Climate Change, Migration and EU Security

The end of cold war saw a widening and broadening of the security agenda and the emergence of new security threats. The complexity, interdependence and unexpectedness of current threats have broadened and deepened our understanding about security. In a growing borderless world, new security challenges cannot be solely tackled with security policies, but call for a comprehensive approach, compulsively including development policies. The question is: Does the European Union (EU) have adequate responses and instruments to meet the new challenges of a rapidly changing security environment? Increasingly, climate change has evolved as a major security threat because of its multiplying effects. It has caught the world’s political imagination changing the way the subject has been perceived in the recent past. This paper (with a non-European view point) analyzes the impact of climate change on EU security. Europe may not experience direct problems related to climate change within its own territorial land, but its indirect impact would endanger its strategic interests around the world, especially in North Africa and the Middle East, that are politically fragile, unstable and acutely vulnerable to climate change. While identifying areas under the threat which have direct or indirect bearing on the European security, the paper in particular tries to study the climate change-induced forced migrations caused by militarization and violent competition over scarce natural resources, food crisis and wars originating in different parts of the world. Finally, to deal with climate change, the paper also recommends ‘mitigation’ and ‘adaption’ strategies that are believed to be most appropriate for the EU to apply