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The climate change and security nexus is an evolving area of research and policy. At the outset of work in this field, major research concentrated on how climate change is adversely impacting human well-being. However, in recent years, academics began to reflect critically on the social, cultural and political construction of vulnerabilities and developing understandings of climate change as a risk multiplier. Different aspects of the conflict–security nexus and its future trajectories became subject to critical academic scrutiny, including at a 2021 conference at Hamburg University where more than 100 scholars of relevant research interests from across the globe discussed and debated twenty-eight presented research papers. A total of sixty-five scholars from over twenty institutions have contributed to those research papers and participated in extensive discussions. The conclusion of these discussions highlights how climate change is an opportunity to reflect upon everyday injustices in distribution and access to resources as integral to concerns with security and conflict. A holistic approach to the nexus of climate change and security is thus vital to efforts to promote and realise societal development efforts while minimising social and environmental injustice. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Popular climate change narratives often identify climate change as the prime trigger of all environmental hazards. Consistent and harmonised framing of this relationship by public media, epistemic communities and established institutions continually shapes and reinforces such narratives. These dominant narratives may present an image of an apocalyptic future beyond the coping capacity of 'climate victims' (often identified – implicitly or explicitly – as the poor and those living in the majority work) while rendering climate change responsible for all disaster-related miseries. Such 'doomsday', 'victimhood', and 'common villain' strings of a convergent narrative use selective and occasional recourse to science to support a generic understanding of the challenge of climate change. Drawing on examples of recent environmental stresses in Bangladesh, we call for local accountability and highlight the 'scale effect' of politics of vulnerability framing. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The resilience concept requires greater attention to human livelihoods if it is to address the limits to adaptation strategies and the development needs of the planet's poorest and most vulnerable people. Although the concept of resilience is increasingly informing research and policy, its transfer from ecological theory to social systems leads to weak engagement with normative, social and political dimensions of climate change adaptation. A livelihood perspective helps to strengthen resilience thinking by placing greater emphasis on human needs and their agency, empowerment and human rights, and considering adaptive livelihood systems in the context of wider transformational changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]