Professor Matthew McDonald, Dr Jonathan Symons1
1Macquarie University, Australia, 2University of Queensland, Australia
Biography:
Matt McDonald's research focuses on the relationship between security and climate change, the international politics of climate change, and critical theoretical approaches to security. He has published on these themes in a wide range of journals and is the author of Ecological Security: Climate Change and the Construction of Security (Cambridge UP, 2021), Security, the Environment and Emancipation (Routledge 2012) and (with Anthony Burke and Katrina Lee-Koo) Ethics and Global Security (Routledge 2014). He is currently completing an ARC-funded project on comparative national approaches to the climate change- security relationship, and leading the University research network, Climate Politics and Policy.
Abstract:
As the climate crisis deepens, policymakers are increasingly considering deliberate, large-scale interventions in climate systems. This includes ongoing negotiations over potential international regulation of solar geoengineering – the reflection of sunlight back to space to minimise climate harms. Such interventions are extremely controversial, not least for their claimed security implications. This paper surveys existing literature on the relationship between stratospheric solar geoengineering (SSG) and security and identifies six distinct categories of identified security impacts: i. shifts in the social construction of climate security, (e.g. climatic events are attributed to state interventions); ii. strategic implications of uneven SSG capacity development, (e.g. implementation threats use as a diplomatic lever); iii. tensions arising from deployment disagreements (e.g. interstate tensions potentially escalating to military conflict); iv. security concerns from militarisation of SSG infrastructure (e.g. surveillance equipment being integrated into SSG planes); v. impacts of SSG interventions (e.g. uneven impacts on food security); vi. security risks from anti-SSG activities (e.g. sabotage or counter-geoengineering efforts). For each category, we evaluate the underlying causal mechanisms, assess plausibility via comparison with relevant historical precedents, assess the likelihood of necessary enabling conditions and identify relevant knowledge gaps.