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The public as an audience for the securitisation of climate change: facilitating conditions at the identification stage

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Abstract

The literature on the emergence of climate change as a security problem notes the lack of studies of audiences that enable the successful construction of climate change as a security issue. While previous studies consider different types of audiences, we focus on public opinion, which provides moral support for securitising moves, to investigate what individual and country level conditions facilitate individuals to identify climate change as a threat to humanity or a risk to themselves. We do so by analysing public attitudes towards climate security in 24 nations covered by the 2015 Pew Global Attitudes Survey. We differentiate between the logics of securitisation and riskification, and different referent objects such as humanity and self. We then identify the patterns of threat and risk perception towards different referent objects in climate security. We find that individuals’ personal insecurities translate into perceived personal risk from climate change while perceived threats to humanity from climate change are related to cognitive resources and sophistication.

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Notes

  1. United Nations (2007) Security Council Holds First-Ever Debate on Impact of Climate Change on Peace, Security, Hearing over 50 Speakers, available at http://www.un.org/press/en/2007/sc9000.doc.htm (last accessed on 30 December, 2021).

  2. Recent waves of other cross-national surveys, such as the World Values Surveys, include a diverse set of countries but do not include questions concerning climate change. Other surveys, such as the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) or European Social Surveys (ESS), primarily cover advanced industrialised countries, which may produce country and culture-specific results that cannot be generalised to other contexts (Lee et al. 2015). The survey questions we used to measure perceived harm and risk of harm to individuals and the humans around the world appeared only in the Spring 2015 Pew survey.

  3. Corry (2012) defines threat as the possibility of direct or indirect harm to a valued object, which is why we use ‘perceived harm’ questions to measure threat perceptions.

  4. In fact, most measures of perceived threats or risks use survey items that ask individuals how serious a threat is (see Leiserowitz 2006), how likely it is that the respondent, their family, or their society are threatened by something (see Goodwin et al. 2005), and how worried they are that they personally may become a victim (see Hetherington and Suhay 2011).

  5. Although we coded those who responded as being very concerned that climate change will harm them personally at some point in their lifetime as those with a high perception of personal risk, some of these individuals may be concerned that the point in their lifetime when climate change is harming them is now. But they may also be very concerned that they will be harmed sometime in the future, which is the definition of risk we use. Likewise those who report perceiving climate change as harming humans around the world in the next few years could also be conceptualised as those identifying climate change as a ‘risk to humanity’. Although the question is not ideal to measure these concepts, it is closest to ideal when compared to the existing survey questions conducted across countries.

  6. This is an additive index combining three survey questions on whether respondents believe media organisations should be able to publish news about 1) large political protests in the country, 2) economic issues that might destabilise the country’s economy, and 3) sensitive issues related to national security, or whether they think that the government should be able to prevent media organisations from publishing articles about these issues under some circumstances.

  7. The literature finds that, especially in the United States, political ideology is an independent variable that explains attitudes towards climate change (Dunlap et al. 2016; Lu and Schuldt 2015). However, as the Pew survey included an ideological self-placement variable for only 10 of the countries included in our analysis, we omitted this variable.

  8. Note, however, that these interactions were not replicated if perceived threat to humanity was the dependent variable.

  9. While we used data on exposure to climate change-related natural disasters at a national scale, studies utilising data on natural disasters at a more local scale might find different effects on threat and risk perceptions.

  10. We tested whether identified personal risk and threat to humanity influenced support for making major lifestyle changes to solve climate change and support for limiting greenhouse gases. Both dependent variables were measured on a binary scale (0/1) and we used all the control variables in the models presented in Table 1. Both perceived threat to humantiy and personal risk had significant positive effects on both types of climate action variables (see supplementary Appendix Table A4 for results). These patterns show that individuals who identify climate change as a personal risk and threat to humanity tend to support two broad categories of climate action. However, this finding should be further supplemented by studies analysing public support for specific policy measures during the mobilisation stage.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported within the scope of the scientific research project which was accepted by the Project Evaluation Commission of Yasar University under the project number and title of ‘BAP 053: Public Attitudes toward Climate Change’.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of International Relations, Yaşar University, Üniversite Caddesi, Ağaçlı Yol, No: 37-39, Izmir, Turkey

    Defne Günay

  2. Department of Political Science, Trinity College Dublin, 3 College Green, Room 4.05, Dublin 2, Ireland

    Gizem Arıkan

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  1. Defne Günay
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Correspondence to Defne Günay.

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Günay, D., Arıkan, G. The public as an audience for the securitisation of climate change: facilitating conditions at the identification stage. J Int Relat Dev 25, 635–656 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-022-00256-0

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