JSPES, Vol. 47, No. 1-2 (Spring-Summer 2022)
pp. 63-75

Is Climate Change Crisis a New Global Security Threat? Evidence from the Quality of Government Dataset

Huong Le
University of Alberta

Over the past decade, climate change has become one of the most important issues to citizens in countries around the world. As the Covid-19 pandemic has demonstrated, no country is immune from actor-less threats like novel disease outbreaks and climate change. When combined with other security threats like transnational terrorism and ubiquitous cyberattacks, it becomes one of the key global security threats. However, while there have been many theoretical arguments that the overall impacts of climate change on international security are inevitable, and predictable posing escalating risks to stability and security, with potentially far-reaching consequences, the empirical evidence of this link is limited. This study takes an important step in filling this gap by measuring the effect of climate change on the global security quantitatively based on the quality of government (QoG) dataset. Contributing to the growing body of work on climate change and global security, this study suggests that (1) climate change crisis can be considered an existential global security threat; and (2) developing countries are the most impacted by climate change and the least able to afford its consequences.