The penultimate chapter explores the future of academic inquiry on climate and security and how the field of international relations ought to change. I explore several areas where the climate security field will need to develop new approaches and insights, mostly related to the challenges of writing about the future. This includes: how academics can be useful to policy and the need to move beyond the simple phrase of “thread multiplier”; the significance of the end of “stationarity” and what that means for scholarship going forward; the question of what baselines we use for identifying normal climatic conditions and how far back we can go to identify deep structural drivers; that scholars need to explore more fully the links between human security and state security; and that runaway climate change would make all of these security challenges worse and, hence, mitigation needs to be considered a security concern in its own right. Finally, I suggest that the broader field of political science needs to elevate climate change to a systemic structural factor like anarchy and think about what this means for the discipline and for the world.

How then can we understand the links between climate change and security? I begin with my understanding of security before reviewing the virtues and limits of the research on environmental security to date.

This chapter explores the emergent practice of climate security. I survey how the practice of climate and security has evolved over the last fifteen years, starting with a review of the variety of climate security challenges policymakers have identified, how policymakers have responded to climate security challenges thus far, and concluding with a section on what can and should be done to address climate security going forward.

The climate crisis – the worsening climate crisis described in Chapter 2 – and the failure of governments and other actors to govern it effectively are very largely a consequence of the pathologies of international relations, national politics and human nature described in Chapters 3–7. These interacting, overlapping and self-reinforcing pathologies are extraordinarily persistent because they have deep historical, institutional and psychosocial roots. What is more, they are premised on anachronistic assumptions and perceptions of the interests of the actors whose behaviors cause and exacerbate the climate crisis, and whose changed behaviors are needed to mitigate climate change. As such, alleviating the pathologies of climate governance requires a variety of prescriptions, as considered and outlined in Chapters 8 and 9. The prescriptions point to the types of policies and approaches to climate governance that will be required. This chapter outlines what some of those policies might look like and considers the potential prospects for climate governance going forward.

Chapter 1 establishes the Human–Environmental–Climate Security (HECS) framework and the context that links climate change and the Syrian conflict. Over the past few decades, a climate–conflict nexus has emerged drawing on narratives of collapse, and it has more recently been applied to the Syrian case. The author questions this line of reasoning given Syria’s history of climate, water, and food insecurity, arguing that government policies were at the heart of Syria’s vulnerabilities in the buildup to the uprising. To evaluate this central claim, the book introduces a new theoretical approach: the HECS framework. This introductory chapter shows that a new multidisciplinary framing is needed to examine the claim that climate change caused the conflict in Syria.

Over the past few decades, a climate–conflict nexus has emerged which draws on narratives of collapse, and it has more recently been applied to the Syrian case. This book has questioned this line of reasoning given Syria’s history of climate, water, and food insecurity, arguing that government policies were at the heart of Syria’s vulnerabilities in the buildup to the uprising. Chapter 6 argues that the war in Syria has intensified the patterns of human insecurity outlined in the previous decade. Rather than building intrinsic resilience, the current postwar reconstruction phase is paving the way for regime resilience on the basis of structural inequalities while increasing the broader population’s vulnerability, particularly the refugee population. By centering the narrative on vulnerable populations, the HECS framework provides an in-depth analysis of the human-security impact of the environment, including poverty, unemployment, marginalization, and the failure of sustainable development. The HECS framework could, therefore, be helpful for others moving forward. It shows that policy choices matter for dealing with climate change. This understanding of climate vulnerability and resilience is a critical contribution to international policy debates on the need to optimize regional and local responses in the face of global warming.