Melting ice and the macrosecuritization of climate change

How has one of the biggest frozen freshwater volumes in the world – the Greenland ice sheet – come to be seen as both a threat to coastal communities across the planet and as a threat to itself? By employing the concept of macrosecuritization (Buzan & Wæver 2009), Kristian Søby Kristensen and Lin Alexandra Mortensgaard show that the global or planetary threat of climate change has important structuring effects on how the Greenland ice sheet comes to be perceived as a threat, both locally and in areas of the globe, which are geographically distant to it.

At the same time, however, the ice sheet also threatens itself because as it melts, it speeds up the geophysical processes that leads to its own demise.

By exploring these threat constructions across scales, the authors show how the macrosecuritization of climate change is also reinforced from ‘below’; the various securitizations at lower scales also feed back up to the macro threat and reinforces it as such. The authors conclude that it is the spatial reach of the Greenland ice sheet (its melting) and the danger contained in this that enables it to be dangerous at higher scales. Tying this back to the concept of macrosecuritization, they show that the spatial reach of a threat is fundamentally enabled by its macrosecuritization. 

The chapter should be interesting not only to securitization scholars and students, but also to readers interested in climate change as a political phenomenon. In addition to its conceptual reflections on macrosecuritization, the chapter explores events, movements and actors like Greta Thunberg and Fridays For Future, the 2017 tsunami in Greenland, and the albedo effect. In this way, the authors show that climate change already has political, including securitizing, effects across scales.