GLOBAL SECURITY CHALLENGES AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT IN AFRICA: AN ANALYSIS OF CLIMATE-CHANGE-AS-A- NEW SECURITY-THREAT PARADIGM

Abstract

This paper looks specifically on the linkage between climate change and sustainable development
vis-à-vis Africa’s security in the 21st century. Drawing from the security rethinking studies, and
environmental literature, we argue that the most important but often disregarded, and
undertheorized analytics domain in the contour of Africa’s security and geostrategic
considerations is the nexus between weak sustainable economic development model and
existential threat that do not lend themselves to military response. The central thesis is that the
greatest threat to environmental security emanates not from poverty, but from the process of
wealth creation, hence the impossibility of an environmentally sustainable capitalist economic
development in a non-dematerializing global economy. The paper concludes by nothing that the
extant international adaptation measures to climate change, not only reduces Africa’s adaptive
capacity but also predisposes it to the cascading cataclysmic consequences of the developed
countries’ ecological footprint. Finally, against the background that climate change is bound up
with other social and economic issues facing developing nations that are fundamentally related
to inequality and injustice, the paper recommends the principle of ‘common but differentiated
responsibilities’ in the climate-change-as-a-security-threat global mitigative measures, if global
environmental security must be concretized into action.