ABSTRACT
The term 'climate security' has recently emerged as a shorthand expression for a broad range of issues that seemingly link conflicts, vulnerabilities and various forms of insecurity to global environmental change. British policy makers have repeatedly raised climate security arguments along with their German counterparts. In terms of security, climate change now requires not just protecting and reconstructing the system but changing it and transforming landscapes, ecosystems, cities and trading arrangements so that they are both less vulnerable to obvious hazards and flexible enough to reinvent themselves when unpredictable crises occur. Governance matters in responding to changing times, in terms of both climate and global economic fluctuations. This is the key point in the climate security discussion that needs reinforcement in policy deliberations, rather than a focus on local environmental conditions and simple scarcity narratives as a causal mechanism for conflict.
