Rethinking Geopolitics: Climate Security in the Anthropocene Simon Dalby Wilfrid Laurier University Abstract Climate change has become a matter of security in recent policy discussions. The scale of the transformations we are living through is slowly dawning on policy makers. But the implications for both security and policy making in general of our new geological conditions, our living in the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene, have yet to be thought through carefully. The basic geopolitical premises in security thinking are now in need of a radical overhaul in light of the insights from Earth system science. Simplistic assumptions of environmental change leading directly to conflict are misleading at best and dangerous at worst. Climate security discussions now have to engage directly with global envi- ronmental change and with Earth systems science in particular. Climate security in the long run is not a matter of envi- ronmental change causing political difficulties, but rather a matter of contemporary political difficulties causing accelerating climate change. Climate change is a production problem, not one that can be managed in the terms of traditional environmental thinking; security thinking needs to focus on the implications of this rethinking of traditional geopolitical assumptions. Policy Implications • Climate security has to be thought through in terms of the new geological circumstances of the Anthropocene. • Recognizing that we are making future environments is now key to the new geopolitics. We are literally shaping the future; business leaders and politicians now need to act on that premise. • The new geopolitics is about what kind of world we are making; economies that don’t further destabilize the cli- mate are key to future security for all. • Dealing only with peripheral political symptoms rather than the economic causes of climate change will danger- ously postpone the necessary reinvestment in green economies. Securing the climate Recent reports from authoritative sources have repeat- edly expressed alarm about the pace and scale of envi- ronmental change. Clearly extreme events, whether heatwaves in Russia, droughts in the US, floods in Paki- stan, typhoons over Taiwan and The Philippines, unusu- ally heavy rainfall in the UK or the extraordinarily intense air pollution in Beijing at the beginning of 2013, have attracted attention. The longer-term trajectories are, as a major World-Bank-sponsored study by the Potsdam Insti- tute (2012) argued, seriously worrying given the rapid rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Major financial institutions are warning their clients that climate change may have major negative implications on their invest- ment portfolios. The American military in particular is starting to think carefully about how to plan for contin- gency operations to deal with disasters and related politi- cal instabilities as well as protecting their facilities from the changing climate, and in the case of the Navy in par- ticular, rising sea levels (Briggs, 2012). All this is now coming under the new rubric of climate security. While this is encouraging in that climate change is get- ting some attention, and serious planning is underway to cope with some of the obvious symptoms, much of the discussion still rests on conventional assumptions about environment and the geopolitical context within which change will supposedly play out. At least so far, the dis- cussion of climate security is about preparing to deal with some serious weather disruptions, political instabilities and the possible knock-on effects of food shortages in the poorer parts of the world. One recent report suggested that the possibilities of climate change difficulties might be at least as serious as the prospect of nuclear prolifera- tion, and as such needs to be thought about in terms of a major military risk analysis (Mabey et al., 2011). But, as the rest of this article will argue, given how profoundly the Earth system is being changed, climate security now requires rethinking of the geopolitical premises that underlie conventional invocations of security. Global Policy (2014) 5:1 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12074 © 2013 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy Volume 5 . Issue 1 . February 2014 1 Research Article