For Pacific Island nations like the Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, and others, climate change is defined as a clear existential threat to the survival of those countries by their own governments; rising sea levels threaten everything – including the very land itself. In contrast, equally clear empirical evidence (in the form of cyclones, desertification, heatwaves, etc.), as well as confident projections in various scientific reports (IPCC’s SR1.5), consistently demonstrate Myanmar’s climate change vulnerability. Yet, the issue is a relatively low priority for its national media and incumbent government. This is observable via the state-owned Global New Light of Myanmar (GNLM). Few environmental stories make the front pages, while the delegation of environmental policies/issues/post-crises visits fall predominantly to the Vice-Presidents—U Myint Swe and Henry van Thio—not usually the highest political echelon. It was not until August 26th (in 2017) that Aung San Suu Kyi (ASSK) discussed any environmental issue in the GNLM (which concerned climate change talks with the IPCC chairman) – all reported in under 90 words. It is further noteworthy that these actors seldom use appropriate language that would be expected in the articulation of environmental security concerns such as ‘urgency’, ‘severity’, ‘threat’, etc. All this suggests that ASSK (and the NLD more generally) prioritize other issues above the environment. Of course, readers may juxtapose environmental concerns against the Union’s de facto priorities from the long-standing ethnic wars, to its fragile though recovering economy, and various ongoing constitutional issues. Or, indeed, that Myanmar is 11 months away from an election. Objectively, it could be construed as entirely understandable that environmental issues are pushed underneath political and security agendas in this context. But these positions fail to address the environmental threat to human and economic security. While many elements of environmental insecurity are recognized by relevant actors, it is seldom contextualized against more traditional security issues, potentially masking the true risk. Consider human security. The 140,000 people who died as a result of Cyclone Nargis in 2008 are roughly 14% of the one-million deaths since independence.^[3] At the international scale, Nargis inflicted twice as many fatalities that year as all global violence (0.54 million) and terrorism (0.18) combined.^[4] Broken-down further, as many as 10,000 a year died from internal conflict in Myanmar,^[5] which equates to less than half of the 22,000 annual deaths attributable  in Myanmar to pollution alone. Likewise, Nargis displaced approximately 2.4 million people in two days compared to 1-4 million in nearly 50 years of fighting (1948-1994).^[6]Even using more reliable modern estimates of ethnic displacement, such as 730,000 Rohingyas or 100,000 Kachins, the impact of events like Nargis becomes self-evident. If dire environmental reports such as the IPCC’s SR1.5 or the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) whose findings reported that of the “[m]ore than 10 million new internal displacements” in the first half of 2019, persons displaced by natural disasters (around 7 million) was almost double that of displacement caused by conflict and violence (3.8 million), Myanmar’s powers-that-be must seriously consider elevating environmental (in)security to the level of ethnic conflict. The economic costs from climate change-linked severe weather events are also demonstrably significant. In Myanmar, the agricultural sector is often described as “the backbone of the nation’s economy.” In 2018, the GDP growth forecast of 7.2% was largely expected to come from agriculture. This sector accounts for nearly 40% of GDP and employs as many as 70% of the Union’s workforce – a figure consistent with other developing countries. By March 2018, decades of economic mismanagement were seemingly reversing: Myanmar exported three million tonnes of rice – a feat not witnessed for half a century. Yet, this success belies the country’s vulnerability to severe weather effects. Monsoonal flooding in the summer of 2018, for instance, destroyed hundreds of acres of farmland in Bago, Mon, and Tanintharyi reducing export earnings. In 2015, Floodlist described how heavy monsoonal precipitation (which combined with Cyclone Komen) impacted most of Myanmar’s states and regions: 1.152 million people were affected and more than 1.29 million acres of farmland were inundated, of which, 687,000 acres were damaged before the planting season. While the environmental sector is evidently a low security priority—an outlook that broadly corresponds to Myanmar’s ASEAN neighbors—the cost that Myanmar pays for not acting now (as opposed to less threatened or more economically robust nations) is much greater. Despite some articulation of various environmental risks and pressures, leading actors have largely failed to define the threats using security language appropriate to the problem. This thereby reduces the sense of urgency and the potential for a larger XR mobilization among the population.