How Geopolitical Rivalry Affects International Climate Action

• In Event: International Environmental Action

Abstract

The study of environmental security is now a relatively well-established sub-field of political science, and its core insight, that environmental scarcity and ecological degradation can interact with social, economic, political, and institutional factors to influence the risk of conflict, violence, and instability, has been convincingly if not conclusively applied to the case of climate change. In particular, climate-linked resource scarcity is often alleged to induce large-scale population movements, in turn stressing existing institutional orders. Almost entirely unexplored by scholars, however, is the inverse hypothesized relationship between conflict, violence, and instability and international collective action to address climate change. This lacuna exists despite strong reasons to believe that the causal effect of rivalry and disorder on climate action may be greater than of climate change as an exogeneous influence on conflict and violence. In empirical terms, geopolitical rivalry and tension very dramatically derailed formal intergovernmental climate cooperation between the world’s two largest emitters, the United States and China, when Beijing unilaterally suspended climate dialogue in retaliation for former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 visit to Taiwan.
This paper aims to scope and help launch a new research agenda on climate geopolitics, building on several grants awarded for this purpose. Specifically, it will 1) briefly review the literature on geopolitical theory and international collective action, in the process placing it in the context of the environmental security literature; 2) outline major cases where geopolitics appears to have distinct implications for international climate action, including U.S. – China bilateral climate diplomacy and Europe’s energy mix following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; and 3) include an empirical analysis of how emissions inventories and adaptation actions in disputed territories are reported in Nationally Determined Contributions transmitted to the United Nations under the Paris Agreement framework. There is some evidence to indicate that states have begun to use these communications, one of the most universal reporting obligations in the international system, to bolster sovereignty disputes – a potentially significant empirical manifestation of the relationship between geopolitics and international climate policy. The paper will conclude by proposing a fuller research agenda, including eventual policy implications, with the aim of working toward a book-length manuscript.

Author

• Scott Moore, University of Pennsylvania