Divided Environments

"That anthropogenic climate change is one of the foremost twenty-first century global security challenges is a view now firmly, if rather superficially, ensconced within Western liberal public and policy discourse. National security strategies have depicted it as 'an urgent and growing threat' and possibly 'the greatest challenge' there is to global stability, potentially presaging a 'breakdown of the rules-based international system' and a 're-emergence of major inter-state conflict.' Foreign ministers have labelled it 'perhaps the twenty-first century's biggest foreign policy challenge,' and 'the world's most fearsome weapon of mass destruction,' and claimed that 'the threat that a changing climate presents to ... international peace and security cannot be underestimated.' Climate change ministers have argued that 'we need to be ready for a world where climate instability drives political instability,' and that a 'world where climate change goes unchallenged will be a Hobbesian world, where life for far more people is "nasty, brutish, and short".' The United States (US) Congress and Pentagon have both described climate change as a threat to US national security. Successive United Nations (UN) Secretary Generals have called climate change 'the defining threat of our time' and 'the pre-eminent geopolitical and economic issue of the twenty-first century'. Activist movements from Extinction Rebellion (XR) to Greenpeace have characterised it as 'an unprecedented global emergency' that puts us 'in a life or death situation of our own making', and as 'the world's biggest threat ... ranked close to weapons of mass destruction in terms of potential impact' (indeed, one of the co-founders of XR has claimed that climate change is already 'turning whole regions of the world into death zones' and that a climate change-induced 'global holocaust ... is already underway'). And figures from Barack Obama to Russell Brand, among many others, have suggested that climate change is a bigger threat than terrorism"