Elements and value-added of a human security approach in the study of climate change

Abstract

What can human security analysis add in the study of climate change?To present climate change as an issue of human security means to focus on the impacts and implications in the lives of ordinary people, not only in the agendas of armies, states or national economies. It means, for example, looking at life expectancies and patterns of nutrition, morbidity and mortality, not only at whether stressed populations might explode into armed conflict -the extreme 'Darfur' scenario. That sort of scenario and such preoccupations often reflect traditional state-centred and military-focused concerns more than person-focused ones. That poor people in most cases seem to lack the organization, cohesion or resources to initiate armed conflict does not mean that their plight is not an issue of-human-security. As part of a humanist perspective, the human security approach means looking at more also than aggregates of monetized economic variables, but rather at the contents, objective and subjective, of the lives of all of the people -at their 'do-ings' and 'be-ings', the constraints that they face, the real opportunities that they have, or lack, and the meanings that they experience -not only at the parts and the persons that are counted in money terms.Security language is commonly tacitly oriented to prioritising and safeguarding the interests of powerful groups within nation-states. 'Human security' is in origin a counter-concept, that attempts to turn the frequently predominant implicit association of 'security' with the security of the state, to a focus instead on the security of human persons, seen as real individuals in the round, and not only as bodies and statistics. The attempted turn involves, first, looking at the security of distinct human individuals, in the circumstances of their particular lives at the intersection of many different forces. Why focus on this set, human persons? Why not ignore some of them? Or why not also include the security of bacteria, algae or clouds? Evidently, human security thinking is a humanist approach, sister to the perspectives of human rights and human development; better put, it is a sister face of a humanist perspective. Further, with all human individuals taken as the set of primary objects of value concern, there is implicitly or typically an interest in the security of the human species, including future generations. According to some authors, there should also be a concern with the security in some respects of human groups, cultures and meaning-systems, since persons are group members (see e.g. Roe 2010). Securing one thing (such as a group) may, however, sometimes be in competition with securing others (such as individual persons). Different types of human security approach reflect different stances on how to conceptualise human identity, human interests, and how to weigh competing considerations. In effect there are different viewpoints about the nature of being human.