Description:

Under what circumstances might climate change lead to negative security outcomes? Over the past fifteen years, a rapidly growing applied field and research community on climate security has emerged. While much progress has been made, we still don't have a clear understanding of why climate change might lead to violent conflict or humanitarian emergencies in some places and not others. Busby develops a novel argument – based on the combination of state capacity, political exclusion, and international assistance – to explain why climate leads to especially bad security outcomes in some places but not others. This argument is then demonstrated through application to case studies from sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. This book will provide an informative resource for students and scholars of international relations and environmental studies, especially those working on security, conflict and climate change, on the emergent practice and study of this topic, and identifies where policy and research should be headed.

Dr. Joshua Busby is an associate professor of public affairs, a distinguished scholar at the Strauss Center, nonresident fellow with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and a senior research fellow at the Center for Climate & Security. He is on leave in 2021–22 serving as a Senior Advisor for Climate at the U.S. Department of Defense.

Dr. Busby has published widely on climate change, global health, transnational advocacy movements and U.S. foreign policy for various think tanks and academic journals, including International Security, International Studies Quarterly, Security Studies and Perspectives on Politics. His first book, Moral Movements and Foreign Policy, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. His second book, AIDS Drugs for All: Social Movements and Market Transformations, with co-author Ethan Kapstein, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013 and won the 2014 Don K. Price Award (the American Political Science Association's award for the best book on science, technology and environmental politics).