The Climate Agenda and the Climate Security discourse: the role of the non-state actors in Europe and the United States

In 1962, with the book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson expressed her basic argument that the environmental change by anthropogenic activities needs to be viewed with extreme caution as we destroy the systems that support us. Carson’s book contributed to the growth of the “deep ecology” movement that expressed the relationship between all living things and systems. In 1972, the apolitical club of Rome mobilized the Volkswagen Foundation to fund an MIT team for its project “on the Predicament of Mankind”. The findings of this research provided the basis for Donella Meadows’ book, The Limits to Growth, which sold 12 million copies in thirty-seven different languages. The book introduced the concept of anthropocentric climate change to a mass audience while it made environmentalists, scientists, and policymakers to think of environmental problems in large-scale terms and as dynamically interconnected. During 80’s, the environmental issues penetrated the security studies and in 1983 Richard Ullman associated the population growth, environmental quality, world hunger and human rights with the United States’ security. The “redefining of security” had started and in February 1994, the journalist and travel writer, Robert Kaplan, rejected the conventional security agenda with his article The Coming Anarchy. In Kaplan’s own words: “It is time to understand ‘the environment’ for what it is: the national-security issue of the early twenty-first century.” This dramatized illustration of the relationship between environmental degradation and international security got the attention of US-President Bill Clinton who invited Homer-Dixon and the so-called Toronto Group to work on issues of environmental change and its security implications. The group’s main finding was that several types of environmental scarcity can cause civil wars. During this period, NATO, with Javier Solana as its Secretary General (1995–1999), enriched its diplomatic tools with an environmental agenda. In 1997, NATO’s Founding Act with Russia referred to the need for cooperation on defence related environmental issues. After ten years, Javier Solana, as the first EU foreign policy chief, raised political awareness of the security implications of climate change. In 2008, Solana and the European Commission jointly published the paper ‘Climate Change and International Security’, which theorizes climate change as a threat to the EU. As a follow up, the 2016 EU Global Strategy highlighted environmental issues and considered the EU a crucial actor for tackling climate change. Rachel Carson, the Club of Rome, Donella Meadows, Robert Kaplan, Javier Solana, NATO and EU, are non-state actors who contributed to the consolidation of the environmental security concept. In this paper we offer an overview and critically discuss how various non-state actors contributed to make known the anthropogenic climate change and its consequences. We also describe how these non-state actors contributed to the “deepening” of security by introducing climate change in the security debate.