Skip to main content

Main menu

  • Home
  • Our journals
    • Clinical Medicine
    • Future Healthcare Journal
  • Subject collections
  • About the RCP
  • Contact us

Clinical Medicine Journal

  • ClinMed Home
  • Content
    • Current
    • Ahead of print
    • Archive
  • Author guidance
    • Instructions for authors
    • Submit online
  • About ClinMed
    • Scope
    • Editorial board
    • Policies
    • Information for reviewers
    • Advertising

User menu

  • Log in

Search

  • Advanced search
RCP Journals
Home
  • Log in
  • Home
  • Our journals
    • Clinical Medicine
    • Future Healthcare Journal
  • Subject collections
  • About the RCP
  • Contact us
Advanced

Clinical Medicine Journal

clinmedicine Logo
  • ClinMed Home
  • Content
    • Current
    • Ahead of print
    • Archive
  • Author guidance
    • Instructions for authors
    • Submit online
  • About ClinMed
    • Scope
    • Editorial board
    • Policies
    • Information for reviewers
    • Advertising

Climate change and security

Paul Rogers
Download PDF
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7861/clinmedicine.9-2-108
Clin Med April 2009
Paul Rogers
Bradford University
Roles: Professor of Peace Studies
  • Find this author on Google Scholar
  • Find this author on PubMed
  • Search for this author on this site
  • Article
  • Info & Metrics
Loading

Abstract

Climate change was originally expected to have its main impact on countries in temperate latitudes which, because of their relative wealth, would be best able to cope. It is now far more likely that much poorer states in the tropics and sub-tropics will experience severe impacts. This is compounded by the widening socioeconomic divide and the combination of these divisions, with environmental constraints, will have a profound impact on human security. The dangerous response to the prospects of mass migration and radical social movements is to attempt to maintain control without addressing underlying problems. Instead, there is an urgent need to embrace new concepts of sustainable security.

Key Words
  • climate
  • migration
  • poverty
  • security
  • tropics

Until the early 1990s, most research into climate change indicated that the regions of the world most likely to be affected were those in the north and south temperate latitudes. While problems of rising sea level and increasingly violent weather could well be severe, at least the countries affected would be those that had strong economies and would be best able to cope. Britain, for example, might get warmer, wetter and windier but it could adapt, even if with some difficulty.

Part of the reasoning for this view was that archaeological, and other, evidence suggested that during previous instances of climate change the world's tropical and sub-tropical regions appeared to have been buffered from the main effects being experienced in the temperate latitudes. When Britain was covered in ice sheets 11,000 years ago, the climate of tropical Africa was not much different to today.

Over the last decade that view has changed and there is now a consensus that the tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world will be hugely affected by climate change. Sea levels will rise, the increasing intensity of tropical storms will be far more devastating than the recent hurricanes hitting New Orleans and Burma, and there will be major changes in rainfall patterns including a potential ‘drying out’ of some of the richest tropical croplands.1

These trends alone are serious, but they are paralleled by a global economic trend that four-fifths of the world's population is increasingly marginalised. Although the recent decades of the globalised world economy have witnessed impressive economic growth, the distribution of the resulting wealth has been extraordinarily unbalanced. Rather more than a billion people have benefited greatly but most of the rest have not. The poor are not getting poorer, but most of the world's population is not sharing in the bounty of the new wealth, and this includes a substantial majority of those in the tropical and sub-tropical regions that are going to be hit hard by climate change.

There is an added factor in that one of the impressive development successes of recent decades has been the huge improvement in education, literacy and communications across the world. While this has been greatly welcome, especially as the benefits are at last being experienced by women as well as men, one inevitable consequence has been an increasing awareness of marginalistion. People are now much more likely to know that they are being excluded from socioeconomic progress. There are many consequences of this, not least the innumerable examples of social unrest affecting many of the interior provinces of China, and the extraordinary re-birth of the neo-Maoist Naxalite rebellion that now affects almost half of all the Indian states. Another indicator is the increased pressure of migration, especially into Europe and North America, as people desperately seek a better life.

These are trends that are already underway, but they will be hugely exacerbated unless climate change is controlled. The great risk is that climate change will be seen more and more as a security issue for the elite communities of the world, with a strong tendency to ‘close the castle gates’ rather than address the core issues of socioeconomic divisions and environmental constraints.

Thirty-five years ago the economic geographer Edwin Brooks wrote of the risk of a ‘crowded glowering planet of massive inequalities of wealth, buttressed by [a] stark force yet endlessly threatened by desperate people in the global ghettoes’.2 There is a strong echo of those words in the heavily protected gated communities in many cities, or the bodies of would-be migrants from North Africa washed up on the Mediterranean shores of Europe.

It is common for military thinktanks to ‘securitise’ climate change as they seek to preserve the security of their own societies, but this is both blinkered and inadequate. One of the implications of the September 11 2001 attacks and the consequent problems of the war on terror is a failure to recognise that modern advanced societies are hugely vulnerable to radical social movements that may be increasingly driven to extreme actions by desperation, anger and bitterness.3

The current western approach to international security is best described as the ‘control paradigm’ that seeks to maintain control rather than address the underlying problems. Global challenges demand global responses rooted in sustainable security.4 This involves concerted and persistent policies to reverse socioeconomic divisions with urgent action to prevent the excesses of climate change and increased aid to the weaker societies that are unable to cope with those aspects of climate change that are already inevitable.

  • © 2009 Royal College of Physicians

Reference

  1. ↵
    Rind D. Drying out the tropics. New Scientist, 6 May 1995.
  2. ↵
    Brooks E. The implications of ecological limits to growth in terms of expectations and aspirations in developed and less developed countries. In: Vann A, Rogers P, Human ecology and world development. New York: Plenum Press, 1974.
  3. ↵
    Rogers P. Losing control: global security in the 21st century. London: Pluto Press, 2002.
  4. ↵
    Oxford Research Group. Global responses to global challenges. Oxford: ORG, 2006.
Back to top
Previous articleNext article

Article Tools

Download PDF
Article Alerts
Sign In to Email Alerts with your Email Address
Citation Tools
Climate change and security
Paul Rogers
Clinical Medicine Apr 2009, 9 (2) 108-109; DOI: 10.7861/clinmedicine.9-2-108

Citation Manager Formats

  • BibTeX
  • Bookends
  • EasyBib
  • EndNote (tagged)
  • EndNote 8 (xml)
  • Medlars
  • Mendeley
  • Papers
  • RefWorks Tagged
  • Ref Manager
  • RIS
  • Zotero
Share
Climate change and security
Paul Rogers
Clinical Medicine Apr 2009, 9 (2) 108-109; DOI: 10.7861/clinmedicine.9-2-108
del.icio.us logo Digg logo Reddit logo Twitter logo Facebook logo Google logo Mendeley logo
  • Tweet Widget
  • Facebook Like
  • Google Plus One

Jump to section

  • Article
    • Abstract
    • Reference
  • Info & Metrics

Related Articles

  • No related articles found.
  • PubMed
  • Google Scholar

Cited By...

  • No citing articles found.
  • Google Scholar

More in this TOC Section

  • The follow-up of renal transplant recipients by telephone consultation
  • Paper use in research ethics applications and study conduct
  • Climate change: how grave the threat?
Show more Climate Change

Similar Articles

FAQs

  • Difficulty logging in.

There is currently no login required to access the journals. Please go to the home page and simply click on the edition that you wish to read. If you are still unable to access the content you require, please let us know through the 'Contact us' page.

  • Can't find the CME questionnaire.

The read-only self-assessment questionnaire (SAQ) can be found after the CME section in each edition of Clinical Medicine. RCP members and fellows (using their login details for the main RCP website) are able to access the full SAQ with answers and are awarded 2 CPD points upon successful (8/10) completion from:  https://cme.rcplondon.ac.uk

Navigate this Journal

  • Journal Home
  • Current Issue
  • Ahead of Print
  • Archive

Related Links

  • ClinMed - Home
  • FHJ - Home
clinmedicine Footer Logo
  • Home
  • Journals
  • Contact us
  • Advertise
HighWire Press, Inc.

Follow Us:

  • Follow HighWire Origins on Twitter
  • Visit HighWire Origins on Facebook

Copyright © 2021 by the Royal College of Physicians