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Environmental Security

The term environmental security has been used as part of a reconceptualization of security in the global era following the end of the Cold War (1989). It refers to a widening of the narrow (political and military) national security concept that was prevalent during the Cold War. It is part of the human security concept in which the referent object has deepened from the state to human beings throughout global society.

Throughout history, the term security has had many meanings and has been used as a societal value in relation to protection, lack of risks, certainty, reliability, trust, and confidence; it sought predictability in contrast to danger, risk, disorder, and fear. As a key concept in the social sciences and in global studies, security has been ambiguous and is used in objective, subjective, and intersubjective senses. In an objective sense, it refers to security dangers and to the absence of threats to acquired values; in a subjective sense, it points to security concerns expressed by governments, the media, scientists, or “the people” and to the absence of fear that such values will be attacked. For constructivists, as, for example, the Copenhagen school, security is intersubjective, referring to what actors make of it and is the result of a speech act (securitization), according to which an issue is treated as an existential threat to a valued referent object to allow urgent and exceptional measures to deal with the threat. Thus, the securitizing actor points to an existential threat and thereby legitimizes extraordinary measures that must be approved by the audience.

Environmental or ecological security comprises the impact of wars on the environment and the effects of the environment, and in particular of human-induced interventions, on human beings and states. Since 1989, environmental security has referred to new threats of environmental degradation, scarcity, and stress that can cause, trigger, or intensify conflict potentials, but since the late 1990s, its scope has widened to issues of global climate change; water, soil, and biodiversity loss; and the complex interactions among the environment and human systems such as urbanization, industrialization, agricultural production, and socioeconomic processes. Combining two fields of global studies, environmental security discourse's realist, idealist, and pragmatist approaches on security are often linked with neo-Malthusian, cornucopian, and equity-oriented environmental standpoints.

These new global challenges and risks transgress the nation-state and its sovereignty, where “we” as human beings have become the new threat through our production and consumptive patterns, especially through the burning of hydrocarbons (coal, oil, gas). Simultaneously, humankind is the primary victim, but those who contribute most to global warming and those who are its primary victims (least developed countries, e.g., in sub-Sahara Africa and Bangladesh) are not identical; this fact poses global equity issues. If humans are the threat, classic strategies and tools of national military policy are obsolete for adapting to and mitigating this threat.

Stages of the Global Debate on Environmental Security

Four stages in the scientific discourse on environmental security may be distinguished:

  • Phase I: In the 1970s and 1980s, A. H. Westing focused on the environmental impact of wars, while the Brundtland Commission (1987), Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev (1988), and in the United States the policy proposals of J. Mathews and N. Myers (1989) framed environmental issues as posing threats to U.S. national security that were taken up by the Clinton administration.
  • Phase II: During the 1990s, two empirical research projects on environmental conflict led by T. Homer-Dixon and by G. Bächler and K. Spillmann analyzed multiple case studies. Whereas the Canadian group (Homer-Dixon, 1999) focused on the linkage among environmental scarcity, stress, and conflict, the Swiss group (Bächler, 1998, 1999) dealt with both environmental scarcity and degradation as causes of environmental conflict as well as matters of conflict resolution outcomes.
  • Phase III: Since the mid-1990s, these inductive case studies were complemented by deductive approaches focusing on complex interactions between environmental pressures, environmental-societal linkages, and extreme outcomes. Among them were researchers (a) associated with the Global Environmental Change and Human Security project; (b) working on the cooperative management of renewable resources in the Nile region and the Horn of Africa, as part of a Swiss project on Research Partnerships for Mitigating Syndromes of Global Change; (c) focusing on the patterned interaction of symptoms of global change with socioeconomic processes, a project sponsored by the Scientific Advisory Council on Global Environment Issues of the German government; (d) discussing water and food, such as the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database at Oregon State University; (e) analyzing causes and intensity of violent conflicts; and (f) analyzing results of research in geography, anthropology, and hydrology of relevance for environmental security.
  • Phase IV: Since 2001, Ú. Oswald Spring (2008), H. G. Brauch (2009), and S. Dalby (2009) have suggested a fourth phase of synthesis and reconceptualization by linking earth systems research in the Anthropocene era of earth history, a combined human, gender, and environmental security concept (Oswald 2008), with a research program on human and environmental security and peace and by adding as new substantive research issues extreme weather events; social systems and gender relations; environmental, social, and urban vulnerabilities; complex emergencies, crises, and conflicts; as well as resilience building and political coping strategies. These three authors also suggested ideas for an “Anthropocene ethics” and for a “political geoecology in the Anthropocene.”

Narrow or Wide Focus and Reference Objects: State versus Human Beings

During the first two decades of the dual policy debate and of the scientific discourses on environmental security, the focus and the scope of the research topics widened to environmental pollution, scarcity degradation, and stress being triggers that may result in migration, crises, and wars due to multiple new and interrelated global environmental challenges. Environmental security issues have also been conceptualized and discussed as food (Food and Agriculture Organization), water (United Nations Development Programme), health (World Health Organization), soil (United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification), energy (International Energy Agency), and livelihood security issues. Since 2007, the major focus has shifted to the link between climate change and international, national, and human security.

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