What is climate security? Framing risks around water, food, and migration in the Middle East and North Africa

From academics to practitioners, many voices have amplified an increasingly popular narrative posing a climate–conflict–migration nexus. This essay reviews the literature on climate security, exploring the human security impacts of climate change in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) with particular attention to the scholarly literature on vulnerability and adaptation. It also examines the policy implications of discourses that frame water, food, and climate-induced migration as security threats. This review highlights how incorporating human security perspectives from the fields of development and environmental justice into security studies more adequately illuminates complex issues of “climate security.” Drawing on the human security perspective, this review uses empirical material from the MENA to illustrate the enhanced analytical utility of moving beyond state-based framings of climate security to include communal and individual well-being. These alternative understandings of climate security offer promising venues for assessing differential vulnerability and adaptive capacities in the MENA region. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Water as Imagined and Represented Human Water > Water Governance.

Duke Scholars

Author Erika S. Weinthal Environmental Sciences and Policy