Intergovernmental organizations and climate security: advancing the research agenda

Abstract

Climate-related security challenges are transnational in character, leading states to increasingly rely on intergovernmental organizations (IGOs)-such as the European Union and the North-Atlantic Treaty Organization-for policy solutions. While climate security issues do not typically fit comfortably within the mandates of existing IGOs, recent decades have seen increasing efforts by IGOs to link climate change and security. This article reviews existing studies on IGOs' responses to climate security challenges. It draws together research from several bodies of literature spanning political science, international relations, and environmental social science, identifying an emerging field of research revolving around IGOs and climate security. We observe significant advancement in this young field, with scholars extending and enriching our understanding of how and why IGOs address climate security challenges. Yet we still know little about the conditions under which IGOs respond to climate security challenges and when they do so effectively. This article discusses the main gaps in current work and makes some suggestions about how these gaps may be usefully addressed in future research. A better understanding of the conditions under which IGOs respond (effectively) to climate security challenges would contribute to broader debates on climate security, institutional change, and effectiveness in international relations and environmental social science, and may facilitate crafting effective global solutions to society's most intractable climate security challenges.© 2017 The Authors. WIREs Climate Change published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. How to cite this article:WIREs Clim Change 2018, 9:e496. doi: 10.1002/wcc.496 INTRODUCTION S ocieties worldwide are currently being confronted by a new class of security challenges posed by climate change. Climate change is undermining the security of states and people in ways that are unprecedented in complexity and spatial reach. 1 Although there is ongoing academic debate about the causal linkages from climate change to conflict, [2][3][4][5][6] researchers and policymakers widely agree that climate change has exacerbated existing vulnerabilities in already unstable regions by shaping social, The copyright line in this article was changed on 22 January 2018 after online publication. Conflict of interest:The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article. political, and economic circumstances. [7][8][9][10] As climate security challenges are typically transnational in character, states are increasingly relying on intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) such as the European Union (EU), the North-Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), that is, formal, multilateral, or bureaucratic arrangements established to further cooperation among states (Ref 11,, for policy solutions. [12][13][14][15][16] Research on the mandates, behavior, and effectiveness of IGOs in addressing climate security challenges has burgeoned in response. ...

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