Reframing climate security: The "planetary" as policy context

Geoforum 155 (2024) 104102 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum Reframing climate security: The “planetary” as policy context Simon Dalby * Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University and Senior Research Fellow, Global Studies, University of Victoria, Canada A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T Keywords: Climate security Environment Geopolitics Hyperthreat Planetary Policy Polycrisis Security Much of the discussion under the label of “climate security” focuses on potential conflicts and disruptions in peripheral locations in the global south putatively triggered by climate change. If, however the analysis starts with climate, and the earth system as the point of departure for analysis, then things look very different. The speed and scale of climate disruptions is accelerating. Earth system science suggests that urgent action is needed to deal with climate change; waiting too long may make the issue impossible to address. Framing matters in terms of a planetary condition and focusing on climate rather than national security as the starting point for analysis suggests very different policy priorities. Reframing climate security to grapple with the planetary condition requires policies that first, facilitate adaptation, second work to make sustainable habitats for humanity and third, work to drastically constrain the use of fossil fuels urgently. Here, proposals for fossil fuel nonproliferation treaties and similar measures analogous with earlier arms control agreements. This provides the security sector with a much-needed direct engagement with the causes of climate change and its resultant disruptions while simultaneously reframing climate as a matter of planetary rather than national security. Tackling climate change is a matter of urgency, and failure to so effectively in the short run my derail needed efforts later, simply because the resources to do so are no longer available. “We have built a civilization based on a world that doesn’t exist anymore.” Katharine Hayhoe 1. Introduction Much of the academic literature and the policy proposals dealing with the links between climate and security focus on the potential for climate change to cause conflict in the global South. The potential spillover effects of conflict, economic disruption and forced migration have suggested obvious dangers to national security in many modern states (CNA ,2014). Hence the widespread discussions under the rubric of climate security. In much American thinking in particular, security has been “climaticized” in Oels (2012) formulation; attempting to render climate “governable” so that it doesn’t disrupt the operation of the global economy. Worse still some of the discussion perpetuates a “fortress mentality” where climate, or at least the disruptions that the climate security discussion worries about, are seen as some sort of external danger to which traditional national security measures are an appropriate response (White, 2014). But, and this is a key point in what follows, while much of the climate security literature deals with the supposed dangers and disruptions in the global south, little of it grapples with the larger Anthropocene disruptions as existential threats to modern societies (Hardt, 2023), or focuses on the dangers that fossil fuels pose to societies the global south that have done little to contribute to climate change but which are already suffering its impacts. Given the scale of climate change currently underway this is an oversight that needs to be corrected. How climate is securitized is a key consideration (Trombetta, 2023). In Boulton’s (2022) terms climate change is a “hyperthreat” and needs to be addressed by the security sector accordingly. It is crucial to recognise. “… that climate change is not just another variable to be added to an expanding security agenda or definition. It is not another “thing” or the newest buzzword that security and military actors will have to do or tackle. … Climate change affects the structural and historical conditions of human societies, systems, and relations. It changes and challenges everything as it reconfigures the physical world and, as such, it will affect every sector of human activity and increasingly impose itself on policy priorities, agendas, and practices.” (Charbonneau, 2024: 10) * Address: 245 Spinnaker Drive, Mayne Island, B.C. V0N 2J2, Canada. E-mail address: [email protected]. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2024.104102 Received 28 May 2024; Received in revised form 8 August 2024; Accepted 17 August 2024 Available online 21 August 2024 0016-7185/© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bync/4.0/). S. Dalby Geoforum 155 (2024) 104102 Cold war vintage security studies were concerned with societal survival when facing the dangers of nuclear wars, not least the climate disruptions of a “nuclear winter”; a focus on a disrupted earth system suggests an obvious analogy (Dalby, 2022). The contributions that the security sector might make to policy and analysis likewise are different. This is a matter of global, or more specifically planetary security, not “national” security focused on keeping external threats at bay with the threat of violence. This paper develops this argument, first noting the rise of attention within international relations scholarship to the novel material context of the Anthropocene, and the concomitant reformulation of social theory that is beginning to respond to this in formulating the human condition in terms of a planetary context. Subsequent sections outline a framework for reformulating climate security based on the global dangers outlined by earth system science and the adoption of an appropriate planetary framework for security thinking. Responding to those dangers the argument in what follows suggests that three key changes in security thinking are needed. First is that the ability to adapt to novel circumstances must be secured; this requires a shift from traditional modes of security thinking that focus on perpetuating existing social arrangements. Second, given the global environmental changes that are already accelerating, building flexible and sustainable habitats are now essential for human security. Third, security policies that have in the past dealt with the existential threat of nuclear war offer arms control analogies for tackling climate change. These could be usefully understood under the rubric of “fuel control”. A final section of the paper emphasizes the urgency of doing so, and the danger that so called “derailment” risks, might prevent effective long-term action to grapple with climate change. requires rethinking assumptions of the planet as a stable backdrop to the human drama. It also requires recognising that many relevant changes are not linear trends or gradual evolutions. Threats to the global ecosystem are immediate, serious and getting worse on an alarming trajectory heading to what is now frequently called a “hothouse world” (McGuire, 2022). This is the context in which security needs to be thought. Humanity no longer lives in the relatively stable world it has known through history, but infrastructure, economy and modes of thinking are still largely rooted in assumptions of a stable world, the period of the Holocene in earth system terms, of the last twelve thousand years. The new circumstances of a rapidly changing earth system present numerous dangers on the largest scale, loosely analogous to nuclear war dangers, a matter of macro-security in Buzan and Waever’s (2009) terms. There are analogies in security policies and practice that might be very useful in thinking about climate change and the larger transformations currently afoot, but as the rest of this paper emphasises, they require thinking very carefully about both the novel context and hence what it is that now needs to be secured. Analyses of the current rapid changes in the earth system are warning that tipping points are looming in the near future, where parts of the earth system, and climate is a crucial part of this, will flip into new configurations (Lenton et al., 2023). Even worse, crossing some of these tipping points may lead to runaway processes with cascading and compounding risks to human systems. The disruptions to agriculture and economic production systems are likely to be both rapid and severe. While some of these tipping points might be better understood as potentially reversable feedback mechanisms, clearly hysteresis applies in key cases; there are dangerous points of no return in the climate system, and avoiding these requires urgent action to scale back fossil fuel use (Hansen et al., 2023). If the West Antarctica Ice Sheet collapses, as present trajectories suggest it will, substantial sea-level rises will inundate port cities world-wide; numerous other effects will follow. Most human attention concerning the numerous heat records being broken in the last few years focuses on terrestrial temperatures, but as the El Nino/La Nina cycles suggest clearly, the oceans are key to atmospheric conditions; the earth system is what matters, not merely terrestrial trends. Industrial humanity is a key novel component in a dynamic planetary system, and this suggests that the planet itself is now the appropriate context for thinking about policy and what needs to be done to provide security for human societies in these new circumstances. While the term “planetarity” has a history in cultural studies (Spivak, 1999), and debates about post-colonial matters (Mbembe, 2021), notions of planetarity, or in Mbebme’s terms “planetary entanglement”, as the appropriate framing for policy discussion, have recently begun to be a focus in social theory too (Clark and Szerszynski, 2021). This engagement can provide a novel way, at least in security studies, to grapple with the appropriate contextualization for grappling with climate change. As Mbembe emphasizes it also has the benefit of challenging the Eurocentrism that structures so much geopolitical thinking, and hence policy advocacy (see also Grove, 2019). The planetary contextualization implies that the most important point in the climate security discussion is how to make these novel circumstances part of a wider conceptual shift so that security can be rethought in terms that get beyond the blind spots caused by modernity’s most pernicious dichotomy, that of humanity as separate from, or superior to, nature (Dalby, 2020a). The increasingly artificial world, with what is often termed an expanding technosphere, isn’t separate; it’s now a component part of the earth system. The most consequential “forcing mechanisms” that are shaping its future configurations are now human energy and production systems, not the Milankovich astronomical cycles of orbital mechanics that, until recently, determined climate conditions in the earth system. It follows that assumptions of a relatively stable climate and predictable weather patterns are no longer a basis for sensible security policy making. Unpredictable and extreme events are now the new normal, but these are accelerating and in danger of tipping the earth system into configurations unknown in human history, and in 2. Security in planetary context While the present might appear to be normal to those of us, scholars, policy makers and politicians who have lived in the period since the end of the Second World War, any serious discussion of climate change and other planetary disruptions has to start from the profound premise that the enormous scale of current transformations is truly novel (Rockstrom and Gaffney, 2021). This crucial point has been slow to penetrate security studies. The fact that there is no obvious parallel in earlier periods of human history with the great acceleration in human activities since the middle of the twentieth century, should, critics have repeatedly suggested, shift the focus of security studies to grapple with these new circumstances (McDonald, 2024). But despite the scientific evidence much thinking about global politics remains premised both on assumptions that the political lessons of the past are a good guide to what is coming, and that existing institutions provide the tools for coping with security difficulties (Albert, 2024). Understanding present circumstances as unprecedented, and as a moment of dramatic transition, rather than in any sense a normal human condition, helps with thinking about security too, while also focusing attention on what kind of future is being created by current practices (Buzan, 2023). The speed and scale of the current transformation of the earth system is such that numerous scholars have adopted the term the Anthropocene for the present period to mark both the scale and speed of these changes. Sketching out the parameters of dangerous boundaries to a stable earth system as the operating space for a global civilization has stimulated scientific inquiry and simultaneously raised the alarm about current trajectories (Steffen et al., 2018). The burgeoning discussion of earth system analyses is making it quite clear that humanity is living in new circumstances because of the fossil fueled mode of economy which now reaches into all parts of the earth system. It may have made part of our species rich and powerful, but the sheer scale of transformations set in motion have destabilized the climate system and much else (Lewis and Maslin, 2018). Both academic research and policy formulations, and what it is that policy makers might wish to secure, must be updated to make this new context of a dynamic and rapidly changing planet the premises for research and policy proposals. This disrupted world 2 S. Dalby Geoforum 155 (2024) 104102 which it is far from clear that human civilization will survive. The crucial point is that most discussions of security, international relations and international law concern themselves with human matters, institutional arrangements and political rivalries, but frequently take the material circumstances of the planet for granted. While some key contributions from security scholars are beginning to challenge this (Trombetta, 2023; Hardt, 2021) much more needs to done to challenge the division of academic labour which all too often reinforces policy silos where environment, and more recently climate change too, is marginalised from core economic and political decision making. Now, however, the earth system science and the notions of planetary boundaries providing a safe operating space for a complex civilization, are making it abundantly clear that the material circumstances are changing in numerous ways which offer a new context for policy and academic research (Richardson et al., 2023). Incorporating the planetary context directly into academic deliberations and practical policy formulations is, hence, as Blake and Gilman (2024) argue at length, long overdue. This needs to be done urgently because, even if tipping points aren’t triggered in coming years, rapid and disruptive change is now upon us, and policy must cope with simultaneously trying to slow down these changes while facilitating adaptations to this new set of circumstances. Change is the new normal. No longer can assumptions of human affairs be the only focus of security studies; clearly how human actions are changing the material context for humanity must be worked into the analysis and notions of law and sovereignty rethought to fit the new circumstances (Matthews, 2021). Ecological security requires thinking about how to facilitate ecosystem flourishing (McDonald, 2021), not just, as has been the case even in most discussions of sustainable development up until recently, managing the external world as a source of resources and a sink for wastes. As climate changes so species try to move to more conducive conditions. Given how frequently fixed territorial boundaries are the basis of contemporary political arrangements, having policies flexible enough to facilitate movement is a major issue. Thinking in terms of a planetary commons, of entities and regions that are global but essential to earth system stability, provides one mode of engaging with what needs to be done (Rockstrom et al., 2024). Traditional notions of conservation and protecting specific ecosystems from external disruptions are clearly inadequate frameworks for addressing the scale of contemporary changes, important though they obviously are in particular places (Mitchell, 2023). Tackling climate change as a pollution problem, the basic approach of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Paris Agreement, has not generated the initiatives needed to effectively constrain greenhouse gas emissions. Focusing on essential critical functions of the earth system as that which needs to be secured is very different from a framing of the issue that worries about disruptions to Southern states and their possible spillover effects elsewhere. The planetary boundary framework extended to global commons offers an obvious starting point focused on the overall functionality of the earth system. In effect this is taking McDonald’s (2021) notions of flourishing ecosystems as the object for ecological security and enlarging them to the planetary scale. Reversing this trend is key to long-term security for most societies. Small scale wars, non-state violence, the dangers of terrorist acts generated from the wild zones of the global south, and related matters frequently inform the climate security discussion even if the evidence that climate is triggering conflict is very limited (Goldberg, 2024). In some situations where climate stress might be thought to be likely to cause conflict it simply doesn’t, even if large scale humanitarian disasters sometimes do result (Busby, 2022). The larger science of climate risk also often occludes prior disruptions of environments in the global south, precluding an effective engagement with current social dynamics and hence misconstruing the causes of insecurity (O’Lear, 2024). Climate change in the form of droughts and floods clearly is a stressor on many societies, but how the stress is handled is key to determining as to whether disaster, conflict or some other outcome results (Buhaug et al., 2023). But the scale of disruptions and the costs of dealing with the economic fallout are clearly mounting. Dealing with climate change requires a recognition of both the urgency of dealing with the disruptive changes already in motion, and the necessity of thinking in new terms about policy priorities. Not least in terms of rethinking what needs to be secured and how a global civilization can simultaneously reduce the production of greenhouse gases and make urban habitats less vulnerable to the extreme weather events and economic disruptions that are already inevitable. Reducing their impact is key to security for populations in coming decades. There are numerous technical innovations becoming available (Dyer, 2024); if the planetary framing is taken as the premise for thinking and policy formulation then the task for academics working with security and policy formulation is to facilitate the adoption of novel systems not dependent on fossil fuels, rather than trying to perpetuate current economic arrangements. To slow down climate change and the resultant disruptions it is necessary to “green” many things by reducing fuel use, but also to design new infrastructure, cities and habitats to be less environmentally damaging while simultaneously being much more adaptable to cope with extremes and resulting economic disruptions. Greening the military is part of this given their large use of fossil fuels; transport and logistics use huge amounts of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel (Crawford, 2022). The rapid emergence of electrically powered drones in numerous battlefield roles in the Ukraine suggests that this is also already happening in combat technologies too. Likewise in most cases of combat environmental damage results quite directly from military action. Avoiding combat by both diplomatic initiatives and active peacebuilding activities is obviously a first priority. This is not to entirely discount the military in terms of responses to climate difficulties; they do have a role in aiding civil powers in disaster relief and reconstruction; the relationships are complex (Vogler, 2024). But overall, they are an institution that contributes to climate change, and in so far as geopolitical rivalries between major powers persist, they make these trends more difficult to tackle. Geopolitical rivalries make matters worse in part due to the resource mobilization for military preparation but also by reducing the impetus for cooperating on numerous matters (Toal, 2024). Increasing international cooperation, a matter running contrary to the recent pattern of political rivalries is key to making progress on climate change, but the alliances that might most effectively do this are far from clear. While the global South, most of whose states are on the receiving end of climate disruptions, have obvious national interests in reducing greenhouse emissions, there are numerous difficulties and conflicting priorities in lesser developed country coalitions on the international stage, not just the presence of petrostates among those nations (Saha, 2024). Better coordination and clarity about the necessity of basing development strategies on non-fuel-based energy systems will help ensure security for regimes and their populations. Arguments that the South should be “allowed” to use fossil fuels under climate change agreements, as a matter of justice, are no longer tenable in the face of accelerating climate change. Energy for whatever social forms “develop” 3. Climate dangers/planetary responses The most important point for current discussions of climate security is the most obvious; climate change is already happening, and the process is accelerating. Environmental security must be understood as a matter of the present, not a matter for future consideration (Dalby, 2022). What happens now in terms of climate policy will shape the future configuration of the earth system, and unless action to anticipate future difficulties happens, that future looks grim for much of humanity in the long run. Climate disruptions are already manifesting themselves in extreme weather, droughts, and storms. The consequences are becoming ever most costly as economic dislocations, disaster cleanup and reconstruction impinge on both governments and corporations. 3 S. Dalby Geoforum 155 (2024) 104102 there will have to come from non-fuel sources if any really meaningful mode of sustainability is to be attained. The urgency of climate change policy responses highlights questions of who or what is to be secured. Obviously fossil fuel infrastructure is a low priority in even the medium term; this is what needs to be phased out. Novel systems and keeping open the spaces for innovation is key rather than protecting that which already exists. Given the urgency of climate issues identifying key things and places that need protection is important, but not only climate is involved in this world where the term polycrisis is frequently invoked to emphasize other environmental disruptions, the extinction crisis, and the failures of international institutions to tackle pandemics and economic disruptions effectively, that also needs urgent attention (Lawrence et al., 2024). The absence of appropriate institutions to tackle the complexity of factors affecting a globalized economy makes all this difficult and puts more emphasis on security actors than would be the case should serious attention be given to the current crisis in its various manifestations. Focusing only on institutional innovation rather than incorporating this with a direct engagement with the changing geophysical context of the Anthropocene isn’t enough, despite the best efforts of organizations like the World Economic Forum to advocate for market flexibilities as the answer (Pasula, 2024). Here the planetary context is frequently forgotten in the assertion of ideological preferences for maintaining corporate power and the role of markets and their institutions. Success on climate must be measured in material terms, not in just in terms of institutional innovation, although those would seem to be needed urgently to facilitate necessary material changes and generate effective transition strategies to post-carbon economies. Transition strategies are needed both to facilitate rapid reduction of carbon fuels, and to head off potential risks where states use fuel pricing as a policy tool without effectively buffering the most vulnerable parts of their population (von Uexkull et al., 2024). Transition risks also have geopolitical implications should petrostates fail to anticipate reductions in demand for their products, potential price crashes in international markets and the budget consequences that will flow from changes in fuel demands. How this will play out in particular places is a matter of empirical research in particular situations (Scholten, 2023), but the overall conclusion is that being prepared is likely to lead to better outcomes. to perpetuate a fossil fuel based “our way of life”, a societal security of sorts, are already offering serious opposition to policy innovations needed to tackle climate change (McLaren and Corry 2023). While this state of political stability has been about providing the conditions for facilitating economic development, it is now the case that crucial parts of the development process and the policy frameworks it is embedded in are not ecologically sustainable. Change is already happening; the questions for climate security deliberations are how best to shape it to avoid the worst potential disasters and stop short of crossing the planetary boundaries, with all the dangerous tipping points and subsequent cascade risks that lie beyond (Richardson et al., 2023). Stopping short of the boundaries doesn’t mean that business as usual can continue; the disruptions that are already occurring are a major challenge to agricultural and economic systems and the risks are also mounting to both health and infrastructure in so called developed societies (European Environment Agency, 2024). The “responsibility to prepare” (Werrell and Femia, 2019) on the part of all security agencies given what is now known about what is coming may include things such as land use planning, and security agencies with large land holdings have a responsibility here. Greening bases and thinking about regenerative ecological practices must be part of military planning as the 2022 NATO strategic concept notes. But such initiatives work on a small local scale. Crucially, if earth system science is taken seriously, adaptation will have to involve structural change in economic systems, not minor cultural adaptations within a given economic system, which have so frequently been what “adaptation” has meant in the past (Watts, 2015). The major cultural changes must tackle both the profligate use of fossil fuels and the numerous other environmental disruptions currently changing the biosphere in so many ways. Neither will simple formulations of resilience, where the assumption is that systems will return to status quo ante after a disruption, be adequate policy frameworks to deal with large scale transformations of the future (Dalby, 2020b). The point of much of climate policy is to slow down change to make adaptations easier, and security thinking too needs to operate on this premise. But this is not a policy issue where a set of solutions will return societies to a status quo ante. The future will be different from the past; the point for policy and for analysis now is to shape the future so that the worst excesses of climate disruptions are prevented, and societies shaped to cope with what cannot now be avoided. All of which implies that prevention of future disruptions must be a key part of the policy agenda (King et al., 2021), not just reacting to disruptions when they occur. The 2015 Paris Agreement compromise of nationally determined modes of emission reduction isn’t getting the job done and novel measures are needed to enhance adaptation as well as rapid mitigation. The multiplicity of sovereign states that are recognised as having primary responsibility for tackling climate change under the Paris arrangements, and the frequency of rivalry and competing interests between them, presents a situation of pathological governance, in Paul Harris’ (2021) terms, when it comes to matters of climate change. In Chakrabarty’s (2022) terms humanity is still in a situation of one planet but many worlds. 4. A new climate security agenda If climate security is reframed in this context, taking earth system science seriously and recognising industrial humanity as a key part of the changing planetary context, what then might be needed in terms of appropriate novel policy frameworks? How might the future be shaped, and past frameworks updated to deal with new circumstances? This paper suggests that at least three innovations are needed. First, is the necessity of focusing on adaptability rather than maintaining existing economic arrangements; second, thinking about what kind of human habitats need to be built to cope with climate disruptions; and third a focus on providing the energy those habitats will need, but doing so while controlling and then eliminating the use of fossil fuels. But none of these will work very well unless policy makers can be brought to focus on imminent dangers, and here the security sector obviously has a responsibility to warn of the dangers in failing to make these transitions (King et al., 2021). 4.2. Sustainable habitats Focusing on modes of life that are consistent with the earth system boundaries requires thinking about the modes of consumption that are endangering earth system functions (McGuire, 2022). Modernity based on extensive fuel use and the current development model premised on economic growth and the expansion of consumption is obviously part of the problem that is driving climate change, but that model too is rendering people in many places insecure. A recent estimate suggests that one in thirty-four deaths worldwide comes from incidents with vehicles, and pollution from fossil fuels kills millions of people each year indirectly (Miner et al., 2024). This too is leading city governments to rethink their planning and priorities; reducing the use of cars in cities 4.1. Adaptability Securing the abilities to adapt is crucial in any framing of the issues that takes the condition of planetarity seriously; maintaining the existing order is not what needs to be done given its trajectory towards various tipping points. In security studies maintaining the economic status quo in conditions of “political stability” has been widely understood as the sina qua non for all other human endeavours. Indeed, efforts 4 S. Dalby Geoforum 155 (2024) 104102 has both the benefit of improved air quality and less death and injuries. Oslo has managed to nearly eliminate pedestrian fatalities by curtailing the use of automobiles in the city. Reduced automobility in cities is emerging as a policy preference with numerous security benefits, not least in improving quality of life and making urban structures greener and hence more resilient. This is not so easy in North American cities in particular, many of which were built in the twentieth century with vehicles as the first priority in planning processes. Climate security must engage with this directly even if transportation systems, consumption patterns, and land use planning seem a long way from traditional security thinking. Once again, reducing vulnerabilities is key to security, rather than heroic interventions after disaster strikes. Municipal governments have a role here in making their infrastructure much more robust in the face of growing weather and economic hazards, while simultaneously reducing fuel use. The overall shape of the technosphere is key here; making things that are sustainable and can be recycled is the opposite of the modern assumptions of nature separate from humanity. The planetarity premise requires that nature be worked with, rather than treated as something external that can be dominated and controlled, often with more engineering and concrete! Hence focusing on how things are built, in ways that don’t require interventions when extreme events happen, and which are not dependent on vulnerable supply chains, is key to tackling human security in the face of the disruptions that are accelerating. Calculations of the global resources needed so that all humanity can meet basic needs and not transcend crucial planetary boundaries suggest that this is all practically possible, but not if the current use of fossil fuels and the economic model it powers, continues into the future (Schlesier et al., 2024). Thus, people demanding the end to fossil fuels, and the dominance of road construction in transportation planning are acting in ways that promise more secure futures. This is contrary to much contemporary security thinking where pipeline and road construction protestors are seen as threats to contemporary states and their development models. Worse, climate protestors are being criminalised in some states, and the long sorry tale of assassination of “earth defenders” is part and parcel of contemporary environmental conflict (Menton and LeBillon, 2021). While much of the traditional discussion of environmental conflict focuses on rural resource shortages as a potential source of conflict, attention needs to be paid to how “development” projects cause violence (Selby, Daoust and Hoffman, 2022). This “slow violence” of enforced displacement as modernity intrudes on traditional farming systems and indigenous lands (Nixon, 2011, O’Lear, 2018), is also obviously a matter that links up with the increased focus on environmental dimensions of peacebuilding and post-conflict reconstruction (Ide, 2020). And likewise links back to other modes of international cooperation on such things as the Ramsar convention on wetland protection (Ndimele et al., 2024). All of which challenges the taken for granted assumptions in much of contemporary security thinking where ontological security, understood in terms of the perpetuation of a stable and continuous sense of identity as key to what needs to be secured, is assumed as the desideratum (Mattos and Henao, 2021). Clearly the fossil fueled mode of economic development, with the private automobile as a key component on what is defined as the good life (McLaren and Corry, 2023), must be challenged in the new cultural politics of sustainability. The planetarity framing and the urgency of tackling accelerating climate change require this “business as usual” notion of security to be abandoned in favour of building ecologically sensible futures. In military parlance this might be understood as shaping operations on the very big scale. other especially dangerous military systems, several international treaties have been formulated in efforts to control arms. While not all of them have been successful, and the arms control regime has been fraying of late, nonetheless there are models here that may be useful (Luymes, 2023). The post-cold war nuclear arms agreements did facilitate a very substantial reduction in the numbers of nuclear weapons in existence. Other agreements have constrained the production of things such as landmines, or at least did so prior to their widespread use once again in the Ukraine. Politicians of many stripes, if not the current generation of populist right-wing figures, are gradually accepting that fossil fuels are a problem, although many are still reluctant to initiate effective measures based on that recognition. Acceptance of common vulnerabilities is a first step to policies to tackle the danger. That recognition, at least, is more or less in place. While the COP process hasn’t succeeded in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, what was clearly novel in the 2023 conference is the sharpened focus on fossil fuel companies and states as the problem that needs to be tackled. This ironically coincides with the culmination of attempts by fossil fuel dependent states to coopt the whole United Nations Framework Agreement on Climate Change process. The 2024 conference is, as was the case in 2023, to be run by another petrostate, in this case Azerbaijan, but now it has become clear that these states are those that must be challenged to change their mode of economy. Fossil fuels are the problem if the planetarity framework is used to consider policy options. A key part of this framing involves making careful and consistent distinctions between energy and fuel (Dalby, 2024). Energy is clearly needed to power much of the urban civilization that now houses the majority of humanity. The point is to generate energy without burning fuel to do so. Combustion of fossil fuels is a key part of what is causing greenhouse gas accumulations in the earth system, and as such this must be tackled directly. While realist scholars of earlier periods came to the realization that nuclear firepower was just too dangerous to be used because of the scale of the destruction and societal disruption that would result, a similar shift in focus is urgently needed in thinking about firepower in terms of civilian combustion in the earth system (Dalby, 2022). Failure to grapple with the disruptions caused by continued widespread use of combustion leads to another form of assured destruction. Preventing this is now the priority for any formulation of climate security that is appropriately contextualized in terms of the planetarity condition. The security sector has experience in such matters of reducing the dangers of mutual vulnerabilities, and constraining firepower in terms of weapons has direct parallels in terms of reducing production and use of fossil fuels. Where cold war arms control measures were designed to reduce the dangers of an overabundance of firepower with all its dangers, reducing the proliferation of fossil fuel production will work to decrease the dangers of what is effectively another form of firepower, the widespread use of power gained from the combustion of fossil fuels to run contemporary economies. Widespread unrestricted use of fossil fuels has led to the rapid rise in carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide and methane in the atmosphere (Rockstrom and Gaffney, 2021). While the ocean has acted as a sink, absorbing large amounts of carbon oxide over the last few centuries it is now clear that it cannot remove all these combustion products as fast as they are being made. Humanity obviously needs energy to function, but the crucial question for the immediate future is how to get this without combustion. The dangers of too much firepower in superpower arsenals, has a fairly direct parallel in the over-abundance of fossil fuels in the earth system. Their production must be curtailed rapidly, a matter of controlling the industry and phasing it out, not just down, quickly. This is part of a new focus on supply side climate policy (Newell and Carter, 2024). Now what is obviously needed are several programs for what is probably best simply called “fuel control” to limit the combustion of fuel in the planetary system. Hence fuel control can be understood as loosely analogous to arms control. Arms control arrangements might very 4.3. “Fuel Control” Planetary security implies new arrangements, which may include rapidly expanding ideas such as non-proliferation treaties for fossil fuels (Newell, van Asselt and Daley, 2022). In the case of nuclear weapons and 5 S. Dalby Geoforum 155 (2024) 104102 usefully be used as models for fuel non-proliferation treaties to complement the Paris Agreement (Newell et al., 2022). Making that analogy stick with fossil fuels is not going to be easy, but the common dangers of climate disruptions which are hitting many societies suggest a shift in focus from assuming climate dangers are a matter of distant disruptions or future impacts. If fuel control is going to make sense as a policy framework, it does require a recognition on the parties to the agreement that there are mutual benefits to controlling particular technologies, and that possessing them doesn’t necessarily confer some advantage. Monitoring and confidence building measures to ensure compliance with a fuel non-proliferation regime also have obvious parallels with nuclear arms control. It is much easier to count tankers, trucks and refineries than greenhouse gas emissions. Given longstanding doubts about how emissions are counted and reported under the UN climate process (Yona, 2023), this is a considerable potential benefit in tackling climate change. With the current rapidly increasing monitoring capabilities driven by internet sensors and numerous satellites too, an emergent “planetary sapience” in Blake and Gilman’s (2024) terms, this is becoming easier. also be a form of derailment risk if it allows the continued use of fuel to be justified by the argument that there is a practical technical fix available. Failure to consider this technology in geopolitical context may overlook potential conflicts too, another important twist to the climate security discussion (Morrisey, 2024). Given the inadequacy of existing climate policy under the auspices of the Paris Agreement to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, the pressure on the part of many governments to gamble with measures under the guise of emergency action is obviously growing. The conflict risks should unilateral efforts emerge are considerable, which suggests that civilian operation of any such attempts would be essential to reduce the immediate concerns that climate policy is being explicitly weaponised. But, and this is a key point that must not be overlooked, present trajectories are leading towards climate disaster (Dyer, 2024). Hence geoengineering in various forms is now on the policy agenda; it is now already part of the climate security discussion; it remains to be seen if it will be intelligently approached. Getting governance arrangements in place ahead of efforts to implement these measures would be very sensible. Avoiding such drastic climate measures is an obvious policy priority, one best dealt with by quickly reducing fossil fuel use. If that is done then preparing for what cannot be avoided in terms of climate disruptions (King et al., 2021), must be the key focus of security policy designed for the long term. But at least so far despite the rapidly growing concerns among various military and security sector thinkers the urgency of tackling environmental change has failed to penetrate the corridors of power and either the corporate boardrooms of fuel companies or the rooms where consequential economic and foreign policy decisions are made. Seventeen years after Nick Mabey (2007) argued that security institutions have a key role in raising the alarm about looming climate change dangers, the European Environment Agency (2024) is making its case in terms of a “final wakeup call”. 5. Derailment risks Within the planetary framing the urgency of tackling climate change is now emphasized by considerations of potential derailment risks. If tackling climate change is delayed too long it simply may not be possible to deal with it. The fear is that if crises escalate then the resources devoted to immediate responses to disasters and disruptions will be diverted from efforts to facilitate transitions to more sustainable modes of economy (Laybourn et al., 2023). The case of the European scramble to replace Russian natural gas in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine focused on rapidly building new gas import infrastructure but may, in the process, have made transitioning off fossil fuels more difficult; in this case security was interpreted in traditional terms a matter of familiar routines focused on accessing fuel rather than innovating to reduce vulnerabilities to supply disruptions (Heinrichs, 2024). This is because of the locked in capital in the new facilities which are investments that must be paid for in coming years. The capital tied up in such infrastructure is not then available to facilitate building energy infrastructure not reliant on fossil fuels. The nightmare scenario is that governments facing growing difficulties will try to use fossil fuels to expand economies to try to provide resources for coping with disruptions but will in the process simply aggravate matters in the long run. The point here is not only that waiting to tackle climate sometime in the future may be making it more difficult, but that waiting too long may make it impossible to effectively change course at all. An obvious concern is that crises may reinforce the populist tendencies in international politics and undermine collaborative efforts to wean the global economy off fossil fuels (Millward-Hopkins, 2022). The longer the wait to focus on sustainability the worse it gets, but if the wait is too long then disruptions and short-term priorities may lead to a situation where climate disruptions accelerate, and the resources needed to reshape economies and societies to produce a stable ecosphere for civilization can’t be mobilized. Hence the urgency of addressing climate change while it is still possible. Failure to set societies on sustainable pathways leads inevitably to discussions of technical fixes, and solar geoengineering, in particular in the form of stratospheric aerosol injections to shade and cool the surface of the earth, looms. Given the potential dangers that this kind of interference with the climate system entails widespread opposition to its deployment is already evident. Clarifying the international legal situation on this point is now an important part of thinking about climate security, both to suggest the possibilities of a no-use regime which would indirectly pressure policy makers to get serious about decarbonization, and to anticipate possible responses should a state or large corporation start doing solar radiation management unilaterally (Gupta et al., 2024). But relying on the dubious promises of such technical interventions may 6. Conclusion: planetary security policy The formulation of the human condition as one of planetarity, of living in a rapidly changing world rather than on a fairly stable one, is this paper argues, a necessary conceptual shift in the taken for granted contextualization that structures security policy formulation. This alternative framing is a challenge to ontological security, the sense of an identity tied to a cultural continuity in a particular place (Mattos and Henao, 2021). The necessity of securing the ability to adapt runs counter to much traditional security thinking, but living in the Anthropocene makes this new focus on adaptability unavoidable. Innovations may indeed run into political obstacles when notions of societal security are invoked to resist change, and worse, portray activists and innovators as threats to existing modes of life (McLaren and Corry, 2023). But if security policy is to be fit for purpose rapid innovations are essential for effective climate action. Building fences to keep migrants out may be popular in some political circles, but it does nothing to tackle the root causes of climate dislocations. These are what security policies need to tackle. If a planetary framing replaces conventional notions of climate security other things follow immediately. Attention needs to be paid to the risks in trying to transition economies off dependence on fossil fuels too, which may have unanticipated geopolitical implications (Scholten, 2023). Climate change is urgent, but it is unfolding in a situation where multiple interacting crises need governance responses, the condition of polycrisis. Simultaneously thinking more carefully about habitats and how cities might be made secure for their citizens focuses on making a less vulnerable civilization. Novel technologies are proliferating and notions of more sustainable industrial practices likewise. All of which makes ensuring that these innovations can be implemented a high priority. Securing the ability to innovate and adapt is key, albeit not what much of conventional security thinking focuses on. At least not yet. Framing matters in terms of the planetary requires thinking about 6 S. Dalby Geoforum 155 (2024) 104102 geophysical change as the key contextualization that should be driving policy and politics. Fossil fuels aren’t the whole story of what needs attention, but they are a necessary but not sufficient component of the policy problem. Other things also need attention, but if fossil fuels aren’t phased out soon, climate change cannot be effectively tackled. Key to this must be the analytical and rhetorical disconnection of fuel and energy; treatment is needed for the ‘pyromania’ which still holds much of the world in thrall (Dalby, 2024). Energy is needed for human life, but burning fuel to get it cannot be sustained if a liveable biosphere is the long-term goal. 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