It is uncomfortably easy to find connections between environmental change and security around the globe. 2023 began with heat records in Europe, a deadly cyclone in New Zealand, and military deployments in response to forest fires ravaging Canada. An untimely early heatwave scorched Spain and endangered its agricultural production. Cyclone Mocha destroyed the livelihoods of thousands in northwestern Myanmar, and Typhoon Mawar caused “significant damage” to a terminal building on Guam’s Andersen Air Force Base.

A summer that is the hottest ever recorded has only upped the ante on climate’s security impacts. The destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam and its dire consequences for humans and ecosystems in Ukraine’s already war-torn environment drew a direct link between the environment and security. Last month, NATO members emphasized their concerns over climate change impacts on fragile countries, confirming their intention to reduce military emissions.

This overview of a few months of 2023 on planet Earth underscores the severity of changes in climate and environment. These impacts are complex and diverse. Climate change makes severe weather events more intense and frequent. It affects harvests and triggers military disaster response deployments—as well as posing risks to military readiness.

To examine how these events are tangibly influencing governmental policy, I have undertaken two new studies. They show that these ubiquitous developments have attracted substantial reflection across hundreds of national security strategies, white books, and similar documents published by governments or their defense departments. And as climate increasingly moves onto the national security agenda, how it is assessed in these documents may pave the way to different—and often problematic responses.

A Chimera and No Silver Bullet

While it is clear that the impacts associated with climate change have become a serious danger to the security and well-being of human populations (and also to ecosystems and national security), formulating responses to address them is not straightforward. So it is no surprise that a set of diverse actors—including domestic development agencies, defense departments, and foreign ministries, as well as a variety of international and regional governmental organizations—have pondered a range of policy responses under the label of climate security policy.

The multifaceted and cross-sectoral nature of climate security issues connects virtually all fields of governance, and evokes a considerable variety of possible responses. These options include conventional policy approaches such as problem mitigation by emission reductions and environmental protection, as well as adaptation to first-order impacts via disaster preparation and response. However, scholars also warn of a realm of options beyond conventional responses, including militarized actions focused on societal dynamics such as “mass migration” and “resource conflicts.”

This is problematic for at least two reasons: First, the assumption that such phenomena arise as possible second-order consequences of climate change is, at best, questionable. Environmental change is “rarely the most important” and “never the only” reason behind violent conflicts. Factors such as ethnic exclusion and other political factors are more common origins. Secondly, conventional security measures do not address the root causes of the problem. Thus, scholars have raised long-standing concerns that security policy responses to these indirect consequences would miss the actual problems, rejecting them as “justifying bigger budgets for the same old things.”

Do National Security Strategy Documents Get the Problem Right?

In light of these concerns, I investigated how national governments frame climate security. Do their problem definitions open up space towards sustainable policy approaches? Or do they instead define the problem to be the nail to their hammer?

Building on earlier research into the responses of conventional security policy actors to climate change, I published two new articles on how environmental change is represented in security strategies. First, I analyzed what the security strategy documents of over 90 countries have to say about environmental change. Secondly, I compared how defense departments and “civil” ministries describe climate change differently.

My first study collected several hundred national security strategy documents published by 93 countries between 2000 and 2020. Climate change featured prominently in these strategic assessments, indicating that climate security framings are by no means only a Western hobby horse. In total, 73% of strategies published after 2008 referred at least briefly to climate change.

Yet these frequent representations vary widely. Some, more than others, support policy measures that call for unsustainable, militarized responses. Their descriptions of climate change and other environmental degradation prioritize warnings about extreme weather impacts. While these events are indeed going to become more frequent, they are usually not disastrous by themselves.

For instance, Ilan Kelman, a professor at University College London, argues that “disasters are not natural.” Instead, they result from a lack of sufficient preparation, particularly in often poor and post-colonial contexts, transforming exposure into vulnerability. Disaster response does save lives. Yet focusing narrowly on disaster risks might not do enough to address the underlying causes and instead encourage reactive measures that are both expensive and pose a challenge to militaries’ capacities.

A considerable number of these documents also linked environmental change to increasing conflicts, invoking an empirically unconvincing and normatively problematic world view. Similarly, national security strategies and other documents published by wealthy, potential destination countries express questionable and stigmatizing concerns over climate-related mass migration.

This rhetoric about potential consequences from environmental change is not matched by a focus on the underlying problems that create climate impacts. About a quarter of the documents mention climate change in passing without any further explication—adding climate to a long laundry list of national security concerns. Moreover, where these references to climate lack specificity, other framings of environmental change do not situate them in the context of planetary boundaries, leaving the bigger picture almost entirely absent from these strategies.

Doing Better: Civil Ministries’ Approaches to Climate Security

Ministries that coordinate conventional climate policy frame the issue of climate security quite differently. My second study compared statements about climate change impacts by defense departments to similar framings by the “civil” ministries typically involved in climate policy.

It is a rather recent development that civil ministries engage with climate change under the label of security. Leading scholars have long made the case against linking security and climate change for a range of reasons. Others, however, noted how this marriage could generate transformative potential towards more sustainable security practices. They also argued that the climate security nexus is out there anyway, making it a more pragmatic choice to work towards preferable climate security approaches. And indeed, while both groups raise alarms over the ever more visible impacts from climate change in alarming tones, the latter strategists frame the problem in a way that is much more conducive to tackling the root causes of climate change.

Ministries within the civil domain refer less frequently to indirect consequences such as migration or conflict than defense ministries. By contrast, they present far more elaborate descriptions of the direct impacts of climate change on biophysical and societal systems. Another major difference lies in the attention that they pay to the anthropogenic root causes of climate change. Civil ministries often mention these causes explicitly, while a large share of defense departments omit them.

Finally, civil and defense departments also differ in their views of the temporal aspects of climate impacts. The former strategists convey a higher sense of urgency by describing the manifestation of climate impacts in the past or in the present. Defense assessments more commonly to describe these impacts as a future matter.

Climate Affects Security: What Now?

Climate impacts already have a wide range of implications for ecological, human, and, arguably, national security. Only rapid mitigation and adaptation can contain these dangers. Yet conventional security policy responses insufficiently tackle emissions and fail to improve the preparedness of vulnerable populations.

Choosing the right policies to maintain climate security is crucial. My analyses show that national security strategy documents often fall short of making the right choices, while civil ministries offer better approaches to climate security. These approaches have a sounder foundation—and focus political attention more effectively on the need to address ongoing and human-made environmental change.