CLIMATE CHANGE AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS: A FIVE-PRONGED RESEARCH AGENDA.

• Author: Sending, Ole Jacob

INTRODUCTION

Climate change has moved from the margins to the center of international politics. From being one among many issues or fields alongside poverty reduction, health, trade, etc., it is now becoming a master frame that will shape foreign policy and relations between states on a par with security and economic interests. Although there is still uncertainty about future climate policy responses, scholars of world politics need to better reflect on climate change within existing theoretical frameworks, and to develop new ones.

Clearly, there is a long tradition of research on specific aspects of climate change. A significant effort has gone into studying the role of nonstate actors in international climate negotiations, regime formation and efficiency, and the link between climate change and violent conflict. (1,2,3) Indeed, strategic planners at the Pentagon were first movers in seeking to assess how climate change may affect the security of the United States. (4) However, climate change is a marginal issue for what most students of world politics deem to be the major fields of IR research, such as systemic shifts in the international system, the status of sovereignty, the drivers of foreign policy, or the endurance of alliances and functioning of international institutions. A survey of five major IR journals indicates that climate change is not on their radar (see Table 1). Between 2015 and 2019, only 0.76 per cent of the articles in these journals were about climate change or related topics.

Josh Busby, Jessica Green, and Thomas Hale made similar observations in 2017. (7,8) The fact that the situation has not changed since then is surprising, given that two years packed with international climate politics have passed and that climate change raises a range of questions about the development of world politics. How, for example, will the United States engagement in the Middle East change as oil and gas lose their importance? Will we see a comparable geopolitical competition for renewable energy? Will poor countries that are disproportionally hit by climate change succeed in demanding compensation from rich industrialized countries? How will climate-induced migration, potentially on a large scale, affect relations between states? What will happen to the norms of sovereignty when the territories of some states become submerged or uninhabitable? By ignoring climate change, IR scholars run the risk of not being able to understand and explain what will be a defining aspect of global affairs in the coming decades. In the worst case, the indifference of the mainstream IR literature towards climate change could be interpreted as ignorance or even a form of implicit climate skepticism.

In the remainder of this article, we outline five broad areas of research that we believe deserve greater scholarly attention. Our starting point is not normative, but analytical: we are interested in better understanding of how the interests of, and relations among, states will be affected by climate change. In addition to the direct impacts of climate change, the fact that it is at the top of the international political agenda will affect states and relations among them in significant ways.

SOVEREIGNTY

Climate change challenges a core principle of state sovereignty under international law, namely territorial integrity The disappearance of the ice on Greenland would result in a 6-meter sea level rise, while the melting of the ice in Antarctica would cause the sea level to rise by around 60 meters. (9) Some South Pacific island states are, therefore, set to disappear entirely, while Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, and other countries may need to relocate millions of people. Moreover, changes in a state's territory may also affect its maritime claims, as exclusive economic zones at sea are calculated based on the shape of coastlines.

International legal scholars now debate how international law, and the concept of sovereignty, may evolve in the Anthropocene, where climate change alters territorial boundaries and where core assumptions about sovereignty based on control over a (stable) territory are being undermined by climate change. (10) This also extends to claims about maritime jurisdiction. The International Law Association notes, for example, that "sea level rise has the potential to impact significantly the spatial extent of national claims to maritime jurisdiction." (11)

While the literature on the evolving concept of sovereignty is extensive, theorizing sovereignty in light of climate change will require new conceptual tools. (12) This is so because violations of sovereignty are typically thought of as the consequences of the behavior of specific actors, through invasion or other territorial infringement. But sovereign control over a territory may be equally challenged by climate change, in the form of extreme weather and rising sea levels. Moreover, geoengineering--efforts to manipulate the climate to reduce global warming, or to change the local weather--will have adverse effects, potentially forming a new area for rivalry and conflict. (13) More knowledge is needed about how such developments will affect defense planning in the name of sovereignty and territorial integrity.

SECURITY

The effects of climate change on state security have been discussed extensively over the last two decades. The discussion has focused on how it may affect violent conflicts in developing countries, where scholars have different views on the causal relation between climate change and conflict. (14,15) Other effects have been discussed under various headings, such as human security or food security, where a consensus of sorts has emerged that climate change works as a "threat multiplier." (15,17,18) There is also considerable research on how climate change may affect specific cases of...