No island is an island: security in a Four Degree World

Abstract

As early as 1977, Lester Brown from the Worldwatch Institute wrote that ‘threats to security may now arise less from the relationship of nation to nation and more from the relationship of [humanity] to nature’ (Brown, 1977: 6). Today, climate change is widely acknowledged to pose the biggest environmental security threat of all, but there remains considerable debate and confusion over how best to characterize and respond to this threat. To the popular imagination, climate change evokes the threats and challenges posed by the transboundary movement of so-called ‘climate refugees’. To traditional security analysts, climate change is typically characterized as a ‘threat multiplier’ to national ..