Security and Climate Change
Climate change and resource scarcity—their ef-
fects, in combination—are indirect causes of armed
conflict (Evans 2010). Indirect does not mean insig-
nificant, however. While climate change and resource
scarcity are unlikely to cause international armed
conflict (IAC), chances are improving that they will
materially contribute to the risk of non-international
armed conflict (NIAC), the most prevalent form of
armed conflict anticipated this century. NIAC, de-
spite its name and legal basis, may involve the mili-
taries of many states and extend to multiple states.
NIAC, which could look and feel very much like IAC,
is heavily shaped and influenced by transnational
threats (Harvard University 2011).
Climate change is a borderless threat (Reveron and
Mahoney-Norris 2011). It is among those described,
principally by human security theorists, as transna-
tional and non-traditional. The security environment,
these writers contend, has changed and is changing,
requiring that more attention be paid to subnational
and transnational threats than to peer-on-peer compe-
tition. Solutions to these problems, they assert, must
operate within and across states, in an integrative ap-
proach focusing not only on threats to human security
and national security but also on collaborative oppor-
tunities for peacebuilding (Khagram et al. 2003).
Sovereignty and traditional national security, in-
separably wedded to border inviolability, were never
designed for these circumstances. Borderless threats
cannot be stopped at a border. Environmentally
dispossessed persons can be stopped, but the condi-
tions—the risks, threats, and vulnerabilities—that
forced their migration will cross borders with impuni-
ty. Such conditions, exacerbated by the effects of eco-