Climate Change, National Security and Geopolitics

This book is a comprehensive study on how the national security sectors of China, India, Japan, Russia and the United States have engaged the idea of climate change as an existential threat.

Climate Change, National Security and Geopolitics examines the respective ways in which the five states have framed the issue of climate change in relation to their larger national security construction. It investigates the extent to which these countries have engaged with climate change as a security challenge, and how this has informed their larger security policy making and practice. The authors employ a conceptual framework that represents the complex relationship between geopolitics and the environment to grasp the nature of the threat and to assess the actions available to governments to manage it. The book also considers the interactions of the five states in the United Nations Security Council as they debate their different understandings on the climate-security nexus.

This volume offers real-world case studies by national scholars of environmental security and an analytical assessment of pathways and barriers to their nations’ future cooperation. It will therefore be of great interest to security sector professionals, as well as to students, scholars and researchers studying climate change, military studies, international security and environmental peace and conflict studies.