Climate Change, Arctic Security, and Methane Risks

Sep 5, 2016 | Chad Briggs
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Over the past year, the climate risks of methane (CH4) released from natural sources have attracted increasing media attention in scientific and media forums as “the Arctic climate threat that nobody’s even talking about yet.” Scientific journals have likewise run articles detailing the risks that methane, in addition to CO2, poses to atmospheric climate change, following scientific research indicating the “2 degree Celsius” limit of climate talks may be physically impossible. Methane therefore serves as something of an environmental “wildcard” in climate change risk assessments, posing the specter of abrupt environmental changes that move climate negotiations from diplomatic to security terms. And yet, despite the acute need to discuss methane as a security risk, such assessments have been sporadic, or not widely publicized due to the nature of the agencies conducting the assessments.

Some academic climate security discussions focused on violent conflict, especially in less developed countries, hypothesizing that changes to environmental conditions or resource stocks would incite violence, and security risks would therefore be judged according to this increased risk of interstate conflict or civil war. The DOE/USAF approaches, in contrast, used a human security lens, which assessed how sudden shocks from environmental factors could undermine systemic stability.