Charting a Course for the Future: An Analysis of the Level of Climate-Security Integration in the EU’s Development Cooperation

Sammanfattning: Climate-related security risks (CRSR) have risen on the foreign policy agenda of the European Union (EU). As climate change accelerates, its impacts exacerbate existing social, economic, and environmental challenges within and between communities and increase the likelihood of states experiencing humanitarian crises and conflict. These so-called climate-related security risks (CRSR), or climate-security, include impacts on food, water and energy supplies, increased competition over natural resources, loss of livelihoods, climate-related natural disasters, and forced migration and displacement. The EU is among the most vocal proponents of the need to integrate climate-related security risks in its development cooperation, but previous research has shown ambiguous results on the level of climate-security integration into the EU’s development cooperation. More importantly, existing literature has not analyzed the level of climate-security policy integration in relation to the level of risk a country is exposed to. By using a qualitative content analysis of EU documents, this thesis analyzes the level of policy integration of climate-security into the EU’s development cooperation throughout the previous and current policy cycles, in relation to the level of risk for experiencing humanitarian crisis. This study has selected 9 different countries in Africa with differences in their levels of risk throughout the years. The findings in this study indicate that the EU has considerably improved the policy integration of climate-security into its development cooperation at all stages of the policy cycle. However, this has not been in relation to the changes in risk levels of the respective countries. In addition, these improvements have not been systematic across the different stages of the policy cycles nor across the different countries.