Speaker
Description
Climate change is increasingly recognized as a critical non-traditional security challenge, reshaping threat perceptions and governance priorities across Europe. Beyond its direct environmental and socio-economic impacts, climate change also acts as a threat multiplier by facilitating the expansion of environmental crime, including illegal logging, wildlife trafficking, waste trafficking, and illicit exploitation of natural resources. This paper examines the intersection between climate change and environmental crime as a complex and underexplored dimension of non-traditional security in the European context.
Drawing on a non-traditional security framework, the paper argues that environmental crime exacerbates climate-induced vulnerabilities by undermining sustainable development, weakening governance structures, and contributing to instability both within and beyond Europe’s borders. Climate stressors such as resource scarcity, extreme weather events, and ecological degradation create permissive environments for criminal networks, while environmental crime, in turn, deepens environmental harm and erodes state and societal resilience. These dynamics pose significant challenges for European security governance, particularly in relation to border management, regulatory enforcement, and transnational cooperation.
The analysis adopts a qualitative approach combining policy analysis of European Union security, climate, and environmental governance frameworks with selected illustrative examples of environmental crime affecting or involving European actors. The paper situates environmental crime within broader debates on human security, resilience, and sustainable development, highlighting how climate change and criminal activity intersect to produce diffuse, cross-border security risks that fall outside traditional military paradigms.
By focusing on governance responses, the paper contributes to ongoing scholarly and policy discussions on how European security institutions are adapting to non-traditional threats. It demonstrates that addressing environmental crime in the context of climate change requires integrated, cross-sectoral strategies that bridge security, development, and environmental policy domains. Ultimately, the paper underscores the need to reconceptualize European security through a holistic lens that recognizes environmental crime and climate change as central security concerns.
| If you are submitting an Open Panel proposal, have you included all four abstracts in attachment? | No, I am submitting a Closed Panel abstract |
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| Would you like to be considered for travel funding through the NetSec COST Action? | No |
| Are you a member of the NetSec Management Committee? | No |
| What discipline or branch of humanities or social sciences do you identify yourself with? | Political Sciences |
| Which of the following best describes your stage of the career? | PhD Candidate |
| In which country is your home institution? | Romania |
| What is your gender? | Male |