ABSTRACT
Environmental change is currently considered a non-traditional threat, a mutable category that, as rightly summed up by the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), encompasses "security challenges that are not considered mainstream". Environmental change already does and will increasingly have a widespread and deep effect on European security. As Europe is profoundly linked to the global economy, vulnerabilities in Europe affect the global economy. But vulnerabilities in global infrastructure can also affect Europe's stability. Environmental change opens up gaping disconnects in the international laws, to the point of affecting the rights of states, and thus creating new risks to geopolitical and geoeconomic stability. In some areas, China is well ahead in understanding that geophysical changes are affecting geopolitics and geoeconomics, as has been demonstrated by its active interest in the Arctic. The geophysical changes are combining with rapidly shifting geopolitics and geoeconomics to create a highly dynamic and potentially volatile, global security environment.
