Beyond a Threat Multiplier : Exploring Links Between Climate Change and Security newsecuritybeat.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from newsecuritybeat.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Over the last decade, EU policy has employed both an
indirect, context-shaping approach to climate security, which focuses more on process than output, and a protective-autonomy approach, which focuses on multiple defensive approaches to safeguard the EU’s geopolitical interests.
In putting these approaches into practice, the EU has advanced a rich profusion of climate security initiatives; diplomats certainly do not need to be told that “climate policy is foreign policy,” as they have been working on this assumption for more than a decade. Moreover, the EU’s approach has positioned the bloc well to play a constructive role in climate geopolitics. However, the union’s overall approach to climate security has been relatively narrow. It has built select climate elements into its existing security strategies rather than rethinking what security itself entails in a world challenged by widespread ecological disruptions.
Climate-related Security Risks in the 2020 Updated Nationally Determined Contributions
Format
Nationally determined contributions (NDCs) are the central instrument for states to communicate their contribution to the 2016 Paris Agreement on climate change and reflect their wider approach to climate mitigation and adaptation. This SIPRI Insights paper analyses how the 2020 updated NDCs (16 submissions as of October 2020) discuss climate-related security risks and compares them with 2015. It finds that climate change is mainly seen as a risk to socio-economic development and human security and almost never as a risk to societal stability or the functioning of the state. The assessment of risks in NDCs largely focuses on direct climate impacts. This suggests that countries are currently not considering the risks from indirect climate impacts, including those that cross national borders, or the unintended adverse consequences of adaptation or mitigation responses. Going forward, c