Climate Security in Central America: Proceedings of a Workshop (2024)
Chapter: Appendix B: Conceptual Framework for Climate Security Analysis
Appendix B
Conceptual Framework for Climate Security Analysis
CLIMATE CHANGE POSES PARTICULAR CHALLENGES FOR NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYSIS
Climate change does not fit easily into traditional framings for national security analysis. It is a complex, systemic threat that manifests over a range of spatial and temporal scales, involves actors all across society, and acts without regard to established societal or natural boundaries. The impacts of climate change involve deep interactions and feedbacks both within and between nature and society, resulting in complex risks and outcomes that often confound assessment or prediction. Climate security analysis requires a fundamentally integrative perspective that considers the interconnectedness of natural and human systems across scales, as well as the mechanistic pathways along which security risks can evolve. Ultimately, the analysis must be grounded in a conceptual understanding of climate-related security risk that effectively addresses the particular analytic challenges posed by climate change (see Table B-1).
| Analytic Challenges | Attributes of a Conceptual Framework |
|---|---|
| Climate change is a complex, systemic threat that manifests over a range of spatial and temporal scales, engages actors all across society, and operates without regard to established societal or natural boundaries. | Applies a systems view a of interactions across space (including telecoupling), time (including temporal lags), as well as societal actors, sectors, and systems, all at the appropriate scale. |
| Climate-related risks arise not only from the physical, ecological, and social impacts of climate change, but also from human responses to climate change. | Considers the multiple interactions and feedbacks between nature and society, and integrates understandings of human behavior and decision-making across scales and societal contexts. |
| Climate-related risks evolve in complex and unpredictable ways because of the dynamic interactions within and between individual determinants of risk and between risks and responses themselves. | Employs an inclusive framework for risk assessment that can integrate complexity and accommodate unexpected risks. |
| Climate change will vary in its importance as a driver of security risk. Often, climate change acts as a “threat multiplier,” amplifying existing socioeconomic, political, and cultural drivers of instability and conflict. | Scales climate stressors appropriately against nonclimate stressors and underlying conditions. |
| Climate consequences are myriad and continually evolving, so evaluation of climate-related risks will involve significant uncertainties with potentially large policy consequences, especially over longer timescales. | Is open-ended and generalizable to different problem sets—organizing how to think about climate-related security risks, rather than what to think about a particular set of risks. |
a The term systems thinking does not currently have a precise, agreed-upon definition. In the context of climate change, however, systems thinking generally recognizes that the complex and unpredictable nature of climate outcomes arises from the deep interdependencies that exist both within and between the natural and societal components of the world, at all scales. Specifically, a systems approach to climate-related risks would consider the dynamic interactions and feedbacks between social, economic, political, and environmental factors that create the potential for harm to people and nature.
A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR CLIMATE-RELATED SECURITY RISK
The National Academies Climate Security Roundtable’s discussions over the past year have produced several draft conceptual frameworks for understanding climate-related security risk. Figure B-1 presents a generalized version.
SOURCE: Generated by the Climate Security Roundtable.
The framework includes the analytic setting, external influences, and internal network interactions:
- The analytic setting is the domain within which climate-related security risk is evaluated. The setting could be a spatial region (e.g., Central America, South Asia) or some other sectoral or system space (e.g., energy sector, infrastructure system). For an analysis to be tractable, the spatial, temporal, and sectoral systems scales on which the setting is examined need to be appropriate for the questions being asked.
- External influences are the factors that affect the analytic setting from “outside” its boundary. These would include climate hazards (e.g., heatwaves, floods, storms), climate responses (e.g., mitigation policies, land use changes), and nonclimate influences (e.g., market forces, socioeconomic development policies, technology change), as well as the underlying conditions that shape the setting’s exposure, vulnerability, and resilience to those stressors (e.g., characteristic human and natural geography, demographic trends). Some of these external influences may be adjacent to, or even colocated, with the setting. Others may be more distant and impact the setting through teleconnections that can be natural (e.g., weather and climate connectivity) or societal (e.g., international trade flows, geopolitical influences). For an analysis to be tractable, it would treat external influences as uncoupled from (i.e., not impacted by) the analytic setting.
- Internal network interactions involve the interconnected and interdependent societal sectors (e.g., energy, water, agriculture sectors) and human and natural systems (e.g., ecosystems, financial systems, governance systems) within the analytic setting. These interactions determine the mechanistic pathways along which climate-related security risks evolve, ultimately leading to impacts on human security, which is centered in this framework. For an analysis to be tractable, it would identify and focus on the most consequential network interactions.
