Editorial: Debating ecological security in new perspectives

The Editorial Team welcomes you to Issue One of New Perspectives 2023 with a debate about Ecological Security (McDonald, 2021). This might seem an unusual place to start our examination of 2023, given the ongoing crisis in Ukraine continues to exert its gravitation pull on the Central and Eastern European region. Likewise, rising populism continues to place democracies under stress with significant ramifications for European institutions. Disinformation and economic stressors criss-cross the CEE space, as the lingering consequences of the pandemic intersect with the impacts of the major European conflict. Notwithstanding the turbulent character of the 21st century life (Michelsen and Bolt, 2022), it is all too easy to forget that the geopolitical insecurities that shape Europe today take place in an ecology in common, where our conditions of possibility are far from the stable state we might desire.

Central and Eastern Europe faces many direct vulnerabilities from climate change, as temperatures rise and ecosystems are disrupted, which accentuate and intersect with other security concerns. Droughts and Floods, Forest Fires and Heatwaves have all become more common. Temperatures in Europe have been rising faster than any other region in the world. It has often been noted that climate change presents an ethical and political problem of unique scale. The idea that we, collectively, now have an agency in determining the climate of the planet as a whole has implications that are difficult to process, let alone act upon. Climate Change represents a political challenge different from any other: It’s not just about the impact we may have on our immediate or regional environments. Our ecological actions or inactions in one place that cannot but extend in their impacts across borders globally. When Europe faces policy challenges like mass migration, which are understood to derive from a combination of conflict and economic stressors, it is experiencing also the impact of its global ecological legacy.

The problem is that the speed at which climate change action is becoming socialised internationally does not appear to be fast enough to save the world. The recent COP27 Sharm el-Sheikh conference outcomes were a case in point – resulting in a commitment to fill a bag with an unspecified amount of money at a later date, by a group of states yet to be determined, to help the most vulnerable states in the world deal with the consequences of climate change. The lack of any sense that a 1.5° global temperature rise is still achievable seemed to acknowledge that what Andreas Malm recently termed ‘climate pessimism’ may, in fact, be warranted (Malm, 2021). International institutions have simply failed to move quickly enough to adequately manage the climate crisis unfolding. Is it any wonder that activists worldwide are adopting strategies of increasing direct action? Since the first COP in 1995, the climate movement has had little impact on spiralling climate change. Investment in oil, gas and coal is increasing, in part due to the energy market impacts that have arisen by consequence of the War in Ukraine.

Anthropogenic climate change is acknowledged as a significant intellectual and political challenge for scholars of politics and international relations (Beardsworth 2020; Burke et al., 2016; O’Neill, 2017; Sending et al., 2019; Beardsworth 2020). The security implications of ecological processes are already transforming political institutions, creating new connectivities and relationalities across Europe and beyond. New forms of international and global relations are being shaped by the ecological transformations we are entangled with. In this context, leaving debates about climate, ecology and security aside is not an option.

For this reason, we focus the first issue of 2023 on the ongoing scholarly debate about Ecological Security: What does it mean? Why should it matter? Can this concept help us to unravel the climatic challenges of our era? Guest edited and introduced by Paul Beaumont, and collecting outstanding essays from Dhalia Simangan, Elana Wilson Row, Tor A Benjaminsen, Dhanasree Jayaram and Matt McDonald, we hope the issue inspires attention and focusses minds on the implications of climate change for Central and Eastern European politics and international relations.