Climate change and security: examining China's challenges in a warming world

The environment is increasingly affected by global climate change. While the causes of climate change are generated across the globe, the impacts of climate change will be highly variable at the local level. An increased scientific understanding of the potential impacts that climate change may have within China has raised new concern among China's leaders. Given that China's domestic realities inform its international policy choices, understanding how climate change may affect its population and natural resources is critical to global climate stabilization efforts. This article examines how the impacts of climate change on China, and China's response, will drive security challenges domestically, as well as in the greater Asian region and around the world. It shows that the impact of climate change on China will be significant and may have sizable adverse economic implications, particularly on vulnerable east coast economic centers. Water scarcity is a problem that already challenges China's leadership and one that will be exacerbated under projected climate impacts. In addition, the country faces the risk of international retaliation should it fail to undertake serious greenhouse gas mitigation actions. Yet China is not without options, and is already well poised to become a leader in the low-carbon technology revolution.     

Climate security,risk assessment and military planning

Climate and environmental changes pose emerging and unique challenges to international security—as the global community experiences issues of food insecurity, severe droughts and floods—and have cascading impacts on energy supplies and infrastructure. Environmental hazards may shift abruptly, posing new risks to vulnerable systems and critical nodes in ways that diverge from historical experience. Effective risk assessments and planning will require understanding of how climate change will affect natural disasters and disaster response, and how hazards may be more extreme or unique from past experiences. This article discusses the role of climate change in affecting security planning from a military perspective, and how integration of scientific data and intelligence methods can foster assessment and effective response.     

Policy Subsystems and Regimes: Organized Interests and Climate Change Policy

This research is an examination of the role of organized interests in international climate change policy formation. Systematic survey results are used to demonstrate that organized interests actually engage in the same activities in both the international and domestic arenas. This research demonstrates that the climate change negotiations can be characterized as both a policy subsystem and an international regime. It is further argued that these two concepts are in fact highly analogous, thereby facilitating new cross-discipline research opportunities. The research is based on a web survey of organized interests accredited by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and on interviews and field research at the 8th Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC in New Delhi, India.     

Australian energy diplomacy

While Australia is considered an energy superpower, Australian foreign policy has often overlooked energy diplomacy. Given the transformations taking place in global energy markets, the time is ripe to begin a policy discussion in Australia on energy diplomacy. I argue that Australian diplomatic efforts should broaden beyond a historical focus on promoting fossil fuels and securing export markets, to driving global energy governance reforms through the G20. This will not only help to ensure that the international energy architecture is capable of achieving governance objectives around energy security, energy access and climate change, but significantly, it will also help Australia to achieve broader foreign policy goals, such as ensuring emerging economies become responsible stakeholders within the international system.     

The Paris Agreement and the new logic of international climate politics

This article reviews and assesses the outcome of the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP‐21) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Paris in December 2015. It argues that the Paris Agreement breaks new ground in international climate policy, by acknowledging the primacy of domestic politics in climate change and allowing countries to set their own level of ambition for climate change mitigation. It creates a framework for making voluntary pledges that can be compared and reviewed internationally, in the hope that global ambition can be increased through a process of ‘naming and shaming’. By sidestepping distributional conflicts, the Paris Agreement manages to remove one of the biggest barriers to international climate cooperation. It recognizes that none of the major powers can be forced into drastic emissions cuts. However, instead of leaving mitigation efforts to an entirely bottom‐up logic, it embeds country pledges in an international system of climate accountability and a ‘ratchet mechanism’, thus offering the chance of more durable international cooperation. At the same time, it is far from clear whether the treaty can actually deliver on the urgent need to de‐carbonize the global economy. The past record of climate policies suggests that governments have a tendency to express lofty aspirations but avoid tough decisions. For the Paris Agreement to make a difference, the new logic of ‘pledge and review’ will need to mobilize international and domestic pressure and generate political momentum behind more substantial climate policies worldwide. It matters, therefore, whether the Paris Agreement's new approach can be made to work.     

Australian Foreign Policy under the Abbott Government: Foreign Policy as Domestic Politics?

While foreign policy featured prominently on the Australian political agenda in late 2014, the manner of Australia's engagement with the world challenges the idea of a ‘pivot’ from domestic politics to foreign policy. In particular, the government demonstrated a tendency to prioritise domestic political considerations, in particular public opinion, in its dealings with the outside world. This was evident across a range of issue areas: from the ‘internationalist’ agenda of asylum, climate change and aid to more traditional concerns such as bilateral relations with Indonesia and international security. This article explores these dynamics and asks what implications this has for both Australian foreign policy and theoretical accounts of the role and desirability of public engagement with foreign policy in international relations thought.     

Climate change,human security and violent conflict

Climate change is increasingly been called a ‘security’ problem, and there has been speculation that climate change may increase the risk of violent conflict. This paper integrates three disparate but well-founded bodies of research – on the vulnerability of local places and social groups to climate change, on livelihoods and violent conflict, and the role of the state in development and peacemaking, to offer new insights into the relationships between climate change, human security, and violent conflict. It explains that climate change increasingly undermines human security in the present day, and will increasingly do so in the future, by reducing access to, and the quality of, natural resources that are important to sustain livelihoods. Climate change is also likely to undermine the capacity of states to provide the opportunities and services that help people to sustain their livelihoods. We argue that in certain circumstances these direct and indirect impacts of climate change on human security may in turn increase the risk of violent conflict. The paper then outlines the broad contours of a research programme to guide empirical investigations into the risks climate change poses to human security and peace.     

From biodefence to biosecurity: the Obama administration's strategy for countering biological threats

The Seventh Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the first international treaty to outlaw an entire class of weapons, was held in Geneva in December 2011. On 7 December, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became the highest-ranking US government official to address a BWC meeting. Secretary Clinton told the assembled delegation that ‘we view the risk of bioweapons attack as both a serious national security challenge and a foreign policy priority’. At the same time, she warned that a large-scale disease outbreak ‘could cripple an already fragile global economy’. Secretary Clinton's speech reflected a new understanding that the range of biological threats to international security has expanded from state-sponsored biological warfare programmes to include biological terrorism, dual-use research and naturally occurring infectious diseases such as pandemics. Recognizing these changes, President Barack Obama released a new national strategy for countering biological threats in 2009. This strategy represents a shift in thinking away from the George W. Bush administration's focus on biodefence, which emphasized preparing for and responding to biological weapon attacks, to the concept of biosecurity, which includes measures to prevent, prepare for and respond to naturally occurring and man-made biological threats. The Obama administration's biosecurity strategy seeks to reduce the global risk of naturally occurring and deliberate disease outbreaks through prevention, international cooperation, and maximizing synergies between health and security. The biosecurity strategy is closely aligned with the Obama administration's broader approach to foreign policy, which emphasizes the pragmatic use of smart power, multilateralism and engagement to further the national interest. This article describes the Obama administration's biosecurity strategy; highlights elements of continuity and change from the policies of the Bush administration; discusses how it fits into Obama's broader foreign policy agenda; and analyses critical issues that will have to be addressed in order to implement the strategy successfully.     

Global Climatic Change: the Difficulties of Assessing Impacts

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, initiated in 1988, is complete, was debated at the Second World Climate Conference in November, 1990 and was subsequentty submitted to the United Nations General Assembly. IPCC: (i) asserted the reality of humanity's disturbance of the natural climate system; (ii) demanded studies to improve our knowledge of processes vulnerable to climatic changes: and (iii) called for policy responses to mitigate and adapt to these changes. Two fundamental issues are: how will global climatic change affect natural resources and human population and how will the impetus towards policy responses, particularly greenhouse gas emission reduction treaties, affect industry, the economy and trade? A necessary first step in the highly desirable and geographical aspiration of striving to link numerical climate modelling to the predictions of socioeconomic systems is increased awareness and improved understanding of current physical and social models. In this paper I review the status of numerical climatic modelling especially as it pertains to scenarios of the effects of human-enhanced greenhouse warming. These projections are of futures which are themselves the result of socio-economic predictions. Development of appropriate adaptive strategies depends crucially upon improved simulation of the continental near-surface climate and on improved spatial resolution of climate models by at least two orders of magnitude. Such increased resolution is likely to demand a thousandfold increase in computing power. The physical results of global climatic change are likely to be less significant than the social and economic effects resulting from international agreements on emission reduction Recent shifts in international research and policy responses place today's studies of global climatic change firmly at the focus of human-environment interactions and hence at the core of modern geography.     

Rules of engagement: America's Asia-Pacific security policy under an Obama administration

The United States’ strategy in the Asia-Pacific stands at a historic juncture. How the new Obama administration conceives and implements its Asia-Pacific policy during its first term of office will have major and enduring ramifications for America's future. The new administration must have a clear vision of its country's national security interests in the Asia-Pacific as well as a better appreciation of the evolving dynamics of the region. To this end, it should continue to underwrite its bilateral security commitments, albeit through a less threat-centric lens, and be more cognisant of the region's multilateral overtures by further anchoring US participation in regional multilateral institutions. This shift from a position of bilateral primacy to one of engaged bilateral and multilateral partnership—a ‘convergent security’ approach—is the best strategy for Washington to advance its strategic interests in the Asia-Pacific.     

Conventions of climate change: constructions of danger and the dispossession of the atmosphere

Climate change has emerged as one of the key issues of the early years of the twenty-first century, bringing together concerns about human relations to nature, the responsibility of rich nations to poorer, the links from local activities to global conditions, and the obligations of present to future generations. This paper focuses on three key ‘narratives’ that are enshrined in international climate policy – asserting that ‘dangerous climate change’ is to be avoided; that the responsibility for climate change is common but differentiated; and that the market (in the form of carbon trading) is the best way to reduce the danger. The goal of the paper is to analyse the origins of these narratives, the power relations they reflect and promote, and some of the concepts and images used to support them, including those of climate determinism, climate stabilisation, ‘burning embers’, ‘tipping points’, Global Warming Potentials, targets and timetables, and carbon credits. I argue that by choosing the market solution of trading carbon we have created a new and surreal commodity, unfairly allocated pollution rights to nation states based on 1990 emission levels, and established a new set north–south relations and carbon transactions in the name of sustainable development.     

Brexit or Bremain: what future for the UK's European diplomatic strategy?

A major public debate on the costs and benefits of the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union is presently under way. The outcome of the referendum on 23 June 2016 will be a pivotal moment in determining whether the EU has a future as a component of the UK's European diplomatic strategy or whether there is a major recalibration of how the UK relates to Europe and more widely of its role within international relations. Since accession to the European Economic Community the UK has evolved an uncodified, multipronged European diplomatic strategy. This has involved the UK seeking to reinforce its approach of shaping the security of the continent, preserving a leading diplomatic role for the UK in managing the international relations of Europe, and to maximize British trade and investment opportunities through a broadening and deepening of Europe as an economically liberal part of the global political economy. Since accession the UK's European diplomatic strategy has also been to use membership of the EU to facilitate the enhancement of its international influence, primarily as a vehicle for leveraging and amplifying broader national foreign and security policy objectives. The strategy has been consistent irrespective of which party has formed the government in the UK. Increasing domestic political difficulties with the process of European integration have now directly impacted on this European strategy with a referendum commitment. Whether a vote for a Brexit or a Bremain, the UK will be confronted with challenges for its future European strategy.     

从地缘政治视角看美国边界安全的空间特征与政策变化——兼论对中国边界安全的启示

本文将美国边界安全置于地缘政治视角之下进行研究,通过对美国边界的空间形态与特征进行分析,总结美国边界安全在当前空间状态下存在的有利和不利因素。在全球反恐背景下,以"9·11"事件作为转折点,对比恐怖主义袭击前后20年美国政府在边界安全政策问题上的认知和态度变化,在对美国边界安全政策进行梳理后,阐述在新的边界安全环境下,美国所采取的保障陆海空边界安全的一系列强有力措施。在此基础上提出了美国经验对中国边界安全的五点启示,以期对中国的国家安全政策和实践提供借鉴。     

Coloniality as a Barrier to Climate Action: Hierarchies of Power in a Coal-Based Economy

South Africa has a coal-based energy system and extractive economy, largely responsible for its high emission levels relative to countries with similar GDP. This extractive, coal-based economy began during British colonisation and today shows few signs of transitioning rapidly to limit climate change. This paper interrogates the role of coloniality in climate delay, given that colonisation is responsible for establishing fossil fuel dependence in South Africa. Combining theory on decolonisation, specifically colonial hierarchies of power, with a critical discourse analysis, this research uses interview and policy data to show how colonial power hierarchies can lead to climate delay in South Africa, through normalising emissions intensive development and silencing alternatives. In doing so, it highlights the need to recognise the colonial foundations of climate change and the potential for a coalition between decolonisation and climate action to motivate for radical change both in South Africa and at a global level.     

Climate change as the ‘new’ security threat: implications for Africa

Once it was an environmental issue, then an energy problem, now climate change is being recast as a security threat. So far, the debate has focused on creating a security ‘hook’, illustrated by anecdote, to invest climate negotiations with a greater sense of urgency. Political momentum behind the idea of climate change as a security threat has progressed quickly, even reaching the United Nations Security Council. This article reviews the linkages between climate change and security in Africa and analyses the role of climate change adaptation policies in future conflict prevention. Africa, with its history of ethnic, resource and interstate conflict, is seen by many as particularly vulnerable to this new type of security threat, despite being the continent least responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions. Projected climatic changes for Africa suggest a future of increasingly scarce water, collapsing agricultural yields, encroaching desert and damaged coastal infrastructure. Such impacts, should they occur, would undermine the ‘carrying capacity’ of large parts of Africa, causing destabilizing population movements and raising tensions over dwindling strategic resources. In such cases, climate change could be a factor that tips fragile states into socio‐economic and political collapse. Climate change is only one of many security, environmental and developmental challenges facing Africa. Its impacts will be magnified or moderated by underlying conditions of governance, poverty and resource management, as well as the nature of climate change impacts at local and regional levels. Adaptation policies and programmes, if implemented quickly and at multiple scales, could help avert climate change and other environmental stresses becoming triggers for conflict. But, adaptation must take into account existing social, political and economic tensions and avoid exacerbating them.     

Australia and the rise of India

Australia is at risk of being left behind by the pace of India's emergence as a regional and global power and its lack of engagement with India during this emergence. The Rudd Labor government is developing a framework which may make Australia a significant partner with India. There is the potential for a thoroughgoing engagement of interests and ideals in proposals Australia has put forward in three areas. Australia's vision of an Asia Pacific Community, with cooperation as its habitual operating principle, and with a membership that includes India and the USA as well as China and Japan, fills a multilateral gap. Secondly, the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament may provide a global framework assisting the development of Australian and Indian initiatives in the controlling and winding back of nuclear proliferation. Thirdly, Australia's national carbon pollution reduction program is intended to demonstrate international leadership and engagement in climate change, and opens the prospect for Australia of a substantial bilateral partnership with India (and others) to advance common interests around climate change. Australia, while emphasising its close relationship with the USA, is preparing to live in a region where the USA will, over time, be less influential as its relative power declines. As other great powers rise, Australia can actively pursue a hedging strategy to diversify its dependencies, and develop a much deeper engagement with that other emerging Asian giant.     

Space,Social Relations,and Contestation: Transformative Peacebuilding and World Social Forum Climate Spaces

The 2013 and 2015 World Social Forums in Tunis, Tunisia hosted thematic “climate spaces” for the first time. This article examines the extent to which these spaces are constitutive of a form of “transformative peacebuilding” aiming to transform social relations and eliminate the structural violence of the world capitalist economy. Both the theoretical and practical activities of civil society at the climate spaces are shown to be transformative but only to the extent that they contest broad processes of trasformismo which transcend differences and obscure the lived realities of governance and resistance. In this sense, civil society groups and movements at the climate spaces are shown to engage with global capitalism to potentially produce new global understanding and action. This generates new understandings of civil society as constitutive of directly resistant modes of social relation that push for radically different visions of climate justice and governance.     

The paradigm that lost its way

For those who call for a change in our approach to international relations ecause they doubt the capacity of the existing system to handle the problems hat lie ahead, the 'paradigm' they are seeking to 'shift' is usually some image of realism , that dates from Westphalia and beyond. Fortunately, the paradigm that actually shaped Western foreign policy behaviour in the last 50 years or so was a product of circumstances and personalities in the 1945–53 period that generated attitudes and behaviour patterns that became entrenched during the Cold War. In relation to the complex problems that face the international community, this national security paradigm is increasingly dysfunctional. However, because it comprises 'attitudes' rather than rules for action, and is non-deterministic, we should find it easier to devise an alternative, more functional paradigm and to engineer the necessary shift. The historical review that comprises the bulk of this article describes the genesis of the paradigm and how the patterns of behaviour and underlying beliefs and attitudes became entrenched in Western foreign policy. Fleshing out the characteristics of the existing paradigm suggests an alternative approach to international relations, but the importance and feasibility of engineering the necessary shift will be argued in a subsequent article in the January 2002 issue of International Affairs     

Counting Carbon: Calculative Activism and Slippery Infrastructure

The environmental movement in the global North is in a state of impasse. It appears that despite the renewed international focus on climate change, and the actions of innumerable social movements, a “solution” to the problem appears as one, without a viable solution. It is the contention of this paper that climate change has no clearly viable solution as it is a seemingly impossible problem. This paper investigates how the problem of climate change is constructed as a global object of political action and how it functions to render politics into a matter of calculative action, one that seeks—but fails—to take hold of a slippery carbon infrastructure. It concludes by suggesting one possible solution to this dilemma is to turn away from the global scalar logic of climate change and towards a situated focus on questions of infrastructure, or what Dimitris Papadopoulos calls “thick justice”.     

全球气候变化对国际安全的挑战与思考

鉴于全球气候变化开始困扰国际社会以至威胁人类生存,如何解决这一非传统安全问题,便成为当今世界关注的焦点与亟待解决的问题。对此,学者们认为,各国间的谅解与互信,特别是在战略上的合作,对全球气候变化的治理、能源的合理使用是至关重要的。然而,由于传统的国家利益观念的影响,国际社会能否达成共识,将是治理气候变化这一潜在威胁的关键。历史上,危机常常可以转化为机遇。那么,国际社会能否抓住这一机遇,对来自全球气候变化的挑战进行认真的思考与治理,这将是对人类智慧的考验。