarian crises at home and abroad; and the threat of domestic conflict. In the conclusion, I argue that climate change has clearly not been successfully “securitized” in Canada, despite the material threats it poses to human and national security, and outline directions for future research.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-392
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Cawkwell

Britain’s war in Afghanistan – specifically its latter stages, where the UK’s role and casualties sustained in the conflict rose dramatically – coincided with the institutional emergence of Ministry of Defence-led ‘Strategic Communication’. This article examines the circumstances through which domestic strategic communication developed within the UK state and the manner in which the ‘narratives’ supporting Britain’s role in Afghanistan were altered, streamlined and ‘securitised’. I argue that securitising the Afghanistan narrative was undertaken with the intention of misdirecting an increasingly sceptical UK public from the failure of certain aspects of UK counter-insurgency strategy – specifically its counter-narcotics and stabilisation efforts – by focusing on counter-terrorism, and of avoiding difficult questions about the UK’s transnational foreign and defence policy outlook vis-à-vis the United States by asserting that Afghanistan was primarily a ‘national security’ issue. I conclude this article by arguing that the UK’s domestic strategic communication approach of emphasising ‘national security interests’ may have created the conditions for institutionalised confusion by reinforcing a narrow, self-interested narrative of Britain’s role in the world that runs counter to its ongoing, ‘transnationalised’ commitments to collective security through the United States and NATO.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document