Dr Heinrichs contends that while experts and policymakers saw promise in the approach to combine security and climate change to drive climate action, it has also meant a naturalisation of the so-called ‘threat multiplier frame’ whilst reducing climate change to a defence and security problem. This approach turns the biggest historical polluters – wealthy, high-emitting countries and their militaries – into the supposed ‘protectors’ against the crisis they helped create. At the same time, it sustains the myth that technology and military power can fix climate change while leaving incremental technocratic approach to political decisions and accountability for emissions and environmental damage aside. This presents future wars over resources as inevitable (when they are not) and downplays existing and present-day harm. Far from helping to reduce emissions or repair existing damage, this approach shields the very systems, actors, patterns and routinesmost responsible.
Dr Heinrichs additionally critiques the persistent assumption, widespread since the mid-2000s, that climate change functions as a direct and proximate cause of violent conflict. Even though evidence for the linkages remains weak and heavily debated, this narrative refuses to fade. Instead, it shifts attention away from drivers of harm such as extreme inequality, deep-rooted political grievances, loss and injustice. The consequence, she argues, is a security discourse that legitimates militarised and technocratic responses while sidestepping deeper questions of historical responsibility and global inequity.
Building on the framework of strategic ontologies (the hidden assumptions that underlie how we see, act and are in the world), Dr Heinrichs shows how these ontologies don't just describe reality – they help create it. The way we talk about climate security actively builds the actors, threats and solutions we end up with. She therefore urges scholars to interrogate the normative commitments embedded in the ontologies they deploy or contest, and to explore alternative framings grounded in differentiated vulnerability, accountability and non-conflictual futures.
With COP30 expected to place emphasis on ‘climate security,’ the article intervenes in ongoing debates about how conceptual and discursive choices delimit the range of imaginable and feasible political responses to the climate crisis.