Climate security and scale: climate change risk and security as an all-scales, all-of-society challenge

Abstract

Climate security as an emerging field of study seeks to connect the substantial security-related challenges faced under climate change, and the ways in which climate change re-prioritizes issues at all scales of governance, and throughout all parts of society. This dissertation explores these perspectives to better understand how climate security differs from past approaches in security, and how climate change requires new paradigms to consider local, national, regional, and international assessments on risk and security. Through three papers, this dissertation assesses local approaches toward shifts in natural hazards through computational modeling, explores regional and global governance challenges that generate ethical and security concerns through attempts to mitigate climate impacts via geoengineering, and identifies current limitations on risk and security dialogues, particularly where conflict and disasters intertwine. The final paper also proposes a new conceptual model to advance approaches on assessing critical failure, the limits of mutual aid, and the assessment of "just securitization" when a referent of analysis faces significant impacts from disruptive events. This dissertation connects these issues of scale and dimensions of security to present climate security as a deeply interconnected and widely impacting issue that requires common framing and dialogues to prioritize capacity and understand limitations of future adaptation.