Is global climate change likely to become a significant source of violent conflict, and should it therefore be seen as a national security challenge? Most Northern governments, militaries, think tanks and NGOs believe so, as do many academic researchers, on the grounds that increased temperatures, changing precipitation patterns and rising sea levels will worsen existing social stresses, especially within poor societies and marginal communities across Africa and Asia. This book argues otherwise. The first collection of its kind, it brings together leading scholars of Anthropology, Geography, Development Studies and International Relations to provide a series of critical analyses of mainstream thinking on the climate-security nexus. It shows how policy discourse on climate conflict consistently misrepresents the causes of violence, especially by obscuring its core political dimensions. It demonstrates that quantitative research provides a flawed basis for understanding climate-conflict linkages. It argues that climate security discourse is in hoc with a range of questionable military, authoritarian and developmental agendas. And it reveals that the greening of global capitalism is already having violent consequences across the global South. Climate change, the book argues, does indeed have serious conflict and security implications – but these are quite different from how they are usually imagined. This book was published as a special issue of Geopolitics.

This timely Handbook on Digital Business Ecosystems provides a comprehensive overview of current research and industrial applications as well as suggestions for future developments. Multi-disciplinary in scope, the Handbook includes rigorously researched contributions from over 80 global expert authors from a variety of areas including administration and management, economics, computer science, industrial engineering, and media and communication.

The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of a large body of research examining the linkage between environmental scarcity, violent conflict, and cooperation. However, this environmental security polemic is still trying to deliver a well-defined approach to achieving peace. Studies are being undertaken to find the precise pathways by which cooperative actions are expected not only to pre-empt or moderate resource conflicts but also to help diffuse cooperative behaviour to other disputed issues. The recognition that environmental resources can contribute to violent conflict accentuates their potential significance as pathways for cooperation and the consolidation of peace in post-conflict societies. Conceived as a single and reliable reference source which will be a vital resource for students, researchers, and policy makers alike, the Routledge Handbook of Environmental Conflict and Peacebuilding presents a wide range of chapters written by key thinkers in the field, organised into four key parts: Part I: Review of the concept and theories; Part II: Review of thematic approaches (resources, scarcity, intervention, adaptation, and peacebuilding); Part III: Case studies (Middle East, Iraq, Jordan, Liberia, Nepal, Colombia, Philippines); Part IV: Analytical challenges and future-oriented perspectives. Enabling the reader to find a concise expert review on topics that are most likely to arise in the course of conducting research or policy making, this volume presents a truly global overview of the key issues and debates in environmental conflict and peacebuilding.

Water is a major global issue that will shape our future. Rarely, however, has water been the subject of literary critical attention. This book identifies water as a crucial new topic of literary and cultural analysis at a critical moment for the world's water resources, focusing on the urgent context of Israel/Palestine. It argues for the necessity of recognising water's vital importance in understanding contemporary Israeli and Palestinian literature, showing that water is as culturally significant as that much more obvious object of nationalist attention, the land. In doing so, it offers new insights into Israeli and Palestinian literature and politics, and into the role of culture in an age of environmental crisis. Hydrofictions shows that how we imagine water is inseparable from how we manage it. This book is urgent and necessary reading for students and scholars in Middle East Studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, the environmental humanities and anyone invested in the future of the world's water.

This topical Handbook explores the emergence of climate change as an international security issue, the threats it poses, and the political and academic debates it has prompted. Framing climate change as a security issue, it explores the ways relevant actors, states and international organizations have conceptualized climate security and its associated threats.

This book explores the relationship between climate change–induced migration and conflict in Bangladesh – one of the most ecologically fragile countries in the world. It explores why people migrate from their original place of land and how the migration of people with a different background to an ethnically distinctive region due to environmental changes can become a source of conflict and violence between the host peoples and migrants. The volume focuses on the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), which has experienced long-standing ethnopolitical conflict due to the settlement and migration of the Bengali people from the plain land of Bangladesh. This settlement and migration were mainly caused climatic events such as floods, cyclones, sealevel rise, and disasters. It traces the history of the ethnic conflict in the region and presents key findings from the field, as well as the dynamics of everyday politics in the region. This volume also highlights how internally climate-displaced people generate violence and civil strife in the major urban cities through their settlements in slums. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of environmental studies, human geography, migration and diaspora studies, public policy, social anthropology, and South Asian studies.

There is overwhelming evidence that the climate is changing. It is the poorest countries and people who are the most vulnerable to this threat and who will suffer the most. This book shows how increasing urbanization and growing poverty levels mean that it is imperative to ask how climate change might impact on asset accumulation and food security for the urban poor. It demonstrates how these three, often separate foci, can be brought together to frame a holistic urban adaptation approach. Furthermore, although much has been written about climate change, limited evidence exists in southern Africa of how climate change has been integrated in urban planning. The authors explore the urban climate change nexus linking asset adaptation, climate change science and food security through several case study cities. These include Cape Town, George and Khara Hais (South Africa), Lusaka (Zambia), Maputo (Mozambique), Mombasa (Kenya) and Harare (Zimbabwe). The results shed light on how this nexus might be explored from different perspectives, both theoretical and practical, in order to plan for a more resilient future. Climate Change, Assets and Food Security in Southern African Cities comprises ten chapters which focus on southern African cities, with each chapter written by highly experienced academics, research-focused practitioners and professional planners. Although the book concentrates on southern African cities, the insights which are presented can be used to understand other urban centres in low and middle-income countries outside of this region and around the world.

This book examines how the armed forces of the United States and Australia have responded to the threat posed by climate change to national security. Drawing on established securitisation frameworks (‘Copenhagen’ and ‘Paris’ Schools), the author uses a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques to systematically examine more than 3,500 speeches, policies and doctrinal articles since 2003. Importantly, the author undertakes an examination of the intersection between the political and the military spheres, probing the question of how ideology has influenced the military’s uptake on the issue. In this context, the author identifies the difficulty of an ostensibly apolitical institution responding to what has become both a hyper-political issue and an unprecedented security threat. A close examination of the key political actors – their intent, outlook and political mandate for broader climate action – is therefore crucial to understanding the policy freedom and constraints within which military leaders operate. The book consists of eight chapters divided into four parts, focusing on: perspectives and methodological insights; empirical case studies; case study comparison; and concluding observations. • Offers a rare and systematic examination of military climate policy by a military officer from Australia• Identifies a divergence of Australian military climate policy from that of the US military during the Obama Administration• Develops a unique method that quantifies climate security, enabling a graphical representation for quick and ready reference ideally suited to policy-makers

The last twenty years have seen a rapid increase in scholarly activity and publications dedicated to environmental migration and displacement, and the field has now reached a point in terms of profile, complexity, and sheer volume of reporting that a general review and assessment of existing knowledge and future research priorities is warranted. So far, such a product does not exist. The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Displacement and Migration provides a state-of-the-science review of research on how environmental variability and change influence current and future global migration patterns and, in some instances, trigger large-scale population displacements. Drawing together contributions from leading researchers in the field, this compendium will become a go-to guide for established and newly interested scholars, for government and policymaking entities, and for students and their instructors. It explains theoretical, conceptual, and empirical developments that have been made in recent years; describes their origins and connections to broader topics including migration research, development studies, and international public policy and law; and highlights emerging areas where new and/or additional research and reflection are warranted. The structure and the nature of the book allow the reader to quickly find a concise review relevant to conducting research or developing policy on particular topics, and to obtain a broad, reliable survey of what is presently known about the subject.

Climate migration, as an image of people moving due to sea-level rise and increased drought, has been presented as one of the main security risks of global warming. The rationale is that climate change will cause mass movements of climate refugees, causing tensions and even violent conflict. Through the lens of climate change politics and securitisation theory, Ingrid Boas examines how and why climate migration has been presented in terms of security and reviews the political consequences of such framing exercises. This study is done through a macro-micro analysis and concentrates on the period of the early 2000s until the end of September 2014. The macro-level analysis provides an overview of the coalitions of states that favour or oppose security framings on climate migration. It shows how European states and the Small Island States have been key actors to present climate migration as a matter of security, while the emerging developing countries have actively opposed such a framing. The book argues that much of the division between these states alliances can be traced back to climate change politics. As a next step, the book delves into UK-India interactions to provide an in-depth analysis of these security framings and their connection with climate change politics. This micro-level analysis demonstrates how the UK has strategically used security framings on climate migration to persuade India to commit to binding targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The book examines how and why such a strategy has emerged, and most importantly, to what extent it has been successful. Climate Migration and Security is the first book of its kind to examine the strategic usage of security arguments on climate migration as a political tool in climate change politics. Original theoretical, empirical, and policy-related insights will provide students, scholars, and policy makers with the necessary tools to review the effectiveness of these framing strategies for the purpose of climate change diplomacy and delve into the wider implications of these framing strategies for the governance of climate change.