Heading Toward a New Criminogenic Climate: Climate Change, Political Economy and Environmental Security

The coming “climate divide” will represent a further extension of the inequitable state of the affairs of humanity and the planet, one in which the conditions producing climate change are contributed to most overwhelmingly by the business as usual features of rich consumer societies, but which will impose the greatest costs and resultant miseries on the already poor and newly developing nations. In addition to these international inequalities, such issues will also resonate unevenly in the domestic setting. For example, not only will those with the fewest resources have the greatest difficulties in mediating the impact of climate change and its attendant shocks, but climate change will also stimulate a number of deeply criminogenic forces. Together, such interconnectivity between the global and local suggests that approaches to sustainability and resilience need to be broadly conceived in both scope and application and need to be genuinely transformative rather than operating within current ambitions for “business as usual”. Moreover, the magnitude of these issues underlines the importance of formulating an approach to sustainability and resilience that genuinely embeds the “green” of environmental concerns within the “blue” of security policy.