Rising seas, sinking futures

Abstract: The issue of climate change initially emerged on the UN Security Council’s agenda in 2007 during an open debate on climate change, energy and security. Since then, there have been several debates held on the topic, which have attracted significant academic attention. In 2023, a debate was held in the UN Security Council on sea-level rise and its implication for international peace and security. The aim of this study is to investigate how the construction of climate change as a security threat has evolved in the UN Security Council debates between 2007 and 2023. The study will apply the securitization theory and conduct a discourse analysis using the WPR approach to analyze meeting records from the 2007 and 2023 debates. The analysis demonstrates two identified thematic findings. Firstly, there are ongoing divergent views on whether climate change falls within the mandate of the UN Security Council and secondly whether the issue of climate change should be seen as a future, present or existential threat. The results demonstrate that the construction of climate change as a security threat has undergone a process of securitization, thus confirming the established pattern in the previous research. This thesis further emphasizes that a wide range of member states now recognize climate change as an existential threat in the 2023 debate, aligning with the framing of the issue made by SIDS in the 2007 debate.