Inaugural Lecture of the 2024 Olof Palme Guest Professor

The Stockholm Centre for International Law and Justice, in cooperation with the Department of Law at the University of Gothenburg and the Faculty of Law at Lund University, invites you to the

 

Anne Orford

The Securitization of Climate Change

Commentator: Professor Jonas Ebbesson, Director of the Stockholm Environmental Law and Policy Centre

The event will be opened by President Astrid Söderbergh Widding

 

Description:
A growing number of states and their legal advisors are turning to security as a frame through which to address the challenge of climate change in international fora, including the UN Security Council. While many states and civil society groups are uneasy about the push to treat non-military or non-traditional issues as threats to international peace and security, the trend towards treating climate change as a security threat appears to be gaining momentum. This lecture will explore what is at stake in securitizing climate change. It will consider how the relative strengths of states and other actors in different international fora have influenced the direction of the securitization project, evaluate the motivations and arguments made by the proponents of these changes, and consider the consequences of framing climate change as a security challenge or a matter for international criminal law. It will consider the geopolitical implications of securitizing climate change, and the effect of treating great powers (many of whom are also great polluters) as legitimate managers of the climate issue, while shifting the focus of global attention and action away from more broad-based negotiations associated with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process. More broadly, it will ask what it means to adopt a ‘wartime mentality’ in response to climate change (as advocated by John Kerry, President Biden’s former climate envoy), and consider whose security is enhanced by entrusting climate politics to the military and intelligence communities.

Bio:
Anne Orford is Melbourne Laureate Professor and Michael D Kirby Chair of International Law at Melbourne Law School, and Visiting Professor of Law and John Harvey Gregory Lecturer on World Organization at Harvard Law School. She researches and teaches in the areas of international law, international dispute settlement, international economic law, climate change, and the history and theory of international law. She is a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and a past President of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. She has been a Visiting Legal Fellow at the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and an international expert adviser on climate change and international law to the Pacific Islands Forum. Her latest book, International Law and the Politics of History (Cambridge University Press, 2021), was awarded the 2022 European Society of International Law Monograph Prize for Excellence in International Law Scholarship.