Over the last few years, there has been a significant change in how governments conceptualise and approach climate change. Climate change was previously seen as an environmental problem, and as a quandary that existed in a separate, often subordinate, sphere to traditional policy concerns. Diplomacy under the old climate frame was centred upon emissions reductions, climate finance, and international agreements – largely looking for ways for states to simply reduce their emissions. More recently, new government frames, conceptions and approaches have emerged. These see climate change as an active threat to economic stability, energy security, state resilience and geopolitical power. Rather than emissions reduction, governments aim to assess how climate change impacts national interests, and how they can manage the green energy transition in a manner which protects those interests.
‘Climate diplomacy’ refers to the use of diplomatic tools, international negotiations, and foreign policy to address climate change, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and manage climate-related security risks. It can involve multilateral negotiations through international bodies, bilateral climate partnerships, climate finance agreements, cooperation on technology and energy, and foreign policy efforts to manage climate-related security risks. Climate diplomacy, operating within new government climate frames, is no longer occurring in a separate sphere from traditionally-prioritised policy spheres – like national security.
Climate change itself, as this article will examine, can create security risks, and the energy transition is partially an issue of national resilience. The transition creates new strategic dependencies, particularly around critical minerals and technology. These dependency networks and national challenges thus mean climate action is a newly emerging arena of global competition, and climate diplomacy’s role is shifting from that of a cooperation facilitator to a competition mediator. Overall, this article aims to investigate whether these added pressures from influential policy spheres make climate diplomacy more effective, or if geopolitical competition makes international climate cooperation more difficult.
The ‘Climate-Security Nexus’
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Despite traditional separation, the politics of climate change and of security do belong in the same discussions. If climate change creates risks to politico-economic stability, governments have good reason to deal with the two in tandem. Climate change, as posited by Buhaug and Rudolfsen (2015), does not simply cause conflict. Rather, climate change acts as a ‘threat multiplier’ in areas already experiencing conflict – since active armed conflict also positively correlates with poverty, weak governance, primary commodity export dependency, and fragile institutions. Those factors simultaneously make societies more vulnerable to climate shocks. The relationship between climate variability and armed conflict is therefore non-deterministic, and climate change is not itself a straightforward cause of war. Instead, it interacts with existing political and socio-economic vulnerabilities.
Climate change exacerbates food insecurity through droughts and bad harvests, market instability, loss of livelihoods and government inability to guarantee food. The latter can lead to food crises becoming symbolic of governmental failure, which can foster potential protest and political instability. Climate shocks can accelerate rural-to-urban migration. Rapidly growing cities may lack sanitation, healthcare, formal employment and adequate public services. Migration can also introduce competition over jobs and resources, thus creating tensions between different groups. With many countries around the globe increasingly targeting migrants as the source of their frustrations, this issue is particularly prevalent. In addition to food insecurity and migrant flows, climate change can have seriously detrimental economic impacts; contributing to declining agricultural production, putting more pressure on imports, reducing state revenues, discouraging tourism, and, overall, reducing the personal opportunity costs of insurrection and rebellion. Importantly, all the possible security effects of climate change are mediated through political institutions and economic conditions.
In terms of climate diplomacy, the significance of climate change as a threat multiplier is not simply that it can cause insecurity. Rather, climate vulnerability is increasingly understood as something governments need to manage before it starts to catalyse security crises. Climate policy, consequently, is connected to development policy, food security provisions, migration management, state resilience, conflict prevention, civil obedience and military planning. This overlap gives us the ‘climate-security nexus’ as posited by Läderach et al. (2023) and explains the use of early warning systems (pre-empting food shortages), adaptive safety nets (to prevent household poverty post-climate shock), and risk finance (for rapid post-disaster recovery). As demonstrated by these policy examples, climate-security challenges are primarily developmental challenges. Climate change adaptation can have both peace- and prosperity-building effects, meaning that securitising climate policy doesn’t necessarily entail militarising it – resilience and adaptation can be treated as an extension of national security.
This said, securitisation of climate change policy happens on a broader scale than developing and fragile states alone. Developed Western states are also at risk of the climate-security nexus. Military infrastructure, such as coastal naval bases, is vulnerable to sea-level rises. Extreme heat can impact military training, and extreme weather impacts military operations. Regarding Arctic geopolitics, melting ice makes previously inaccessible territory and shipping routes more accessible, creating possible competition over resources and strategic routes. National planning must adapt in kind, increasingly incorporating climate projections into state strategies. Climate-security policy isn’t confined to the prevention of civil war in vulnerable countries, but also includes the direct strategic interests of powerful states.
The Energy Transition
Having established that climate change threatens security, climate diplomacy asks what governments are actually able to do about the threat – such as investing in the energy transition. The shift away from fossil fuels is increasingly attractive to states both because it reduces emissions and because it reduces strategic dependence on foreign energy suppliers.
Fossil fuels, the driving force behind the economic growth models of most nations on Earth, embody an age-old strategic vulnerability. States dependent on imported oil and gas are vulnerable to price shocks, supply disruptions, geopolitical coercion and being forced to interact with politically unstable and hostile suppliers. For example, the Russia-Ukraine war has exposed Europe’s dependence on Russian gas. In response, Europe has deliberately diversified its energy suppliers, and renewable investments into stronger climate targets were accelerated. Climate policy, therefore, has become partially motivated by energy security. Geopolitical crises like these expose energy vulnerability, encourage diversification and thereby accelerate the overall global transition.
Governments increasingly look to wind, solar and nuclear power as ways of reducing external energy dependence, meaning that the energy transition can simultaneously serve climate goals, energy system resilience, economic resilience and national security. It also means that climate policy is merging with security policy because security hinges, at least in part, upon the structure and stability of the energy system.
Decarbonisation efforts, however, create a new security issue of sourcing critical minerals. Governments responding to fossil fuel dependence rationally endeavour to switch away from them, but the technologies required for that transition depend on another set of strategically important resources. Clean energy technologies need significantly more minerals than conventional fossil fuel-based ones. Electric vehicles are around six times more mineral-intensive than conventional cars. Offshore wind energy requires around nine times more mineral resources than gas-fired power generation. Demand for these critical minerals, like lithium, cobalt, and nickel, is expected to rise substantially under net-zero scenarios.
This demand for critical minerals becomes a national security problem because of three distinct issues: concentration, supply and socio-environmental consequences. Regarding concentration, extraction and processing is already concentrated in a small number of countries. This means clean-energy supply chains can become strategically vulnerable, in a similar manner to oil and gas-rich nations’ monopoly on energy under the current arrangements. In terms of supply, new mines can take a decade or more to properly develop, connect to transport infrastructure, and ensure safe mining practices – the latter being seriously absent in current critical mineral mining in Africa. Mineral supply, therefore, may not keep pace with rapidly expanding climate policy. Finally, looking at consequences, mining can involve habitat destruction, water consumption and pollution. Therefore, the green transition could end up reproducing some of the environmental and political problems associated with the fossil-fuel economy.
On the political side, the Democratic Republic of Congo provides a concrete case study of the reproduction of these problems. The DRC possesses enormous mineral wealth, including around 48% of global cobalt reserves – as well as significant deposits of other critical ores (AMDC, 2026). Cobalt and other minerals are increasingly important to the technologies underpinning the energy transition, meaning that decarbonisation creates new strategic value around mineral-producing regions. As the DRC demonstrates, this isn’t simply a question of securing supply; rather, one of mineral wealth becoming entangled with political instability and conflict. The geography of conflict in the eastern DRC overlaps substantially with mineral extraction zones, with M23 expanding its control over areas containing tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold. While minerals alone are not the sole cause of Congolese conflict, control over critical minerals can acquire geopolitical significance precisely because global demand for them is increasing. This creates a potential continuity with older extractive relationships, wherein colonial economic structures left the DRC heavily dependent on primary resource extraction and ensured revenue flowed to external actors.
Returning to climate diplomacy, the green transition then raises a difficult question of who bears the costs of decarbonisation. If wealthy states are the ones to secure the minerals needed for energy transitions, while producing countries will experience the environmental damage of the global warming created by the wealthier states, then the same patterns of uneven development seen under the fossil fuel model will continue; climate innovation in the Western world will be financed at the expense of climate damage in the developing world, and unequal extractive relations will be reproduced in a new form. Critical minerals, therefore, are becoming a matter of resource sovereignty, supply-chain security and geopolitical power – not just a matter of environmental economics.
The Green Transition as a Competition for Strategic Power
States are increasingly competing to control the technologies, resources and industries that will determine the future energy system. China is increasingly taking a leading position in this competition. China has invested heavily in renewable technologies, and consistent state support has helped create industrial dominance. Clean technology, as the CCP clearly recognises, is a source of economic geopolitical power. The competition is not just over who has the lithium, but over who can process it, manufacture batteries, develop technology and establish global standards.
In line with the competitive nature of the energy transition, the shift is no longer being left in the hands of international agreements, carbon pricing, private investment, and market signals. Instead, governments are actively trying to construct their own domestic clean-energy industries. As Falkner (2016) outlines, the Paris-era approach (following the limitations of Kyoto) encouraged markets to act in anticipation of a low-carbon future. Conversely, the emerging approach follows a trajectory closer to Mazzucato’s (2016) recommendations: governments actively intervening in energy markets to create the industries and supply chains required for a sustainable future.
The US Inflation Reduction Act is a useful example of climate policy becoming industrial and strategic policy, as it shows how a major climate policy package can simultaneously pursue several objectives. The Act was primarily focused on the climate’s relationship with industry; incentivising the expansion of renewable energy, looking at industrial developments by aiding domestic manufacturing capacity, creating jobs in renewable sectors, and looking further afield in the strategic sphere by reducing dependence on foreign clean-tech supply chains and responding to China’s technological dominance. Beyond simply subsidising green technology, the US is beginning to see leadership in green technology as an element of national power projection.
The EU’s response is similar, using subsidies, protectionist measures, clean-tech investment incentives and carbon border adjustment mechanisms as tools in its green transition. The EU aims to decarbonise while retaining European industrial competitiveness and ensuring that European industries aren’t being undercut by cheaper, more carbon-intensive production. Becoming dependent on imported clean technologies, while environmentally desirable, is an economic vulnerability that the Union would rather avoid – especially when EU-US relations are increasingly tense and the need to maintain competitiveness against China remains pressing. Climate policy in the modern day is centred upon actively building desirable economic capacity while dealing with the paradoxical nature of the global stage: nations who share the aim of sustainability while being in serious competition as to who can attain it first – and the most profitably.
Climate change has traditionally required cooperation because emissions are globally distributed, and a healthy environment is a global public good. Great-power rivalry interferes heavily with cooperation. As US-China tensions demonstrate, climate diplomacy is not insulated from wider geopolitical issues; China’s suspension of formal climate talks following House Speaker’s Nancy Pelosi’s 2022 Taiwan visit shows how climate negotiations can be held hostage by unrelated strategic conflict. Despite climate threats impacting all nations (albeit to differing degrees), even an existential threat cannot fully mitigate the Hobbesian war of ‘all against all’ in the international system. Given that both nations function as regional hegemons, major US-China disagreements could severely damage international climate cooperation.
This competition-cooperation paradox, foundational to international relations, helps explain why protectionism enters the picture despite shared global goals: international climate logic is almost antithetical to national economic logic. China’s success, then, changes the strategic value of climate policy. If clean technologies become major industries, control over them gives the owner manufacturing capacity, supply chains, technological expertise, intellectual property rights, export markets, and the potential to set the standards of future energy systems. The final advantage, of course, means that the first-mover in the clean-tech-race essentially has the keys to the energy-castle in the years to come, and can write the rules of the new era of green energy’s playbook. This idea, of who controls the successors of fossil fuel, is becoming more and more central in the negotiations of climate diplomacy.
That said, competition can also force governments to act faster. While demonstrating barriers to cooperation, the US-China rivalry has also fostered serious clean-tech investment and innovation, and a lot of US investment can be chalked up, partially, to the desire to compete with China. Similarly, Europe’s energy diversification was motivated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. States pursue clean energy strategies because they want to dominate emerging industries, capture jobs, secure export markets and establish technological standards. Consequently, geopolitical rivalry can both undermine collective climate diplomacy while catalysing national climate action.
What Does this mean for Climate Diplomacy?
As outlined by Falkner, the Kyoto agreement struggled because climate policy involves intense distributive conflicts over who pays, who must sacrifice economic growth, who is allowed to industrialise and who is made to lose fossil fuel revenues. Paris, in response to the political difficulties exposed by Kyoto, allowed for greater national flexibility – since contemporary climate diplomacy works more through nationally-determined strategies, not a single externally-imposed pathway.
Keohane and Victor (2011) offer the ‘regime complex’ to deal with climate change and climate diplomacy’s decentralisation. There is no unified climate regime to which the whole world adheres. Instead, there is a loosely connected web of UN institutions, bilateral agreements, technology partnerships, regional initiatives, clubs, NGOs, sector-specific arrangements, development projects and private/subnational efforts. The fragmented structure may actually be well-suited to a world where states have vastly different security and economic interests. States concerned with energy security can cooperate on energy, tech leaders can form innovation partnerships, mineral-dependent countries can negotiate supply chains and vulnerable countries can focus on adaptation and finance. The equity, however, of the latter point is contestable; countries most vulnerable to climate change have often reached that point as a result of the extractive, historical, imperial machinations of others.
Fragmented approaches to grand challenges do have important downsides. First, they can entrench and exacerbate existing power asymmetries, with certain disempowered nations only able to access the lower and less influential rungs of the regime complex. Second, fragmentation can lead to inertia – multiple institutions existing in tandem with the same mandate but different approaches, resources and perspectives could produce gridlock, and little substantive change. Moreover, echoing the absence of overarching authority that creates international competition, there is no single entity capable of ensuring that climate action within the regime complex matches the scale of the problem. With climate policy being increasingly national-security-driven, states may cooperate only when cooperation serves their own strategic interests, rather than because they’ve accepted their broader global obligation. While climate action is therefore more politically feasible, a fragmented approach cannot guarantee consistent coordination.
To conclude, climate diplomacy has in no way disappeared. Rather, it has undergone serious qualitative change. Traditionally centred around emissions, international agreements and climate finance, climate diplomacy is beginning to include national resilience, energy independence, critical minerals, supply-chains, industrial policy, technological competition, and global influence. To answer our guiding question: yes, climate diplomacy change is increasingly becoming entwined and embedded with national security policy. The question is not, however, simply of climate diplomacy’s place in the policy sphere, but whether national security motives can actually produce enough climate action to make up for international cooperation – which they undermine.
