Human Insecurity from Climate Change on Vanuatu and Guam 

Floods and heavy rain in Guam. Credit: – [email protected]Opinion by Anselm VoglerThursday, February 13, 2025Inter Press ServiceFeb 13 (IPS) – The climate crisis is severely endangering human well-being. While the climate security nexus is omnipresent in national security strategies and on international institutions’ agendas, political responses remain insufficient and are often problematic. Among other issues, related policies often struggle with siloization or a focus on symptoms instead of root causes.To address the core challenges to human security imposed by climate change, the “emergent practice of climate security” must be sensitive to two contexts. First, local political and economic contexts shape how these processes of environmental change translate into human insecurity. Second, climate change is only one of several ecological processes that endanger human security on our planet.To substantiate this point, my recent publication documents the pathways to human insecurity in the specific political and economic contexts of Vanuatu and Guam. Both Pacific islands are exposed to climate change impacts such as sea level rise and intensifying extreme weather. However, their country-specific political and economic contexts translate this exposure into different forms of human insecurity. This means that similar climate change impacts have different implications for both islands.For example, the economic differences mean that climate change impacts affect food security differently. In Vanuatu, most people engage in subsistence agriculture. In this economic context, sea level rise and tropical storms can disrupt food supplies directly by destroying local crops, particularly in rural areas. At the same time, local food habits on the Melanesian archipelago are currently shifting towards a growing reliance on lower-quality imported foods and these trends seem to be amplified by the side effects of disaster relief.In contrast, the prevailing colonial integration of Guam into the United States economy has enforced diets centred around imported, processed food long ago. Food insecurity, therefore, comes about differently and rather results from a precarious form of economic integration. According to a study, every second respondent experienced not having enough money to pay for food and dietary quality was found to be insufficient. In particular, shares of fruit and vegetables intake are dramatically low and the mortality resulting from non-communicable diseases among Pacific islanders is on a worldwide high. In this context, climate change is rather an aggravating factor: while there is almost no local food production to be disrupted by extreme weathers, super typhoon Mawar endangered food security due to internal displacements and food price hikes. In addition, the islands tourism economy is endangered by these storms and by the additional risks that ocean warming creates for the island’s coral reefs. This poses a substantial risk to local’