Environmental Security

The term environmental security suggests that environmental problems should be addressed as threats to human or national security. This can and has taken a number of very different forms, and as such there is no single, indubitable meaning of environmental security. It could include, for example, everything from environmentalists employing security rhetoric to draw attention to their political agendas to post–Cold War security officials appropriating new threats to justify exorbitant defense budgets. What an environmentally secure community, state, or world might look like is also debatable. This entry summarizes the ways in which scholars and institutions have conceptualized environmental security and examines debates and dividing points within the literature.

The current literature on environmental security mushroomed in the early 1990s, although the literature on environmental security has precedents predating the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Worldwatch Institute, along with several other environmentalists, argued repeatedly in the late 1970s and 1980s that national security was an outdated concept that needed to be revised in the face of global environmental change.

Environmental security's key institutional moment, however, was the publication of Our Common Future by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987, which argued that pressing environmental issues and resource scarcities are best addressed through the security orientation that had thus far contained Soviet communism. This was a response to important policy debates about the environmentally disruptive effects of the rush toward “development” in the periphery and helped further instantiate environmental security into the foreign and development policy lexicon. The National Security Strategy statements produced annually by the Office of the U.S. president began incorporating environmental security regularly in 1991 (although the environmental content of these statements waned significantly 10 years later). Although environmental security was a prominent theme in the official policy statements of the Clinton administration, it is questionable to what degree and how it has ever been incorporated as a policy focus. For some of its proponents, environmental security entails state access and control of geopolitically significant resources—securing U.S. access to Caspian Sea oil, for example—although critics sometimes see environmental security as a pretense for neoliberal, capital-driven development policy.

In addition to official policy debates, there are a number of research programs designed to investigate the relationships (causative or correlative) between environmental change, scarcity, and violent conflict, perhaps most notably the Environmental Change and Acute Conflict Project at the University of Toronto. Such research programs are grounded in a case study approach to tracing out relationships between environmental [Page 999]degradation and violent conflict. Since its inception and increase in visibility, environmental security research in this form has faced (and responded to) a number of criticisms, the most prominent of which is that it typically analyzes only case studies in which the dependent variable, violence, occurs. Consequently, critics argue, they offer no control case, such as the existence of peaceful negotiations over a declining resource. Others stress the need to avoid explanations based on models of linear causality, in which independent variables (environmental change) are taken for granted as causes, rather than effects, of dependent variables. The more recent literature has sought to address these issues by focusing on, for instance, the role of natural resources (particularly transboundary water resources) in peace negotiations and pathways to environmental security focused on scales other than the state.

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