The geopolitics of climate change

In his 2012 Political Geography plenary at the 2012 Royal Geographical Society meeting, Stuart Elden posed the possibilities of a “geopolitics” that engages the earth, the air and volumetric understandings as an alternative to geopolitics as a synonym for global politics with its two dimensional cartographic imagination. More is needed than political geography writ large: a material sensibility is necessary to think about security and geography but one that is not linked to traditional determinist formulations. Climate change has a long connection to geopolitics, but now humanity is determining the future of the planetary climate. Picking up Elden's themes, this paper explores how taking the physicality of climate change seriously requires a rethinking of politics in the face of numerous transformations in what is becoming the more obviously artificial planet in the Anthropocene epoch. The geometrics now needed in security analysis include the volumes of global carbon dioxide and Arctic ice. Geopolitical discourse needs a fundamental overhaul to deal with the new circumstances and incorporate climate change as a production problem in the making of a new world, not as a deterministic phenomenon shaping human life in coming decades.