In the line of fire: The climate threat to global security

Abstract

Climate change, increasingly being called the climate crisis, is arguably the greatest threat to human life as we know it. Across regions in the world, people are experiencing the most adverse impacts of this crisis in the form of more frequent and more intense climate extremes like heatwaves, droughts, floods, landslides, cyclones, wildfires, crop loss and water scarcity, among others. As per latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data, the crisis is only going to intensify in the coming decades making populations even more vulnerable to climate extremes and causing large scale disruption of natural and human systems. Thus, the ongoing climate crisis will threaten human security, and by extension, global security like never before, exacerbating ongoing conflicts through an explosive interplay between pre-existing fault lines in societies. This article tries to situate climate change in the current global security discourse through an analysis of the relationship between climate and conflict. It also attempts a reappraisal of traditional security discourse, particularly in developing countries like India, which are facing some of the worst modern-day impacts of extreme climate events. The article concludes that the global security discourse, policies, and as well as interventions to tackle armed conflicts need to be restructured to accommodate for the effect of climate change on conflicts.