Climate change and spatial planning in security strategies

Abstract

International and national security strategies have adopted the concept of total security, which includes non-military threats such as climate change. Concurrently, the occurrence of severe disasters required the intervention of the armed forces in domains previously assigned to civil organizations. These two trends raise a rapprochement between traditionally detached policies. Analysing three security strategies (NATO, EU and USA), we identify how the recognition of climate change as a threat promotes actions of preventive and adaptive management by states that value, or may value, spatial planning tools as a factor of climate resilience and, thus, of security