Climate Change and Revisiting Security from Traditional State-Centric to Human Security and Beyond

Abstract

Traditional security premised on state and its military apparatus has got itself emasculated in the face of continuing emergence of new kind of threats from the non-traditional and nonstate centric sources. Climate change and deepening environmental crisis along with other crises like demographic change, incidence of poverty, and rise of fatal and dangerous diseases have already thrown down the gauntlet to the realist paradigm of security built on state. Out of all these what stands out as the greatest threat to entire humankind is the climate change with all its devastating consequences like global warming, sea level rise, floods, cyclones and storms not only killing and uprooting poor people from their homeland etc. but also dragging people into an unsafe, insecure and sepulchral uncertainty of life. The answer to the fundamental question of survival and security and of providing a dignified way of life to the individuals was tried to be found out in various world summits on climate change from Kyoto to Paris summit but it was not sufficient to keep the temperature of the earth down at 1.5 degree Celsius at the pre industrial level by reducing emission of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as agreed to by the world leaders. Climate change inextricably connected with security and development based on fossil fuels necessitates a rethinking that urges upon all to view the earth, both animate and inanimate not mechanically as mere instruments to redound to human wellbeing, security and primrose way of life but they are co-constitutive of each other’s life tied in the web of togetherness or being together as propounded by the proponents of worldly security.