Environment and security

Environment and security

The “environment and security” movement, if it can be called that, was born from a deepening public
concern in the 1960s and 1970s over environmental degradation. This growing environmental awareness
resonated against a nerve-wracking backdrop of Cold War uncertainty. Subsequently, a series of events—
international meetings on the one hand and man-made environmental disasters on the other—illustrated
some of the important links between the environment and our security.
In 1972, a United Nations conference on Human Security was convened in Stockholm under the leadership
of Maurice Strong. Although the conference was rooted in the regional pollution and acid rain problems of
northern Europe, it led to the creation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and many
other national environmental organizations. These organizations have been central to subsequent
multilateral environmental cooperation and dialogue.
The OPEC oil crisis in the 1970s fuelled the debate over the ecological carrying capacity of the earth as well
as the political ramifications of dispute over scarce resources. Meanwhile, the Three Mile Island nuclear
accident in 1979 and the toxic chemical gas leak in Bhopal in 1984, to pick just two examples, graphically
demonstrated some of the environmental dangers of a modern, changing economy.
In 1987, the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Norwegian
Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, was released. Titled Our Common Future, it wove together
environmental, economic and social issues and helped to popularize the term, “sustainable development.”
A new world “disorder”
The initial relief at the end of the Cold War, the return to democracy in Eastern Europe, German
reunification and multilateral cooperation against Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War led many
to herald the dawn of a “new world order.” This, it was believed, would be one that respected human rights
and the rule of law, and in which the United Nations would finally begin to function as originally intended
by its founders.
Symbolic of a renewed interest in multilateralism, the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 saw the largest ever
gathering of world leaders tackle questions of the environment and development. For perhaps the first time
it seemed that the environment had become a matter of considerable international attention.
However, optimism over this supposed new world order was soon dashed by the gruesome images of
conflict across the world in Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia and Bosnia. The inability of the international
community to reach consensus on the best, or indeed any, course of action, undermined confidence in a
new form of assertive multilateralism.

This inaction gave free reign to some of the worst excesses of civil war—ethnic cleansing and genocide on a
scale not seen since the Second World War. Ethnic conflict was often total war, involving intractable
guerrilla battles and great loss of civilian life. As the experience of trying to mediate the conflict in the
Balkans proved, this form of conflict was also highly resistant to resolution.
Environment and security research since the Cold War
The dramatic rise in intra-state conflict in the early to mid-1990s led many academics, commentators and
policy-makers to search with some urgency for an explanation; often looking for answers outside traditional
models of state security. This debate has taken two major, interrelated paths.
First, has been a redefinition of what we should understand by security in the post-Cold War world. Second,
has been empirical research to try and discern whether and how environmental change might threaten
peace.
This redefinition has prominently featured environmental considerations. Speaking at the launch of the 1997
Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Dr. Mahbub ul
Haq succinctly expressed a new vision of security shared by many. He argued that, “[s]ecurity is increasingly
interpreted as security of people, not just territory; security of individuals, not just of nations; security
through development, not through arms; security of all people everywhere—in their homes, in their jobs, in
their streets, in their communities, and in the environment.”
In 1994, journalist Robert Kaplan wrote a highly influential article, “The Coming Anarchy,” that painted a
bleak picture of a West African descent into endemic conflict fuelled by spiralling population growth,
environmental degradation and easy access to arms. Based on early environment and security research, the
future he portrayed was one of “disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee
migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-state independence and international borders, and the
empowerment of private armies and drug cartels.”
Kaplan’s analysis of West Africa attracted a great deal of attention. Even more alarmingly, Kaplan argued
this volatile and destructive mix was gaining critical mass elsewhere in the world. By arguing that the result
for Northern countries might be mass inward immigration from failed developing states, he played deftly to
the unspoken fears of the developed countries. However, “The Coming Anarchy” failed to give due credit
to societies’ capacity to adapt to environmental change, nor to the potential for international action to rein
in trade in those resources used to fuel conflicts
Four approaches to environment and security
Since the early 1990s, a great deal of research has tried to elaborate our understanding of the relationship
between environment and security. This body of work can be simplified into four discernible but
interconnected approaches.
First is the Toronto school, which is the name given to the research groups led by the University of
Toronto’s Thomas Homer-Dixon. This approach focusses, like Kaplan’s, on resource scarcity as a cause for
insecurity and conflict. The Toronto school argues that simple scarcity as a result of environmental change
and population growth is only part of a much more complex picture. They focus on situations where elites
extend their control over productive resources (in a process called “resource capture”) and displace poorer
communities (“ecological marginalization”). Resource capture and ecological marginalization, they argue,
may lead to conflict (as people resist marginalization) and environmental damage (as displaced people move
into fragile, marginal environments). In some cases, this process may be connected to state failure and
political violence, especially in developing states where insurgencies are fuelled by grievances related to
injustice and inequity.
A second approach is proposed by the Swiss Environment and Conflicts Project (ENCOP) led by Günther
Baechler. ENCOP research links environmental conflict more directly to a society’s transition from a
subsistence to a market economy. They argue that violence is most likely to occur in more remote areas,
mountainous locations and grasslands—places where environmental stresses coincide with political tensions
and inequitable access to resources. In many cases, conflict occurs where communities resist the
expropriation of resources and the environmental damage caused by large-scale development projects.
A third approach, linked to the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO) amongst others, takes
an entirely different starting point. PRIO suggests that violence in many developing countries occurs when
different groups attempt to gain control of abundant resources. World Bank studies indicate that countries
heavily dependent for their income on the export of primary commodities are at a dramatically higher risk of
conflict than other poor countries, particularly during periods of economic decline. Other studies suggest
that many wars concern control over revenues from valuable resources—especially so if they are easy to
transport and hard to trace. Examples include: illegal timber in Burma, diamonds in Sierra Leone or coltan
in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A fourth approach argues that environmental degradation is one of the many “network threats” that face
the world. Climate change, like epidemic disease or international terrorism, is an example of a network
threat. People make decisions about their energy use based on their immediate social, economic and
ecological surroundings. These decisions constitute an informal, transnational web of individual behaviours
that ultimately present a truly global security problem. Like epidemic disease, the threat is dispersed, and so
is difficult to neutralize through negotiations or force. And although climate change could be extremely
dangerous and costly, it is hard to identify an effective mitigation policy, since no single incentive structure
can modify the behaviour of all the actors. In a 2004 article, Richard Matthew and Bryan MacDonald argue
this idea holds important lessons for future environment and security research. However, absent from much of the academic literature on environment and security are practical recommendations for how environmental protection and natural resource management could help prevent and resolve conflict. According to Simon Dalby, the assumption that the environment is separate from humanity and economic systems lies at the heart of the policy difficulties facing sustainable development and security thinking. Whatever the reason, the result is that much of the academic research has yet to articulate concrete tools for policy-makers.
Some observations on the links between environment and security

Experience shows us that conflict can be driven by natural resource degradation and scarcity, and by
competition for control where resources are abundant. Ask an ecologist and a political security analyst to
name countries of gravest concern to them, and though their points of departure are different, their final
lists would look remarkably similar: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Haiti, Indonesia, Iraq, the Great Lakes region,
the Solomon Islands and Somalia, among others. Indeed, the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to a Kenyan environmentalist in 2004 underlines the relevance of environmental issues to global security.The connections between environmental change and human security are many and complex. On the one hand, our environment affects our security by undermining livelihoods, or by leading to conflict over scarce
or abundant resources. On the other hand, insecurity can have a negative impact on our environment
through, for example, the ecological impacts of large refugee movements or warfare itself. However,
environmental concerns can also present opportunities for dialogue; non-military mechanisms for
communication; and greater mutual understanding.
All too often the environment and security literature seems to focus on the developing world as the both the
victim and the villain of environmental insecurity. However, the developed countries’ habit of unsustainable
consumption is at the heart of many conflicts over both scarce and abundant resources in the developing
world. Throughout much of the 1990s, for example, war over diamonds in Sierra Leone continued, at least
in part, because diamond markets in the North were blind to the provenance of those diamonds.
It should be mentioned that there is, as yet, no robust empirical link between environmental stress and the
start of violent conflict. Environmental factors are rarely, if ever, the sole cause of conflict; ideology,
ethnicity and power politics are all important factors. However, it is clear that environmental stress increases
the severity and duration of conflict. That said, efforts to develop robust empirical forecasts of violent
conflict on the basis of environmental information have had a poor record of success, due to the complex
interaction of social, political and economic factors involved.