Columbia International Affairs Online: Working Papers

CIAO DATE: 09/2010

'Human Securitising' the Climate Security Debate

Lorraine Elliott

March 2010

Centre for Non-Traditional Security (NTS) Studies

Abstract

Efforts to understand the connection between climate change and national, regional and international security have fuelled something of a climate security industry, evidenced in a range of reports from governments, international organisations, and non-governmental organisations. In much of this, particularly those works produced by defence agencies and individual governments, the focus has been on threats to national security through civil unrest and violence that derive from competition for resources, access to environmental services, and the unregulated movement of people in the face of ecosystem collapse. This paper reinstates a human security approach.