What is the major issue concerning environmental security today?
Dr Michelsen: The major current issue is the ongoing breakdown in the Liberal International Order – a global loss of faith around this order that is unable to cohere around common policy directions. Climate Change is the international security crisis par excellence - the crisis that may end the international as we have known it for the last 50 years. It binds together every issue that scholars of security should be interested in –sovereignty, global institutions, state power, where the security threats of the future will be located, global injustices, the legacies of imperialism, the social construction of history and national antagonism, the sources of hard power and soft power, morality and exploitation. It will transform the shape of states, indeed some will disappear altogether.
[…] We are seeing unfold before our eyes a shift away from the normative principles that could facilitate the kind of effective action on the international stage, we urgently need to combat climate change. In a sense, the challenge of environmental security reflects the breakdown of the global security order as such. This is coming together with a reckoning with complex histories of exploitation and violence centred in the West and experienced globally, which undermines any claims to leadership by states like Britain or America, or across Europe. And is accompanied by rising powers, often driven by reactionary nationalist narratives, who do not wish to pay for the huge economic costs of reducing emissions.
What key issues do world leaders need to agree upon at the COP28?
Dr Michelsen: The community of international actors present a remarkably united front in rejecting any binding climate commitments. The reasons for this need to be acknowledged. They are rooted in a combination of real grievances: the distribution of environmental risks reflects inequitable global histories. They are also rooted in a meaningfully changing international order. The new power dynamics of that order matter, as well as the changing normative principles underpinning it. Transactional logics are going to be necessary to any climate agreement in today’s weakened international order, and the outcomes will be significantly smaller than desired. World leaders need to get what they can and reach a binding agreement as soon as possible. That is the key principle, but it needs to be based on an acceptance of the limits of the international we have and appealing to self-interest.
For some global communities, the end of the world is real (think Tuvalu) – so any action is good action. Sadly, we also must lower our expectations. A target of 1.5 or even 2 degrees is probably no longer achievable, with all the destructive impacts that is forecasted. I hope that world leaders agree to accept failure as a necessary step towards future more binding action. This means a formal acceptance that fundamental changes to global political and economic realities are happening, whether we like it or not, and the international community needs to plan for them, and account for their costs as part of the coming reality. A greater emphasis on concrete planning for the scale of future costs, I think, is what COP can realistically achieve.
What role may non-governmental organisations play in COP28?
Dr Michelsen: Non-governmental organisations’ (NGOs) roles have been to socialise the challenge of climate change as an international ethical norm. NGOs have been quite successful in doing this. The problem is that the speed at which it is becoming socialised internationally as an ethical norm does not appear to be fast enough to save the parts of the world that will be most impacted by climate change. Life-changing fundamental impacts are going to happen for millions of people around the world, unfolding with incrementally greater impacts over the next several decades. Social movements have a role and responsibility to pressure receptive governments into taking binding action. But, we should be under no illusion; it’s nation-states decision-making that matters.
What have been the main challenges at COP28?
Dr Michelsen: The principal challenge is the same the international community has always faced the scale of the problem and inability to mobilise individual state actions against their short-term interests. The sense that no state is yet able to accept the scale of costs necessarily to make the changes required to limit climate change to acceptable levels. However, the proximate challenge is that created by the rise of a nascent alternative to the Liberal International Order in reactionary internationalism, linking New Right actors within democracies in Europe, to autocracies, theocracies and other cultural identitarian populists world-wide. This COP will be marked also by the impacts of two significant wars, in Ukraine and in Israel and Palestine, which are accentuating in different ways the cleavages that are rupturing international order. All this will make cooperation and global agreement incredibly challenging.
In your opinion, do you think COP28 will be successful?
Dr Michelsen: No, it has a limited chance of success on its own terms. The time is not ripe for effective negotiation, because there are simply too many structural cleavages in the international order. The most important being between the still standing proponents of the Liberal International Order and the anti-globalist alternative ‘reactionary internationale’ linking Russia, China, India, Turkey and religious autocracies in places like the Middle East. Also, between the developed and developing world those responsible for the majority of climate change and those experiencing the majority of its impacts.
However, each COP is a triumph, even in failure, because it sustains the presence of climate change as an international issue. Whilst I am not hopeful that COP28 will individually make great progress towards combating climate change, we can hope that its likely failure will be a springboard for future binding targets.
How might the international community plan to monitor and enforce agreements, if any are even made at COP28?
Dr Michelsen: The international community is currently too fractured to enforce anything. Only recognition of the real costs coming down the road for every state will drive steps towards an enforceable programme. I suspect we are far from such a situation today.
What actions does the international community need to implement worldwide to address climate security?
Dr Michelsen: The key step needed to combat climate change is a rapid shift towards renewables, on a huge scale. The hosts of COP28 are therefore an ironic harbinger of its likely outcomes.
Could you provide insights into ongoing projects you are working on related to environmental security?
Dr Michelsen: I have recently been working on tropical storms and hurricanes, as an international challenge that is becoming observably more destructive as a consequence of climate change. Projected increases in global rainfall and sea level rise, as well as changing storm pathways, mean anthropogenic climate change is expected to result in increasingly destructive hurricanes. The security implications of these changes are sharply felt in places like the Caribbean, as well as across the globe, where the resilience of small island developing states is particularly exposed to these destructive impacts. International cooperation around tropical storms is of critical importance to human life and economies in some of the most vulnerable states in the world, and functions as a kind of bell weather for wider international climate security cooperation