Photo: Torstein Øen
Climate Change and Security Research
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. There is scientific evidence of the human impact on climate change but research on feedbacks between climate change and human interactions is in its initial stages.
In recent years, the study of climate change and security has become the focus of both scholarly work and policy-making. A number of policy reports and individual statements proposed alarmist claims about the impact of climate change on security. In 2007 and under the leadership of the United Kingdom, the United Nations Security Council held its first session on climate change and security.
Others are more cautious to make direct links between climate change and security such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its Forth Assessment Report or the UK-Treasury commissioned Stern Report on the economics of climate change. But can the empirical evidence support these claims? My research on climate change and security aims at examining potential security implications that are most likely to result from the impact of climate change.
Yet, there is another dimension to research on climate and security that relates to the area of energy security: Attempting to mitigate the consequences of climate change is likely to cause new conflicts, when forests are cleared for palm oil plantations, food prices rise as a result of increasing demand for biofuels and more droughts, or when non-democratic governments promote the development of nuclear energy as a means to substitute for fossil fuels.
In addition, I am working on how to measure the economic cost of not mitigating climate change. Click below on a presentation on the relationship between income and CO2 emissions:
