Global Warming and Climate Change: Prospects for Forced Migration in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Global warming and climate change as non-traditional security challenges and their attendant human security implications have increasingly received the attention they deserve.¹ The alarm bells signalling their entry into the agenda of human collectives at various levels are not of recent vintage. It will be recalled that environmental destruction has led to earlier major global initiatives to mitigate its effects on humankind, including the Climate Change Convention and its Kyoto Protocol. Al Gore’s documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ on global warming and climate change was preceded by his own advocacy at home and abroad. Leaders responded in different and opposite ways, citing conflicting scientific studies as their basis. Others simply reacted to the fact that environmental destruction, including global warming and climate change, are slow processes that easily escape the attention of policy makers whose priority concerns are about their own perceptions about imminent challenges that immediately impact on regime survival.