Make room for me! A study of how climate change and environment landed on Spanish national security

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how climate change and the environment have been incorporated into Spain’s security documents and policymaking. We have examined forty-plus documents issued by Spain’s National Security Department to identify the evolution of the climate and environmental discourse. A keyword filter helped to single out the eleven most environmentally relevant documents, which have been qualitatively analysed to better understand the context in which environmental language is used. In our work we identify how both common practices of security analysts and policy-makers different level policies have been strongly influenced by environmental knowledge, and, therefore, incorporated new considerations into security policies as well as. Our findings suggest that climate is not the only challenge incorporated into security documents. Other environmental issues such as desertification, access to water, energy transition or loss of biodiversity are also included, which implies that they are part of a broader concept of national security more in line with the new challenges of the twentity-first century.

KEYWORDS:

• National security
• climate change
• Spain
• environmentalisation
• climatisation
• securitisation

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the editors for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Between 2009 and 2019 the hectares burnt in Spain were 893,737, caused by 3179 fires; the surface burnt in Italy was 804,221 in 4374 fires, while in Greece 527,886 hectares were burnt in 2066 fires. Source: European Forest Fire Information System (EFFIS). https://effis.jrc.ec.europa.eu/.