The Global Issue of Climate Change

Global climate change has been an important point of discussion for several years. People often associate climate change with global activities such as burning fossil fuels, pollution, glacier melting, and various other greenhouse gasses. According to Discourses of climate security, “global climate change has become a security issue in contemporary global politics (McDonald, 42-51)”. This article explains different discourses of climate security argued by lobbyist, environmental advocates, and academic analyst. The four climate security discourses will answer the following questions: Whose security is at stake? Who is able to respond to the threat? How is the threat defined? What are suggestions to deal with the threat? The article is delineated into four different phases. First, the evolution of engagement with climate change security relationships. Second, the methodologies of discourses analysis are outlined. Third, which is also the most important part of the article; the four climate security discourses with different conceptions are discussed. Finally, climate change and security correlation will be explained and the politics of responses to climate change. Climate change is dubious of being responsible for certain events that put entities at risk. Entities that could be at risk are long-term human security and nation-state’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. Climate change can cause humans to be at risk with more “vector- borne diseases, sea level rise on low lying land, changing patterns of rain, and extreme weather phenomena’s (IPCC, 2007)”. Climate change has also been researched to see if it is related to armed conflict and water resource boundary conflicts. The first climate change discourse presented is the threat to national security. “A threat caused or could possibly be related is armed conflict and climate change (Kaplan, 1994)”. The second discourse is human security to climate change. This discourse has various opinions and views. Some advocates believe that pathogens are the number one risk to human security due to climate change. Others believe that the environment is human’s biggest problem with climate change. The third discourse to climate change is international security. International security could be at risk if “climate induced agriculture challenges encouraged population movements were as groups confronted each other over scarce natural resources (Moon, 2007)”. The last climate change security discourse discussed was the ecosystem. Ecological security was the least popular out of all four discourses. Ecological security needs more support if it wants to be recognized like the previous three discourses. Various organizations are continuing to create better documentation that links humans to environment.