How are policies on energy transformation and climate security related? A comparative global typology.

Germany’s polarizing position on Nordstream 2, Poland’s reluctance to phase out coal energy, France’s preference for nuclear energy powered by Uranium from Western African coun-tries and the health implications of South East Asian haze smog caused by palm oil farming-related slash-and-burn agriculture applied on Sumatra are all energy issues with security implications. Meanwhile, national energy transformation levels under the Paris Agreement remain insufficient – even after the 2020 updates Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) were due (Climate Analytics 2021). This moves the world towards more pronounced climate change. This affects human security and, if not properly approached, can promote conflict. Clearly, energy policy decisions have security implications. National security policies increasingly take a position on climate security issues. Do these positions influence national energy policies? Do nations’ climate vulnerability levels have an influence as well? What role does state capacity play? Climate vulnerable states may react more ambitious. Yet, state capacity may intervene on this link, because energy transformation and climate security policies require resources. Furthermore, states may either opt to react to climate-related threats by adaption or mitigation. While the first can involve preparations by security policy, the latter involves tasks for energy policy actors. In this case, trade-offs between energy transition and security policy may arise from scarce resources. Studies have focused on what drives national climate and energy strategies. Comparative stocktakes of national climate security policies exist as well but do not capture post-Paris developments or analyse small samples. Equally, these contributions have not put the observed climate security policies into a broader national energy policy perspective. This contribution focuses on national climate and energy policy choices together. To do so, it joins two strains of research. The first focuses on national climate security policies. The sec-ond analyses NDCs from 2015 and the 2020 update round as official statements about na-tional climate and energy policies. This study builds on the by far broadest and most up-to-date stocktake of national climate security policies by analysing all available high military planning documents published between 2000 and 2020 – currently over 350 documents from 93 countries around the world. The analysis was conducted as Framework Content Analysis (Hackett and Strickland 2019) and will be used to establish a global typology of climate security policies. In a second step, a global typology of NDCs and ambition levels of energy policy is added. Results of these two analyses are merged to present a global 2-by-2 matrix of national energy and climate security strategies to identify nations with ambitious/less ambitious energy and ambitious/less ambitious climate security strategies. This typology reveals whether and in which countries energy and security policies take a common stand on climate issues. It will also show, whether climate vulnerability and state capacity influence policy ambition levels. This typology is presented as tool to reveal “odd” national combinations of energy and security policy. Finally, some nations with particularly ambitious or low energy transformation ambitions are selected and discussed. Climate Analytics. 2021. https://climateactiontracker.org/. Hackett, Alison, and Karen Strickland. 2019. https://doi.org/10.7748/nr.2018.e1580.