Climate change, security and the institutional prospects for ecological security

• States approach the security implications of climate change in different ways. • Different climate security ‘discourses’ have different implications in practice. • Ecological security represents the most progressive approach to climate security. • Ecological security is gaining in prominence and attention, even among states. • Climate crisis makes exploring ecological security’s institutional prospects vital. It has become commonplace, almost a cliché, to begin an analysis of the relationship between climate change and security with the acknowledgement that this relationship looks very different depending on whose security is under consideration. In the academic literature on this relationship we have seen a steady shift away from an exclusive focus on the protection of existing institutions from the indirect effects of climate change, and towards a focus on the biosphere or the natural world itself. Such an orientation asks whether and how the natural world, and the ecosystems that compose it, are threatened by the immediate and direct effects of climate change. While this shift seems logical in response to the geological reality of the Anthropocene epoch and the unambiguous arrival of climate change, crucial questions remain about the prospects for pursuing ‘ecological security’ in practice: what would this look like, who would be agents of ecological security, and is increasing academic and think tank engagement with the concept matched in policy and practical developments? This paper analyses the institutional and practical prospects for this approach to the climate-security relationship, drawing on policy documents and interviews with policy makers in a range of states. It finds grounds for (cautious) optimism in increasing engagement with ecological security, including at the nation-state level, evident in growing recognition of the need for states to address the direct threat posed by climate change to the most vulnerable.