Securitising Climate Change: An Existential Crisis for the European Union and CSDP

Abstract

Speaker: Sezen Kaya-Sönmez The EU has faced many security challenges over the last couple of decades, such as economic instabilities, refugee crisis, terrorism, radicalisation, regional conflicts, energy shortages, pandemics, etc.; the Union is also threatened by the emergency of environmental hazards, including climate change. It is seen that the Climate issue is securitised within the EU to the extent that it’s uttered almost as a macro-security concern. Climate change has been explained to have a threat-multiplier effect on conflicts, instabilities, and societies since 2008; thus, climate change must be tackled in an emergency modus. Accordingly, this paper first aims at how climate change as a security threat is constructed as a “threat multiplier”; in other words, how climate change is macro-securitised in the EU’s official security papers. In other words, the research examines how climate change is constructed as a threat to EU integration and shows the importance of considering climate change within foreign and security policies. Secondly, this paper aims to analyse how this macro-securitisation and the related climate change policies impact the functioning of the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) with a particular focus on the operational aspect of CSDP. More specifically, the research will look at how climate change policies impact and get impacted by the EU’s operations and operational capacity. In conclusion, this study argues that climate change has an effect on how the EU operates in its CSDP and EU’s integration process and discusses the extent to which climate change has an impact on the effectiveness of the EU’s defence initiatives, operations, and policies.