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Environmental security and climate change.

• Simon Dalby Simon Dalby Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.168
• Published in print: 01 March 2010
• Published online: 22 December 2017
• This version: 30 June 2020
• Previous version

Environmental security focuses on the ecological conditions necessary for sustainable development. It encompasses discussions of the relationships between environmental change and conflict as well as the larger global policy issues linking resources and international relations to the necessity for doing both development and security differently. Climate change has become an increasingly important part of the discussion as its consequences have become increasingly clear. What is not at all clear is in what circumstances climate change may turn out to be threat multiplier leading to conflict. Earth system science findings and the recognition of the scale of human transformations of nature in what is understood in the 21st century to be a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, now require environmental security to be thought of in terms of preventing the worst dangers of fragile states being unable to cope with the stresses caused by rapid environmental change or perhaps the economic disruptions caused by necessary transitions to a post fossil fueled economic system. But so far, at least, this focus on avoiding the worst consequences of future climate change has not displaced traditional policies of energy security that primarily ensure supplies of fossil fuels to power economic growth. Failure to make this transition will lead to further rapid disruptions of climate and add impetus to proposals to artificially intervene in the earth system using geoengineering techniques, which might in turn generate further conflicts from states with different interests in how the earth system is shaped in future. While the Paris Agreement on Climate Change recognized the urgency of tackling climate change, the topic has not become security policy priority for most states, nor yet for the United Nations, despite numerous policy efforts to securitize climate change and instigate emergency responses to deal with the issue. More optimistic interpretations of the future suggest possibilities of using environmental actions to facilitate peace building and a more constructive approach to shaping earth’s future.

• Anthropocene
• development
• earth system
• environment
• geoengineering
• planetary boundary
• safe operating system
• sustainability

Updated in this version

Updated references, enhanced discussions of security and political geography.

Environmental Security and Sustainable Development

The contemporary formulation of environmental security was effectively put on the international policy agenda by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) in its 1987 report, Our Common Future . While the report is best remembered for its advocacy of sustainable development and its catalyzing role in shaping the agenda that led to the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), the so called “Earth Summit,” environmental security is specified in the report as the provision of the conditions necessary for sustainable development. Environmental security is also unlikely to be a possibility in the long-term future if sustainable development is not followed as an overarching economic priority. Thus, the two formulations mutually reinforced each other. Without environmental security sustainable development was unlikely to succeed because conflict and disruption would prevent sensible initiatives. Likewise, if sustainability wasn’t a policy priority, in the long run, ecological destruction would prevent its accomplishment.

While the exact trajectory of climate change wasn’t clear in the 1980s, and Our Common Future suggested that much more science was needed, it was noted as a significant issue that needed attention in formulating environmental security. Other matters, including the dangers of the cold war arms race, were highlighted; clearly nuclear military preparations were anathema to long-term survival and the possibilities of environmental security:

Perhaps the greatest threat to the Earth’s environment, to sustainable human progress, and indeed to survival is the possibility of nuclear war, increased daily by the continuing arms race and its spread to outer space. The search for a more viable future can only be meaningful in the context of a more vigorous effort to renounce and eliminate the development of means of annihilation. (WCED, 1987 , p. 35)

While the dangers of nuclear warfare and the possibilities of a nuclear winter disrupting climate patterns for years, or even decades, were on people’s minds in the 1980s (Sagan & Turco, 1990 ), environmental security was understood as a larger planetary concern needing attention and, implicitly, a very different formulation of security. “The time has come to break out of past patterns. Attempts to maintain social and ecological stability through old approaches to development and environmental protection will increase instability. Security must be sought through change” (WCED, 1987 , p. 250). Simultaneously, Our Common Future suggested that there were growing sources of environmental conflict where resource shortages fed into violence in many underdeveloped parts of the world. Wise use of renewable resources, to ensure their sustainable yields, was a key part of providing environmental security too. Quite how resource shortages were causing conflict wasn’t clearly specified in the report; this was simply assumed to be the case and assumed to be a situation that was getting worse. That there were numerous environmental problems in need of attention isn’t in doubt, but the assumption that scarcity was the cause of the difficulties went more or less unexamined.

Three decades later, as the science on climate change and the role of fossil fuel consumption in particular is highlighted as a key cause of global warming, it is clear that the problem that needs attention is not a matter of scarcity. While climate disruptions may cause local scarcities of water in particular, the problem with climate change is that there is too much fossil fuel, not too little, being used in the global economy. As climate change accelerates, security is increasingly a matter of infrastructure provision and vulnerabilities to extreme events (Dalby, 2009 ). Fossil fuel’s geographical distribution likewise has consequences for geopolitics and the conduct of climate policy, which does not make global coordination of climate change efforts easy (McGlade & Ekins, 2015 ). Renewable energy is widely dispersed and, given the lack of fossil fuels, access and transportation difficulties are much less likely to be a matter of geopolitical disputes (Overland, 2019 ). However, despite this, much of the discussion about climate change and security replicates the earlier discussion of the 1990s, on environmental causation of conflict, without focusing on the larger system transformation that climate change is driving and the consequences of that for security broadly understood.

This is changing, however, as discussions of climate risk and the need to rethink environmental contexts and interconnections in the global political system become clear, in the aftermath of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change of 2015 , and the toll rises of casualties from storms, droughts, fires, and floods as a result of accelerating climate change. Earth system science, in its nascent stages when Our Common Future was being written, has progressed by leaps and bounds, and the necessity of thinking through human vulnerabilities, in what is now widely called the Anthropocene, has become clear to most researchers (Lewis & Maslin, 2018 ). This is not necessarily clear to many policy makers still working within traditional developmental frameworks and energy supply security agendas. The contrast between traditional energy security priorities with energy independence as top priority, for the United States in particular (Yergin, 2011 ), and climate change policy (Nyman, 2018 ), is especially stark in the Trump administration, a matter that highlights the importance of politics in deciding on priorities in security planning.

Our Common Future didn’t provide a precise definition of environmental security, but it clearly suggested that environmental stress was a cause of conflict and that sustainable development required stable environmental conditions to succeed. Hence, environmental security emerged as a policy goal despite the lack of a clear definition as to what it entailed. These themes subsequently shaped both the policy and scholarly agendas in the 1990s, engaging the relationships between environment and insecurity, widely understood, as well as the more specific research focus on environmental change causing conflict (Dalby, 2002 ). While scholarly and policy attention to environment temporarily receded in the early years of the 21st century , during the war on terror, climate concerns reactivated this discussion in updated form, especially in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in 2005 , an event that raised numerous questions about human vulnerability and the capabilities of states to provide security for their citizens in the face of accelerating climate change.

Various formulations of climate security emerged (McDonald, 2013 ), and in parallel with the discussion in the 1990s, scholars set about trying to clarify the role of climate in causing conflict while simultaneously addressing how this new discussion of human vulnerabilities required updated formulations of security. Most recently, this research and the policy debate have been shaped by the findings of earth system science and emergent discussion of the policy implications of the Anthropocene era (Dalby, 2020 ). In all this, there is no commonly accepted definition of either environmental or climate security, beyond a general sense that predictable weather conditions are key to human flourishing, both directly in agricultural societies, and indirectly given the vulnerabilities of urban societies to infrastructural disruptions.

To explicate all this further, the rest of this article looks back briefly to the discussion in the 1990s concerning environmental change and conflict, then observes the reinvention of the environmental causation arguments and their links to security in the middle of the first decade of the new millennium. Subsequent sections deal with the emergence of the larger earth system science discussion, which documents the scale and urgency of dealing with climate change, energy security that frequently contradicts climate policy, the emergence of climate risk as a policy focus, the discussion of climate securitization, and possibilities of planetary geoengineering; finally, the chapter draws some tentative conclusions about future research directions.

Environment and Conflict

While Our Common Future assumed relationships between resource shortages and conflict, quite how this relationship actually worked wasn’t clear in the report. Two major research projects were undertaken in the 1990s to address the question of how environmental change might generate conflict, in what conditions, where, and with what implications for policy. Thomas Homer-Dixon ( 1999 ) led a team of researchers that investigated a number of case studies, including South Africa, Rwanda, Pakistan, and elsewhere to trace the casual pathways between environmental change and what he termed acute conflict. One of the initial problems turned out to be that security was such an imprecise term that it wasn’t practical as a research agenda if causal relationships were the key to the investigation. Hence, this project focused more narrowly on acute conflict, rather than security more generally. Guenter Baechler ( 1999 ) led a parallel series of investigations that more closely looked at matters of development and discrimination in terms of access to environmental resources in rural areas.

In very broad terms, both research efforts concluded that environmental matters alone weren’t key to predicting conflict. While they were obviously important in numerous situations, key intervening variables included historical patterns of grievance and conflict as well as the competence and legitimacy of existing governmental structures. Scarcity wasn’t obviously a causal factor, and clearly it emerged that in crisis conditions elites often acted to enhance their power and control over resources, a matter that accelerated the marginalization of rural communities. Maldevelopment in Baechler’s ( 1998 ) terms was a key problem and, as such, policies that dealt with the perverse consequences of rural transformation and focused on practical matters in particular contexts were key to sustainable economic activities that were likely to avoid conflict. Elite appropriation of resources was also a theme in Colin Kahl’s ( 2006 ) detailed field-based studies of Kenya and the Philippines. This finding is broadly in parallel with the political ecology literature that has long investigated the power relations in rural transformations linked to development and economic change (Peluso & Watts, 2001 ).

Simultaneously, another series of research efforts were looking to the role of resources in civil wars and larger scale conflict in the Global South. Here, the discussion suggested that control over extraction and export of resources, including timber, oil, diamonds, and coltan, was a key to understanding patterns of violence in the Global South (Bannon & Collier, 2003 ). This is a long-standing pattern in traditional geopolitics, where rivalries over access to resources is a cause of conflict, and in cases such as the Japanese entry into the Second World War, major warfare too (Le Billon, 2013 ). Controlling resource streams and the revenues that they generate may be a way to power and wealth in poor areas that is much more tempting than waiting for long-term economic development to enrich a society. This suggests that local cases of resource abundance may be much more important than scarcity as causes of conflict generation (Le Billon, 2005 ). But it is important to note that most of the resources in these discussions concerning diamonds, minerals, and petroleum, in particular, are not strictly environmental matters. Hence, the discussion of resource curses, Dutch disease, and related resource economics issues are often tangential to environmental security matters.

These studies all suggest in one way or another that theories of locally generated violence as the source of environmental conflict are inadequate; clearly, the larger global economy and the political economy of resource supplies is key to explaining conflict in particular locations, although the causal link is frequently indirectly environmental, at best. Clearly too, while war is related to famine and frequently involves the use of food as a weapon, starving people are usually far too busy trying to find food to initiate large scale conflict despite the practicalities of violence often involved in these situations (Watts, 2013 ). Food riots are frequently urban phenomena emphasizing the importance of economics in insecurity, but large-scale insurrections are at best indirectly related to resource scarcities. As the Arab spring phenomenon suggested global food prices matter; rapid increases in these are often the trigger for political unrest; but environmental matters are indirectly rather than directly involved here as a cause of conflict (Homer-Dixon et al., 2015 ).

In terms of wider interpretations of environmental security, it was also clear in the 1990s that matters of pollution, food shortages, inadequate nutrition, and lack of safe drinking water were substantial hazards to populations in many places. These concerns were part of the larger discussion of human vulnerability (Adger, 2006 ) and human security that incorporated environmental matters into its overarching formulation of the dangers faced by the poorest parts of humanity that threatened their prospects for development (Adger et al., 2014 ). Environmental security in these terms is compromised by many factors, not just those related to overt conflict (Floyd & Matthew, 2013 ); the discussion of specifically environmental security spills over into larger concerns with human security broadly understood (O’Brien, Wolf, & Sygna, 2013 ). Both the narrow version of conflict-related environmental change and the broader understanding of human security having an environmental component fed into the policy discussion of sustainable development.

Climate and Conflict

The failure of the American state to deal effectively with the aftermath of hurricane Katrina and the flooding of New Orleans, in 2005 , dramatically increased the policy attention given to the matter of vulnerabilities to climate change. In 2007 , the discussion once again found its way into policy debates in the United States and the United Kingdom (Mabey, 2007 ) with a number of high-profile publications coinciding with the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate assessment and the controversy over Al Gore’s documentary movie An Inconvenient Truth , which shared a Nobel prize with the IPCC and won an Oscar. Both the CNA Corporation ( 2007 ) and the Centre for Security and International Studies (Campbell, Gulledge, McNeill, Podesta, & Ogden, 2007 ) published reports on national security and climate change in 2007 , to be followed soon by the German Advisory Board on Climate Change ( 2008 ) and the US Army War College analysis of national security and climate change (Pumphrey, 2008 ).

A key formulation in this literature in the United States was the idea of climate change as a threat multiplier (CNA Military Advisory Board, 2014 ), something that added to other sources of instability, and in light of the focus on terrorism, a potential source of discontent and terrorist recruitment. Hence this was seen as an issue for national security, and something worth thinking through in terms of long-term strategy. It once again raised the question of the causal links between environmental change, this time explicitly as a result of climate change induced weather variability, and conflict generation. An updated formulation suggested that climate was better understood as a catalyst of conflict (CNA Military Advisory Board, 2014 ). In parallel, the American military became concerned that storms and rising sea levels might render its facilities vulnerable (Briggs & Matejova, 2019 ); a decade before, Tyndall Airforce Base in Florida was badly damaged by hurricane action in 2018 . Vulnerabilities of facilities and the potential for growing interventions to deal with disaster relief and insurgencies aggravated by climate change made climate a matter for military attention regardless of the lack of interest from the Bush, and subsequently the Trump administration in Washington (Klare, 2019 ).

These concerns generated a renewed research focus on environmental conflict and revived the 1990s discussions as to the appropriate frameworks for analysis and methods to investigate political consequences of climate change. A research literature emerged addressing both the empirical studies and policy implications with some quantitative analyses suggesting a clear indication that weather events and larger scale climate change do cause violent conflict (Hsiang & Burke, 2014 ; Hsiang, Meng, & Cane, 2011 ). But other research produced results that are much less certain on connections between civil wars and climate (Buhaug, 2015 ), suggesting that the empirical evidence about such things as drought causing conflict is less than consistent or less than clear (Theisen, Holtermann, & Buhaug, 2012 ). Special issues of Political Geography in 2007 and in 2014 and the Journal of Peace Research in 2012 (see Gleditsch, 2012 ) have generated both empirical investigations and methodological disputes about how to tackle the relationships between climate change and conflict. In Africa, where many of these studies are done, detailed research doesn’t obviously link climate to large scale conflict (O’Loughlin et al., 2012 ). A key part of the methodological debate here in terms of whether large studies are what is required, or whether, given the large variation of social and geographical circumstances over which climate change occurs, data aggregation across diverse situations is in fact useful (Buhaug, 2015 ; Busby, 2018 ; Ide, Link, Scheffran, & Schilling, 2016 ).

These findings are sometimes complicated by the inclusion of large-scale historical events and more contemporary cases as well as their inclusion of a variety of scales from individual acts of aggression all the way up to climate as a factor in civilizational collapse (Hsiang, Burke, & Miguel, 2013 ). Historical studies linking up with new scientific analysis of climate records suggest very clearly that the period of the little ice age, especially in the 17th century , when agricultural production and food supplies were severely compromised in many parts of the world, is related to wars and political conflict (Parker, 2013 ). Similar investigations of the decline of the Western Roman Empire suggest that climate, and in this case disease, were key factors in these historical events (Harper, 2017 ). But great care has to be taken to generalize from these past events to draw conclusions about present trends given the sheer scale of transformations in the global economy over the last few generations, and the emergence of international institutions of aid and governance.

While some large statistical studies claim there is a relationship between climate and conflict, detailed empirical work on the ground repeatedly suggests that if there is such a relationship it is relatively weak in comparison to issues of development and governance (Selby, 2014 ). Focusing on livelihood issues and historical trajectories in particular places suggests specific local factors are crucially important in understanding relationships of violence (Deligiannis, 2012 ). There are numerous difficulties with data sets, distinguishing dependent and independent variables, universal causation claims, and the scales involved (Meierding, 2016a ). Likewise, difficulties occur in terms of how media reports code events, whether civil wars are the focus or more general outbreaks of violence, the scale at which events register in these sets, given that national aggradation over large states may produce spurious correlations, and their completeness as a record of political conflict (Buhaug, 2015 ).

Some quantitative analyses focusing on Africa have suggested that there is a relationship between warming and civil war in Africa (Burke, Miguel, Satyanath, Dykema, & Lobell, 2009 ), but detailed investigation of the statistical claims seems to suggest that the relationships between conflict and environmental change are anything but clear, especially in the case of Eastern Africa (Raleigh & Kniveton, 2012 ). The scholarly research on this theme comes to diverse conclusions. “Sweeping generalizations have undermined a genuine understanding of any climate–conflict link, whereas cumulative results from the numerous studies of individual communities are difficult to summarize” (O’Loughlin et al., 2012 , p. 18344). The finer points of the methodological debate are beyond the scope of this chapter (see Bretthauer, 2017 ), but efforts to integrate different research methods are obviously important to get greater clarity on which connections are most important (van Baalen & Mobjork, 2018 ). While rural disruptions are clearly a matter influenced by weather (Busby, 2018 ), the question as to whether distress turns to conflict relates to the political and social circumstances in particular cases, and the particular ways that rural political economy channels social change into conflict, migration, or collaboration (Ide et al., 2016 ). Nonetheless, despite the lack of clarity about results, this literature has fed into policy analyses of climate risks and the need to consider conflict risks as a matter of foreign policy in Europe (Detges, 2017 ), and in the United States (Werrell & Femia, 2017 ).

A noteworthy attempt to resolve some of the conflicting claims in the empirical discussions by a process of expert elicitation among the key researchers appeared in Nature (Mach et al., 2019 ). This synthesis suggests that four drivers of conflict are especially important in subnational contexts: low socioeconomic development, low capabilities of the state, intergroup inequality (for example, ethnic differences across groups), and recent history of violent conflict. What is unclear is the importance of climate variability, although there is agreement that further climate change will amplify conflict risks. Much of this is simply because, to date, climate disruptions have been small relative to other conflict drivers. Nonetheless, this research effort continues because “Given that conflict has pervasive detrimental human, economic, and environmental consequences, climate-conflict linkages—even if small—would markedly influence the social costs of carbon and decisions to limit future climate change” (Mach et al., 2019 ). The concerns about climate change are about future possibilities, which climate projections suggest will be severe for most societies (Steffen & Rockstrom, 2018 ), but there is no agreement in the scholarly literature that there is a substantial empirical record of this so far in the 21st century . In the policy discussions that draw on this work, there is considerable concern that climate change induced conflict will change the geostrategic situation in dangerous and unpredictable ways, not least as a result of extrapolations from the war in Syria.

Multiple accounts suggested that one of the causes of the Syrian civil war was the migration by unemployed farmers from drought stricken eastern areas to Syrian cities (Gleick, 2014 , Kelley, Mohtadi, Cane, Seager, & Kushnir, 2015 ; Werrell, Femia, & Sternberg, 2015 ). If climate change had induced the drought, which in turn removed agricultural livelihoods from rural areas, and these people, upset with the failure of the government to assist them protested then, so the argument went, here is a case of climate-induced conflict. Careful subsequent analysis of the case and the evidence on which it is based cast considerable doubt on the whole situation, both as to whether climate change had caused the drought in 2007 and subsequent years, and whether the protestors who were attacked by state security forces included substantial numbers of displaced farm workers (Selby, Dahi, Frolich, & Hulme, 2017 ). While rural distress in Syria clearly happened in those years (Daoudy, 2020 ), the causal link via formulations of migration and political protest all the way through to the subsequent civil war is difficult to establish (Ide, 2018 ; Selby, 2018 ). The violent suppression of protest would seem to be key to subsequent events, and the history of regime violence against protests is nothing new in Syria.

Overall, it may be more important to inquire into how large-scale processes of globalization have played out in the region and how the responses of particular regimes to the ongoing warfare since 9/11 have shaped political rivalries (Swain & Jägerskog, 2016 ). In these terms, the role of oil in geopolitical competition is important too, and American intervention in particular is a key factor in the larger patterns of violence. That said, even if so-called oil wars , to gain access to specific supplies, may be overrated as a direct cause of war (Meierding, 2016b ), there is a long history of conflict around oil in the Middle East in particular (Bichler & Nitzan, 2004 ). Now global food markets and climate disruptions are adding additional complications to this pattern. In terms of causal factors relating violence and change 21st century events are heavily influenced by the global economy and multiple interconnected crises in the political architecture of the international system (Homer-Dixon et al., 2015 ).

The Anthropocene

The Syrian case also poses the question as to how much the drought might have been caused or aggravated by anthropogenic climate change. The question of attribution, as it has come to be known, in terms of either the increased likelihood or the severity of damaging weather events (Kirchmeier-Young, Gillett, Zwiers, Cannon, & Anslow, 2019 ), raises issues of responsibility and hence liability, as well potential conflicts if victims of increased storm activity and other climate-change related disruptions seek recompense for their suffering (Byers, Franks, & Gage, 2017 ). As critical scholars have emphasized, as extreme events escalate, people in the Global South in particular, who had very little to do with causing climate change, are its victims. Hence climate justice is a key part of geopolitical discourse, even if representatives of states that have caused the bulk of climate change downplay it, and repeatedly refuse to comprehensively discuss loss and damage as part of international climate change negotiations (Chaturvedi & Doyle, 2015 ).

All of which is even more complicated by the fact that climate change is but one of the phenomena in play as human actions transform ecosystems in most parts of the earth system. Earlier discussions of global change (Steffen et al., 2004 ) have fed into what is known as earth system science and changed our understanding of how planet Earth works. The scale of human activities suggests that we live in new circumstances, in a planetary system that we are remaking drastically and quickly, so much so that it is widely accepted that we live in a new geological epoch named the Anthropocene (Lewis & Maslin, 2018 ).

This science provides at least some of the answers to the questions raised in Our Common Future concerning the trajectory of climate change and other environmental factors. Prominent among the formulations in this new Earth System Science is the suggestion that the Holocene period of the last ten thousand years provided conditions within which we know humanity can flourish (Davies, 2016 ). All of human history has occurred since the last glaciation, a period of relative stability in the planetary climate that has allowed agriculture to develop and has provided predictable conditions for complex economies to persist over long periods. During this time human actions have dramatically transformed landscapes by removing forests and changing habitats and species mixes in most of the ecologically productive terrestrial ecosystems (Ellis, 2018 ). The impact of European colonization linked the world into a global capitalist economy.

Most recently, in the period since the middle of the 20th century , now known as the great acceleration (McNeill & Engelke, 2016 ), earlier fossil fuel-powered industry has been dramatically expanded by petroleum-powered globalization. This has involved the vast increase in the use of fertilizers, the introduction of dangerous chlorofluorocarbons and other things into the system, the widespread use of plastics and concrete to change habitats and modes of living, and the diversion of much of the fresh water systems of the planet due to dams, irrigation, and urban water systems. The planet is increasingly an artificial entity due to the expansion of this “technosphere,” which now measures in trillions of tons of material (Zalesiewicz et al., 2017 ).

In earth system science terms, the period of the Holocene provided a “safe operating space” for humanity, a set of conditions within which we know humanity could flourish (Rockstrom et al., 2009 ). Doing so required that the earth system operate within a number of key “planetary boundaries,” beyond which dramatic disruptions not previously known in human history would result (Steffen et al., 2015 ). In contrast to the Holocene period, the previous million years witnessed a series of glacial periods in what effectively was a lengthy ice age marked by brief warmer “inter-glacial” periods. Current trajectories suggest that we are heading toward a hothouse earth pathway, where rapid and accelerating climate change will be the norm (Steffen & Rockstrom, 2018 ).

This trajectory will further disrupt historical ecological systems and agriculture on land, and will, through pollution, warming, and acidification of the oceans, damage oceanic ecologies fundamentally. As life is primarily an oceanic phenomenon this has profound consequences for all of life, not just humanity; this is the new context of rapid planetary change that we face in the Anthropocene (Angus, 2016 ). Environmental security at the largest scale now requires policies that lead to a “stabilized earth” system, one not too far from the conditions that pertained in the Holocene (Steffen & Rockstrom, 2018 ). The alternative “hothouse earth” pathway offers no indications that civilization can function in conditions of ongoing drastic disruptions, a theme that has received widespread popular commentary (Wallace-Wells, 2019 ).

Risks, Fragility and Adaptation

Early in 2019 , the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) published a report by the Global Commission on the Geopolitics of Energy Transformation that didn’t mince words on the scale of the current transformation:

The accelerating deployment of renewables has set in motion a global energy transformation that will have profound geopolitical consequences. Just as fossil fuels have shaped the geopolitical map over the last two centuries, the energy transformation will alter the global distribution of power, relations between states, the risk of conflict, and the social, economic and environmental drivers of geopolitical instability. (Global Commission, 2019 , p. 12).

This is important, as climate is increasingly being discussed in terms of risks. Mabey, Gulledge, Finel, and Silverthorne ( 2011 ) offered a discussion of climate security in terms of risk analysis, suggesting that, because this formulation is both insightful and familiar to security planners, it should be efficacious in security policy circles. However, while they suggested that risk analysis is useful, they did emphasize a key point that frequently gets lost in the discussion. Normal risk assessments work with a scale that has high probability, low impact events on one end and low probability high risk events on the other. This is not the situation faced by climate analysts (Ruttinger, 2017 ). The present trajectory is clearly leading to high probability high impact futures, and this requires careful thinking about what risks, where and when, need attention in security planning. Focusing on water issues in particular, it is clear that matters of infrastructure and the political economy of access to supplies is key to insecurity, and hence a crucial part of the relationship between climate change and insecurities in particular places (Zografos, Goulden, & Kallis, 2014 ). Likewise, cooperation across international boundaries is important in water management, and cooperation is necessary to effectively deal with extreme events and supply disruptions; at least so far, the vast majority of cases of cross-boundary water difficulties have generated cooperative efforts rather that conflict (Dinar & Dinar, 2017 ).

A report on “A New Climate for Peace,” presented to the G7 meetings in Germany in 2015 , identified seven “compound fragility risks” to states in coming decades as climate change stresses weak states beyond what they may be able to cope with effectively. These risks encompassed: local resource competition,; livelihood insecurity and migration, extreme weather events, volatile food prices and provision, transboundary water management, sea-level rise and coastal degradation, and notably, concern that climate policies may have unintended consequences. This final point draws on studies suggesting that, if adaptation strategies don’t think about specific local conditions carefully, they may aggravate injustices or generate responses that make climate adaptation more difficult. These “backdraft effects” (Dabelko, Herzer, Null, Parker, & Sticklor, 2013 ) may “boomerang” (Swatuk & Wirkus, 2018 ) on aid programs and enhance insecurities, especially where the political economy of climate adaptation perpetuates traditional development efforts relying on engineering projects that fail to take ecological and political conditions in fragile states into account (Sovacool & Linner, 2016 ).

Noting that geopolitical rivalries remain a major problem in the international system, Mobjork, Smith, and Ruttinger ( 2016 ) emphasized the importance of managing them peacefully to facilitate effective climate actions. Similar concerns have been expressed by US AID concerning the risks of climate change and fragile states where “threat multipliers” may enhance the consequences of climate disruptions (Moran, et al., 2018 ; Null & Risi, 2016 ). These considerations have been brought to larger audiences in the documentary movie The Age of Consequences and in the TV series “Years of Living Dangerously.” As with earlier efforts, including the ENVSEC initiative (Hardt, 2018 ), there remains the difficulty with these formulations that focus on the dangers of instability in the Global South, but in the process focus on the symptoms of climate change rather than the causes in metropolitan consumption of fossil fuels (Dalby, 2013 ). This is not to deny the complex consequences of climate change in rural underdeveloped regions that need urgent attention, but the first task in dealing with climate change is the rapid reduction in the use of fossil fuels, and this is something that the affluent consumers of the world need to attend to, especially as the social costs of climate change are mounting in affluent states, too (Ricke, Drouet, Caldeira, & Tavoni, 2018 ).

Invoking a universal climate crisis, where everyone is equally affected or capable of dealing with the consequences, or focusing just on its symptoms rather than causes is to misconstrue the geopolitics of environmental security (Chaturvedi & Doyle, 2015 ). This is especially so when Malthusian fears of growing African populations and climate migration are fed into the policy discourse (Hartmann, 2014 ). In so far as climate migration is an issue, much of the dislocation is within states, and while climate is a factor in long-distance migration, disentangling it from political and economic processes is difficult. The World Bank has estimated that as many as 2.8% of the population in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America may be forced to move as a result of slow onset climate change (Rigaud et al., 2018 ). While these are large absolute numbers, relative to the dynamics of urbanization and economic change in these regions, they are relatively small amounts. How states respond to cross-border distress migration is one of the key themes that the revival of xenophobic geopolitics poses for sustainable development and effective climate adaptation strategies; the past cases of closing borders to prevent migration from disasters presents alarming precedents (Smith, 2007 ).

Geoengineering and Conflict?

Given the very slow response to increasingly clear indications of rising dangers caused by climate change, discussions of the possibilities of artificially cooling the earth have emerged. Technical fixes to reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the earth’s surface include increasing cloud cover by spraying seawater into the lower atmosphere, and most popular, mimicking the cooling effect of volcano eruptions by injecting sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere (National Research Council, 2015 ). While these might be effective in temporarily reducing insolation, their most articulate advocates make it clear this is a really bad idea that only makes sense as a last-resort temporary measure to buy time while energy systems are converted away from fossil fuel use (Keith, 2013 ). This provides one form of environmental security in that it, if it were to work successfully, it might keep earth’s overall temperature within, to use the earth science system terms, the safe operating space of a stabilized earth system.

While such interventions might work to reduce temperatures, they are also likely to have further largely unpredictable consequences, such as changing the patterns of monsoon rainfall in Asia. Hence, as critics argue, such initiatives need to be avoided and sensible climate mitigation strategies followed instead (Hamilton, 2013 ). If, however, geoengineering efforts were undertaken and disruptions of the monsoon happen, with all the likely consequences for crop production in a region that is populated by more than half of humanity, the disruptions would be severe. If in these circumstances, one state’s leaders were to blame another’s geoengineering efforts for the disruptions and issue ultimatums to cease and desist using such technologies, the possibilities of major conflict loom. While no one took Iranian President Ahmadinejad seriously when he claimed, in 2011 , that European states had been using weather modification techniques to cause a drought in Iran, the precedent is troubling (Dalby & Moussavi, 2017 ).

While overt conflict might not result from geoengineering, the discussion of the potential consequences now includes investigations into possibilities of countermeasures (Parker, Horton, & Keith, 2018 ), a situation that implies, and as has been suggested repeatedly, that security in these terms can only be provided by careful agreements and cooperative efforts by governments and corporations who might actually produce these technologies and use them (Burns & Strauss, 2013 ). The continued failure of the international system to grapple effectively with climate change makes it increasingly unlikely that the planet will be maintained within the aspirational targets of 1.5 or 2 °Celsius average heating above pre-industrial levels (IPCC, 2018 ). As heating accelerates in coming decades, it seems increasingly likely that efforts to artificially cool the planet will be attempted whether or not there is widespread consensus among the global community. The possibilities of unilateral action may be over rated, not least because of the possibilities of countermeasures by other actors, but the potential for conflict over diverging priorities and unclear causal mechanisms in the earth system is, potentially, a major security nightmare for policy makers. As such, environmental security is far more likely to be provided by rapid decarbonization than efforts to deal with the effects of failure to do so.

Securitizing Climate Change

At the largest scale, questions of climate disruptions link up with historical discussions of the causes of major events in human history (Harper, 2017 ; Parker, 2013 ). These offer useful lessons for the future of civilization and the possibilities of humanity causing either the collapse of civilization (Diamond, 2005 ), or, in worst-case scenarios, our own extinction (Wallace-Wells, 2019 ). So far, climate change and the larger discussion of the Anthropocene have not shifted the priorities of macro securitization from traditional concerns with nuclear weapons, state rivalries, or terrorism (Buzan & Waever, 2009 ). Nightmare scenarios loom of the future of a planet where the long-term legacy of contemporary actions is a “plutocene” (Glikson, 2017 ), as in a geological epoch where future strata are marked by plutonium as a consequence of future nuclear wars, whether directly caused by climate disruptions or other Anthropocene events, if the new geological circumstances are not addressed quickly.

In terms of securitization theory, linking climate to security has had a mixed success in gaining policy traction (Floyd, 2010 ); the issue is complex, and while climate is an existential threat to many entities, the complexity of the matter defies easy encapsulation in traditional modes of security thinking (Mayer, 2012 ). In the United Kingdom, under the Blair and Brown governments, it was understood to be a policy issue that mattered (Rothe, 2016 ). Elsewhere, in case studies dealing with Germany, Mexico, and Turkey, the difficulties of getting coherent narratives and national attention suggest how complex the issue is, not least because of the various referent objects—individuals, states, and the planet itself—that are invoked (Diez, von Lucke, &Wellman, 2016 ). So far, at least, efforts to make climate change a security priority have had mixed results in the United States. While President Obama invoked the language of security in making climate a security priority, climate policy has had to deal with opposition from the fossil fuel lobby, and subsequently, the enthusiastic endorsement of fossil fuel exploitation by the Trump administration. The sheer complexity of American politics and the conflicting dynamics between interventionist and de-regulationist tendencies in the neoliberal state make for contradictory trajectories (MacNeil, 2017 ).

If climate change is understood to be a global security issue (Goldstein, 2016 ), then the obvious focus for attention to this matter is the United Nations security council. This body has considered the matter of climate security a number of times but hasn’t generated the necessary momentum to deal with climate as a matter of urgency (Scott & Ku, 2018 ). This is not least because the permanent members include the largest carbon dioxide producers, and the sense of urgency generated in scientific analyses of the current trajectory don’t translate into political responses when fossil fuel industry influence is so widespread. Activists have been making the case for emergency action on climate for many years (Spratt & Sutton, 2009 ), invoking metaphors of wartime, like mobilizations, as necessary to tackle the scale of the problem with the necessary speed (McKibben, 2016 ), but so far with little effective traction on international institutions.

The major achievement of the 2015 Paris Agreement and its rapid acceptance by most of the major states is in fact the agreement that this predicament is real and that it needs to be dealt with in coming years by most of humanity. That said, the contradictions between universal aspiration and national commitments remain to be resolved (Höhne et al., 2017 ). In Bruno Latour’s ( 2018 ) terms, all politics is now somehow related to climate, either as a focal point for attempts at collective action, or as a series of policies mobilized to resist these, as in the case of climate denial efforts and fossil fuel company obstruction of climate change initiatives. It also requires focusing on where international investments go, to coal powered generation stations, or into efforts to restore and more effectively manage forests so they can sequester carbon (Gaffney, Crona, Dauriach, & Galaz, 2018 ).

Keeping the earth system within its safe operating space, which is now the key to environmental security, requires rapid action (IPCC, 2018 ). Environmental security can’t be provided by violent actions after disruptions. It needs to be built into planning and preparation for likely disruptions that are already in the system, but it simultaneously needs to work on the rapid elimination of fossil fuel-based combustion everywhere. Clearly environmental management efforts, the use of parks, pollution prevention, and sustainable yield strategies for resource management alone are not adequate to the tasks facing security planners. In Peter Dauvergne’s ( 2016 ) terms, this “environmentalism of the rich” has failed to deal with either the colonial legacies of destruction of indigenous peoples and their places, or the disruption of numerous ecosystems due to the resource extractions and pollution generated by the scale of the global economy. Neither can traditional modes of “fortress conservation,” using armed forces to keep local populations away from traditional territories to supposedly protect them (Duffy, 2016 ). Similarly, assumptions that isolated regions can somehow protect societies from larger environmental disruptions are premised on a failure to understand the interconnections in the earth system and a nostalgia for inappropriate national containment strategies based on territorial sovereignty (White, 2014 ).

Earth’s Future

In so far as peaceful cooperation among the great powers occurs and violence is contained to relatively small areas that are disrupted by climate shocks, the possibilities for environmental peacemaking add another dimension to the policy discussion (Swain & Öjendal, 2018 ). While regional local peace initiatives, peace parks, and peace building around shared waterways and cooperative resource management are useful initiatives, they are all subject to large scale collaborative efforts of the major powers to slow and eventually stop climate change. All this requires a recognition of the new context of the Anthropocene, where caring for ecosystems rather than extracting resources from them is key to security provision on the largest scale (Harrington & Shearing, 2017 ). It is about more than plans to make societies resilient (Grove, 2018 ); what is needed now is transformative thinking to prepare for the disruptions that are inevitably coming, even if decarbonization does eventually lead to a stabilized earth system in future (Kareiva & Fuller, 2016 ).

In many rural areas in the global economy, however, corporations and military agencies continue to expand their control over resources at the sometimes violent expense of local people anxious to maintain traditional modes of livelihood and control over their territories (Buxton & Hayes, 2016 ). Activists who protest often get killed in the process, while international meddling gets the blame (Matejova, Parker, & Dauvergne, 2018 ). As Our Common Future suggested, in 1987 , many of these practices will have to change if sustainability is to be the priority. How to transition to more ecologically sensible modes of economy is now a key theme in the discussions of environment, security, and peace (Brauch, Oswald Spring, Grin, & Scheffran, 2016 ). The problem with climate change in particular, and the Anthropocene in general, is precisely that what has been secured so far is what is now endangering environmental security for all in coming decades (Dalby, 2020 ). Regional efforts and environmental peacebuilding will undoubtedly be useful, especially in areas where major rivers matter to multiple states, as in the case of the Himalayas (Huda & Ali, 2018 ), but these efforts will only work in the long run if the planet avoids the hothouse pathway of runaway climate change.

The states that are most obviously vulnerable to climate are the low-lying, small island states that face immediate questions of survival, and many other states in the Global South that are vulnerable to agricultural disruptions caused by storms and droughts, but lack the means to make their existential plight a matter of concern for the larger international community (Chaturvedi & Doyle, 2015 ). While climate change may be the largest existential crisis facing human kind, the United Nations has not formulated an effective response (Scott & Ku, 2018 ); a global problem still faces the persistent political problems of multiple jurisdictions and politics, where relative gains are still valued in international politics despite the likely disasters that temporary benefits may confer on the collectivity in the longer term (Harris, 2013 ). The Paris Agreement of 2015 does recognize the necessity of dealing with climate change but still relies on states to craft plans to tackle greenhouse gas emissions without any overarching authority to enforce compliance, even with the limited ambitions states have so far shown in dealing with this issue (Falkner, 2016 ). Climate has so far been understood as a development issue and a matter of inter-state rules, the “law between and development within” approach in Conca’s ( 2015 ) formulation. In turn, this raises the question of whether the United Nations might have better success in thinking about climate if it was considered in terms of its functions to protect human rights and its peace building and conflict prevention roles.

More specifically, this requires thinking about survival as a matter of economic production and shifting from fossil-fueled modes to more renewable ones. In terms of geopolitics, it requires a shift, from assumptions of competitive antagonisms as the basic premise for international politics and security problems, to assumptions of the possibilities of resilient peace as an attainable goal for the United Nations (Barnett, 2019 ). As Conca ( 2019 ) suggests, focusing on the consequences of climate change in such places as the Lake Chad basin and Iraq, where climate migrants and instability are linked to environmental change, if not directly to conflict, may facilitate actions by the United Nations that might accrue to a larger general series of policy initiatives.

Future Research

In light of the growing discussion of security in the Anthropocene (Harrington & Shearing, 2017 ), to do so will also require more fundamental rethinking of environmental security to focus more explicitly on the ecological functioning of the planetary system, a matter of “ecological security” in McDonald’s ( 2018 ) terms, referring to a functional earth system, rather than simply taking the environment as a source of resources, or the contextual backdrop for human affairs. The implications of this new Anthropocene context suggest the need for further research looking at the interconnections between places in the earth system, matters sometimes now encompassed in the literature of environmental geopolitics (O’Lear, 2018 , 2020 ), as well as more work in the emerging field of environmental peacebuilding. This latter work focuses on practical measures to use environmental cooperation as a tool for post-conflict reconstruction (Krampe, 2017 ) and the promotion of quality peace conditions.

Nonetheless, unless this new framing has a comprehensive rethinking of rural ecologies and their interconnections into the global economy, there remain dangers that many of the problems with traditional development projects may stymie innovations (Ide, 2020 ). How to avoid these in working on climate adaptations (Sovacool & Linner, 2016 ) is clearly a key theme for new research on ecology and security in the next stage of the Anthropocene. Research in the future must focus on transition strategies (Brauch et al., 2016 ), especially in energy systems (Looney, 2017 ) and on how to accelerate social transformations (Linner & Wibeck, 2019 ), rather than looking to traditional themes of security studies concerned with conflict, war, and its prevention. As Our Common Future suggested, at the beginning of the environmental security discussion, security has to be sought in terms of change.

Digital Resources

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This site contains many of the published IPCC reports online.
• Earth System Governance . A key network of social science research on the earth system.
• Center for Climate and Security . A clearing house for military and policy materials linking climate and security.
• Planetary Security Initiative . A consortium of international think tanks researching climate and related security issues directed by the Netherlands Foreign Ministry.
• Real Climate . Where climate scientists discuss contemporary scientific developments and their human implications.
• United Nations Environment Programme’s Global Environmental Outlook Programme provides links to the latest GEO documents that summarize the changing conditions of the biosphere.
• Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Environmental Change and Security Program hosts the a key online source in the New Security Beat Blog

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• Published: 11 April 2017

An evaluation of the ecological and environmental security on China’s terrestrial ecosystems

• Hongqi Zhang 1 &
• Erqi Xu 1  

Scientific Reports volume  7 , Article number:  811 ( 2017 ) Cite this article

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• Environmental sciences
• Sustainability

With rapid economic growth, industrialization, and urbanization, various ecological and environmental problems occur, which threaten and undermine the sustainable development and domestic survival of China. On the national scale, our progress remains in a state of qualitative or semi-quantitative evaluation, lacking a quantitative evaluation and a spatial visualization of ecological and environmental security. This study collected 14 indictors of water, land, air, and biodiversity securities to compile a spatial evaluation of ecological and environmental security in terrestrial ecosystems of China. With area-weighted normalization and scaling transformations, the veto aggregation (focusing on the limit indicator) and balanced aggregation (measuring balanced performance among different indicators) methods were used to aggregate security evaluation indicators. Results showed that water, land, air, and biodiversity securities presented different spatial distributions. A relatively serious ecological and environmental security crisis was found in China, but presented an obviously spatial variation of security evaluation scores. Hotspot areas at the danger level, which are scattered throughout the entirety of the country, were identified. The spatial diversities and causes of ecological and environmental problems in different regions were analyzed. Spatial integration of regional development and proposals for improving the ecological and environmental security were put forward.

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Introduction.

China is undergoing fast economic growth, industrialization, urbanization with huge environmental costs over a long period 1 . The excessive pursuit of gross domestic product (GDP) growth by over management and irrational development has heavily exploited natural resources and damaged environment conditions. This results in a series of serious ecological and environmental problems, such as water scarcity and contamination, air pollution, soil erosion, ecosystem degradation, and loss of biodiversity 2 , 3 , 4 . The ecosystem degradation and environmental pollution threaten and undermine the country’s economic and social growth, as well as domestic survival and development. Faced with the considerable ecological and environmental problems, is there an ecological and environmental security crisis, which indicated a hazardous situation causing the deleterious or potentially even disastrous consequences for humans 5 , 6 , 7 , in China’s terrestrial ecosystems? It calls for a systemic and comprehensive evaluation.

With different ecological and environmental problems in China, the evaluation of ecological and environmental security has progressively matured for the sustainable development and management of regional areas 8 , 9 , 10 . In particular, the evaluations were performed for water ecological security 11 , 12 , land ecological security 8 , 13 , 14 , and urban ecological security 15 , 16 . Thus far, limited studies have qualitatively or semi-quantitatively assessed the ecological and environmental security in China 2 , 3 , 4 , 17 . The quantitative evaluation and its spatial distribution of ecological and environmental security are insufficient, which leads to ambiguous policy formulation and confounds implementation on a national scale.

Because the ecological and environmental security involves various definitions and is still a polysemous category 9 , 18 , 19 , we defined it as the characterization of the health status of ecosystems and the ability of ecosystem service supplies for humans. Until now, there has been no uniform and well-recognized indicator system. Faced with the complex and considerable ecological and environmental problems in China, there is a great difficulty in the evaluation of the ecological and environmental security status because of the unavailability of data and models. Our evaluation framework focused on the resource scarcity, ecosystem degradation, and environmental pollution, which were seen as the major ecological and environmental problems in China 2 , 3 , 4 , 17 . Based on the different ecosystem elements, including four sub-ecosystems of hydrosphere, pedosphere, atmosphere and biosphere, this study identified the key indicators to build a comprehensive evaluation system, which was closely related to the ecological and environmental security status and above specific problems, and to assess the ecological and environmental security of China’s terrestrial system in around 2010.

Water security evaluation

The veto aggregation focusing on the most serious security deficits and the balanced aggregation methods coordinating all indicators were used to comprehensively evaluate the security status for six classes, from the highest security class (safety) to the lowest security class (crisis). Results of water security in China are shown in Fig.  1a and b . Either veto aggregation or the balanced aggregation methods presented an obviously serious water security status in northern China; however, a relatively good water security status was obtained for southern China. Almost all areas of the entire northern China are classified into class 4 , class 5 , or class 6 . Veto aggregation methods indicated that area proportions of class 1 to class 6 are 14.75%, 20.37%, 16.58%, 7.56%, 8.92%, and 31.82%, respectively (Table  1 ). Over 40% of the areas were up to the danger level (marginal crisis or crisis classes), implying that there is at least one water security indicator up to the danger level, which indicates a serious water security status in China. Areas belonging to the crisis class of water security evaluation are chiefly located in the North China Plain with serious water scarcity and contamination; the adjacent mountains in Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau in southwestern China, the Hulun Buir Grassland, the Great Khingan Mountains, and Sanjiang Plain in northeastern China were identified as facing serious water contamination, and northwestern China region is faced with serious water scarcity. The results of the balanced aggregation method showed that area proportions of class 1 to class 6 are 34.19%, 15.56%, 22.16%, 13.00%, 8.12%, and 6.97%, respectively (Table  1 ). With the scattered distribution of evaluation scores and using Jenks natural break optimization, the North China Plain and its surrounding region were still classified in the crisis class in the balanced aggregation evaluation. Areas of high water security are chiefly located in the Tibet Plateau, Hengduan Mountainous Region in southwestern China, and hills and mountainous in Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangdong, and Guangxi Province.

Spatial distribution of veto aggregation result including ( a ) water security in 2010; ( c ) land security in 2010; ( e ) air security in around 2010; ( g ) biodiversity security in around 2010; and balanced aggregation result including ( b ) water security in 2010; ( d ) land security in 2010; ( f ) air security in around 2010; ( h ) biodiversity security in around 2010. Maps were generated by ArcGIS version 10.1.0 ( http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis ). Note: Non-evaluation areas were at the extreme of degradation and cannot support human survival and development.

Land security evaluation

Figure  1c and d show a similar spatial distribution between the results of veto aggregation and balanced aggregation methods. A relatively good land security was found in eastern China; however, a more serious land degradation and pollution threats were indicated in southwestern and northwestern China. Area proportions at the security level were the highest. Area proportions of safety to basic safety classes were 35.96% and 12.31% by the veto aggregation method, and 42.19% and 19.83% by the balanced aggregation method (Table  1 ). With the veto aggregation method, the area in the danger level of land security accounts for over 17% of the total evaluation area. It shows a diverse distribution of different land security evaluation indicators with significant geographical differentiation characteristics. Areas of serious land sandy desertification are mostly located on the edge of Gobi of the eastern Xinjiang Province, Taklimakan Desert, the Badain Jaran Desert, Tenggeli Desert in northwestern China, and the north of Tibet Plateau. Areas with the serious soil saline-alkali are mostly located on the edge of the Tarim Basin, the Qaidam Basin in northwestern China, the Hunshandake Sandy Area in northern China, the Songnen Plain in the northeastern China, and the north of Tibet Plateau. Although there are great improvements in the soil conservation in the Loess Plateau in western China, it still presents the most serious soil water erosion threat nationwide. The rocky karst desertification occurs in the southern karst areas, and areas of the most serious desertification are located in the adjacent mountains in Guizhou, Yunnan, and Guangxi Province. Areas of the serious heavy metal pollution are mostly in densely-populated cities and developed mining areas of the Hunan, Guizhou, Yunnan, and Guangxi Provinces. Areas with relatively good land security are mostly located in the eastern coastal areas, the Great Khingan and Changbai Mountains in northeastern China.

Air security evaluation

Air security evaluations are shown in Fig.  1e and f . The figures show a more serious air security situation in the developed areas within mid-eastern China based on the two aggregation methods. Veto aggregation method indicates an unoptimistic air security status in China, where areas at safety and basic safety classes only accounted for 2.87% and 20.96% in the total evaluation areas, respectively (Table  1 ). This is may be attributed to the relatively high PM 2.5 pollution in China, and even the PM 2.5 pollution in part of the regions of Xinjiang and Tibet Province were up to a level indicative of insecurity. In detail, areas at the danger level for four air security evaluations indicator are mostly located in mid-eastern China but with a certain heterogeneously spatial distribution, as follows: areas at the danger level of inorganic nitrogen wet deposition exist, as does the pH level in acid rain located in wide areas in the southern China region and Sichuan Basin in southwestern China. The most serious PM 2.5 pollution sites were mostly located in the North China Plain and the Middle and Lower Yangtze Plain in eastern China. Further, areas of the high carbon emission are located in the North China Plain and Lower Yangtze Plain in eastern China. The balanced aggregation method presented an obviously spatial distribution of a gradient increase from the west to east. Areas at the danger level of air security evaluation are mostly located in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region in northern China, Middle and Lower Yangtze Plain in eastern China, and Sichuan Basin in southwestern China.

Biodiversity security evaluation

Similar spatial distributions of threatened plants and animals result in a similar spatial distribution between the veto aggregation and balanced aggregation methods (Fig.  1g and h ). Thus, the figures show a more serious biodiversity security problem in the south of China than that in the north of China. Almost all the wide areas in southern China are classified to the class 4 , class 5 , or class 6 . Except for the Great Khingan and Changbai Mountains in northeastern China, and the Altai Mountains in northwestern China; other regions in northern China are classified to class 1 or class 2 . Area proportions at the security level are the highest, with over 50% of areas classified by the safety or basic safety classes, with 52.83% by the veto aggregation and 71.75% by the balanced aggregation method (Table  1 ). Area proportions at the marginal crisis and crisis classes are 9.79% and 4.86% by the veto aggregation, compared to the 4.30% and 4.07% areas by the balanced aggregation method (Table  1 ). Areas at the danger level present a relatively scattered distribution, including the Hengduan Mountains in southwestern China, hills in southern Yunnan Province, adjacent Mountains of Chongqing Municipality and Hubei Province, adjacent Mountains of Zhejiang Province and Fujian Province, the Nanling Mountains in southeastern China.

Ecological and environmental security evaluation

Figure  2 shows the final ecological and environmental security evaluation in terrestrial ecosystems of China. With different strategies and emphases of two methods, different numerical values and spatial distribution of evaluation results are shown. The veto aggregation score yielded a mean value of 4.83 and a standard deviation of 1.13, ranging from 1.00 to 6.00. In contrast, the balanced aggregation score yielded a mean value of 2.19 and a standard deviation of 0.51, ranging from 1.00 to 4.03. Areas at the danger level are the highest, which accounted for 43.05% of the total evaluation area by the veto aggregation method. In contrast, areas at the insecurity level are the highest by indication of the balanced aggregation method, which accounted for 40.79% of the total evaluation area (Table  1 ). Moreover, the evaluation scores by the veto aggregation method which are larger than 4.00 and 5.00 accounted for 70.09% and 44.00% of the evaluation area, which means that at least one security evaluation indicator is up to the crisis and marginal crisis classes in 70.09% and 44.00% of the evaluation area, respectively. Only 16.03% and 30.08% by the veto aggregation and balanced aggregation methods of the evaluation areas were classified to the security level. Additionally, the insecure ecological and environmental areas, including the non-evaluation (extreme of degradation and cannot support human survival and development), insecurity level and danger level, account for 84.52% and 72.85% of the national territorial area by the veto aggregation method and the balanced aggregation method, respectively. Both of the two aggregation methods showed a relatively serious ecological and environmental security crisis in China.

Spatial destitution of ecological and environmental security in China ( a ) veto aggregation method in around 2010; ( b ) balanced aggregation method in around 2010. Maps were generated by ArcGIS version 10.1.0 ( http://www.esri.com/software/arcgis ). Note: Non-evaluation areas, which were at the extreme of degradation and cannot support human survival and development, did not need to be evaluated and were labeled as the “crisis” class.

Integrating diverse spatial distribution of four aspects for the final ecological and environmental security evaluation, both the aggregation methods presented an obviously spatial variation of the security evaluation results (Fig.  2 ). The result showed that areas at the security level are mostly located in the Tibet Plateau, Tianshan Mountains and Altai Mountains in northwestern China, the Great Khingan Mountains in northeastern China, Hainan Island, and Taiwan Island. Areas at the insecurity and danger level are widely scattered in China. Figure  2 shows that areas of serious ecological and environmental security are located in either the developed eastern regions or the underdeveloped central and western regions in China. Overlaying Fig.  2a and b , the hotspot areas at the danger level, which were obtained by focusing on the limited security indicators by the veto method and integrating the compound security problems by the balanced aggregation method, were identified as follows: Gobi in Eastern Xinjiang, Taklimakan Desert, the Badain Jaran Desert, and Tenggeli Desert in northwestern China; Hunshandake Sandy Area, and North China Plain in Northern China; Lower Yangtze Plain in eastern China; adjacent hills and mountains in Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, adjacent Mountains of Chongqing Municipality and Hubei Province in southwestern China; Pearl River Delta in southeastern China.

Joint spatial distribution of ecological and environmental security

Using the veto aggregation and balanced aggregation methods, this study conducted a spatial evaluation on the ecological and environmental security in terrestrial ecosystems of China based on 14 security indicators. The GIS maps visualized the spatial distribution and identified the hotspot areas of water, land, air, biodiversity, to determine the final ecological and environmental security. According to the joint spatial distribution of all security evaluation indicators, we found that four aspects of ecological and environmental security have obviously different spatial distributions but a relatively similar distribution for several security indicators (Fig.  1 ). The problems of environmental pollution, including water pollution, soil heavy metal pollution, and air pollution, are primarily located in the mid-eastern China, especially the coastal eastern regions. The problems of land degradation, including soil water erosion, land sandy desertification and karst rocky desertification, are primarily located in the western China. Moreover, the problem of water scarcity is primarily located in the northern China. In contrast, the problem of threat to biodiversity is primarily located in the southern China. All of these may be attributed to the regional distribution of the resource abundance, physical geography characteristics, and human disturbance in China 20 . Physical geographical conditions determine the geographical distribution of climate, water, land, and biological resources in China. For example, the spatial distribution of land desertification status in the northwest is controlled by climate change and geomorphological processes even though human impacts have undeniably exacerbated these effects 21 . The land rocky desertification almost occurs in southwestern regions with the karst landscape 22 . In contrast, environmental pollution mainly originates from the strong anthropogenic disturbance, which resulted in a more serious pollution status in the developed eastern region 23 , 24 .

Uncertainty and of security evaluation results

With the difficulty and time-lag in data collection, it should be noted that the timeframes of datasets would potentially limit our results with the possibility of changes in recent years, since data were collected in around 2010 (Table  2 ). China has implemented large-scale environmental management and ecological restoration projects 4 , 25 , 26 , and the security status of China improved locally compared to our results. However, the ecological and environmental security did not change dramatically at the national scale and was still not optimistic 27 . For example, the PM 2.5 pollution was still serious in 2016 with even a 7% increase of PM 2.5 concentration in November of 2016 Footnote 1 . Anyway, our results presented a spatially-explicit distribution to show the serious security issues (Fig.  2 ) and provided the effective information about the ecological and environmental security of China’s terrestrial ecosystems.

The results presented a certain degree of difference from the spatial distributions of the security evaluation results obtained using the two aggregation methods (Figs  1 and 2 ), which can help to explain different aspects of results 28 , 29 . The veto method focused on the most serious security evaluation indicator and can also identify the limited security evaluation indicator at each grid, which presented a more obviously spatial diversity. In contrast, the balanced aggregation method can comprehensively integrate all the indicators and give a relatively even evaluation. This method permitted compensation between indicators, that is, a deficit in one indicator could be offset by a surplus in another 28 , which presented a more scattered spatial distribution (Figs  1 and 2 ). It is worth noting that limitations of the two methods lead to some uncertainties. For example, the water pollution in the Great Khingan Mountains and Sanjiang Plain in northeastern China are serious, but other indicators are classified at the security level, which result in a higher class in the veto aggregation method but a lower class in the balanced aggregation method (Fig.  2 ). Similar differences can be found in the edges of deserts in Northwestern China region with serious land insecurity but relative security in other indicators; moreover, the hills in southern Yunnan Province show a danger level of biodiversity security but relatively secure classes in other indicators. In contrast, the Pearl River Delta was classified into relatively secure classes in the sole evaluation indicator by the veto aggregation method as opposed to the high security class obtained by the balanced aggregation method. This result indicated that various aspects of ecological and environmental security in the Pearl River Delta were not up to the crisis class; however, they remain at a relatively serious security class. Therefore, we call for a combined evaluation of the two methods to explore the ecological and environmental security crisis in China, to decrease the uncertainty originating from singular evaluation.

Scale was an important and inevitable issue in the evaluation processes 28 . A uniform grid of 10 km × 10 km, which was basically determined by the mean unit size of all indicators at different scales, was used to execute the data assimilation in our study. To examine the scale effects of the uniform grid on evaluation results, we used the grid of 5 km × 5 km and 20 km × 20 km to re-execute the evaluation process. It found the almost similar mean values and standard deviation values for two aggregation methods. For veto aggregation scores, the mean values of 5 km × 5 km, 10 km × 10 km, and 20 km × 20 km were 4.84, 4.83, and 4.83, respectively; and the standard deviations at three grid sizes were 1.15, 1.13, and 1.12, respectively. Similar results were found in the balanced method. Comparing results at the three grid sizes, the grid of 5 km × 5 km generated the most scattered spatially distribution of security evaluation result. Although a coarse grid size would result in a smooth result, using scaling transformations, the evaluation scores were transformed to the same frequency histogram from raw evaluation data. Therefore, no evidence for scale effects in determining the degree of ecological and environmental security results was found. We thought that the grid size of 10 km × 10 km provided a reasonable evaluation result at the national scale.

Causes of the ecological and environmental security deterioration

Either individual or comprehensive evaluation results indicated a relatively serious ecological and environmental security in China. These can be attributed to natural factors but also to anthropogenic factors, including the historical legacy, but also the irrational use and destruction over the past century. China, consisting of three topography steps with a high proportion of mountains, are majorly located in the eastern Asian monsoon climate zone 20 . This resulted in the wide distribution of ecologically fragile regions, including the arid desert, the alpine region, the Loess Plateau region, karst regions and agro-pastoral zone 21 , 30 , 31 . The basically natural factors and physical geographical characteristics caused the resource deficiencies and ecosystems fragility. With the population pressure, economic development, and rapid urbanization, the predatory management and excessive pursuit of the GDP target accelerated resource waste, land desertification, and environmental pollution 32 . Moreover, the science and technology of ecological restoration and environmental protection is lagging, which increases the difficulty in helping to solve important ecological problems and to provide effective knowledge and technology reserves for the state 27 .

Integrated regional development to improve ecological and environmental security

Faced with the current ecological and environmental security status in China, a solution calls for the spatially regional integration and development strategies to relieve the pressure on the environment and to implement ecological restoration and environmental governance for different ecological and environmental security problems. We suggest that eastern coastal areas should be committed to make efforts to govern the environmental pollution, including air, water, and soil pollution. In addition, a solution calls for a transformation of economic development and an acceleration of industrial restructuring and upgrading. Central regions have the advantage of linking the eastern coastal areas and western areas, as well as geographical advantages and the flat topography to develop modern agriculture. Further, we suggest that the central regions focus on the development of agricultural modernization, and also, on the ecological restoration and environmental governance concentrated on the comprehensive management of major rivers, remediation of soil metal heavy pollution, and soil conservation. For the western region, which has ecologically fragile areas, the protection of the ecological environment should be made prominent. Under this premise, we suggest an appropriate integration of ecological migrants, the economic development in key areas, and the development of natural resources, step-by-step. With the spatial development and integration of the resource-ecology-economy, we look forward to improve the ecological and environmental security and to promote the sustainable development of society in China.

In conclusion, our study assessed the spatial distribution, visualized different security aspects, and identified hotspots of ecological and environmental security in terrestrial ecosystems of China On the national scale. Based on 14 security evaluation indicators for the water, land, air, and biodiversity security, with area-weighted normalization and scaling transformation approaches, this study used the veto aggregation and balanced aggregation method to comprehensively assess the ecological and environmental security status of China’s terrestrial ecosystems. Both these methods indicated a relatively serious ecological and environmental security situation, but presented an obviously spatial variation of the six security evaluation classes. Areas of unsafe ecological and environmental security, including the non-evaluation, insecurity level and danger level, account for 84.52% by the veto aggregation method and 72.85% by the balanced aggregation method of the China’s territorial area. Areas of serious water security issues are mostly located in northern China, serious land security issues in mid-western China, serious air security issues in eastern China, serious biodiversity security issues in southern China. With the final security evaluation, areas at the healthy security level are mostly located in the Tibet Plateau, Tianshan Mountains, and Altai Mountains in western China, the Great Khingan Mountains in northeastern China, Hainan Island, and Taiwan Island. Areas at the danger level are widely scattered in China, and corresponding hotspots were identified. The integration of regional development was suggested to improve the ecological and environmental security deterioration in China.

Evaluation index system of ecological and environmental security

A framework for selecting indicators should take the goals defining, context understanding, and stakeholders identifying into consideration to develop criteria for indicator selection 33 . In consultation with other researchers and policy makers, this study built the ecological and environmental security framework of indicator selection, which comprehensively characterized the health status of ecosystems, the ability of ecosystem service supplies for humans, and the major current ecological and environmental problems in China 2 , 3 , 4 , 17 . Considering the system complexity and data availability at the national scale, our framework selected limited indicators from four basic sub-ecosystems (hydrosphere, pedosphere, atmosphere and biosphere).

Finally, we collected and classified the 14 indicators, such as water security, land security, air security, and biodiversity security in Table  2 , for the purpose of building the ecological and environmental security evaluation indicator system. Water security includes water scarcity and contamination 34 . Land security consists of different land degradation types (soil water erosion, land sandy desertification and karst rocky desertification in different regions) and soil heavy metal pollution 35 , 36 . Air security is heavily characterized by the nitrogen deposition, carbon emission, acid rain, and PM 2.5 pollution 37 , 38 . Biodiversity security is characterized by the status of threatened plant and threatened animal life 39 , 40 . Details of how all the security evaluation indicators were collected or calculated are shown in the Table  2 .

Different data were primarily evaluated into different categories based on the corresponding grading standard from the professional sectors and previous studies (Table  3 ). All of the grading standards were used to indicate different security states of the evaluation subsystem but with different descriptive ways, i.e. the poor, dangerous security for the low level; the unsafe, worsening, threating security for the medium level; the general, ideal, safe security for the high level 41 , 42 , 43 . To build a unified security evaluation system, the different numbers of indicators and grading obtained from different studies were grouped in three levels (A: security; B: insecurity; and C: danger) and six sequential classes (class 1 : safety; class 2 : basic safety; class 3 : early warning; class 4 : unsafety; class 5 : marginal crisis; class 6 : crisis). Reference to previous study 41 , 42 , 43 , meanings of six security classes were shown in Table  4 , which indicated the relative safeguard degree and expectation state of evaluation subsystem, and the reliability of prevent imperfect and threating event to happen based on professional sectors and document retrievals.

Here, the lowest security class is named as the “crisis”. As modern concept of “crisis” has a distinguished history, ably recalled by Jim O’Connor 44 and discussed by previous studies 6 , 45 . This study defined it as a hazardous situation causing the deleterious or potentially even disastrous consequences for humans 5 , 6 , 7 . Not all processes or subsystems have well-defined thresholds of “crisis” 7 , then we identified the “crisis” class as the extreme lack of resource scarcity, the most serious ecosystem degradation, or the most hazardous environment pollution. The grading thresholds of “crisis” class were quantitatively determined by the corresponding grading standard (Table  3 ). For example, the value of 150 (t/(hm 2  · a)), which indicated the most serious water soil erosion based on Standards for Grading of Soil Erosion (SL190-96) Footnote 2 , then was grouped as the crisis threshold of the water soil erosion.

It should be noted that all the indicators can be grouped as in the three levels, but only several indicators can be grouped in six classes. This is determined by the professional grading standard of the security evaluation indicator. Moreover, the evaluations in this study did not include the Gobi in Eastern Xinjiang, Taklimakan Desert, the Badain Jaran Desert, and Tenggeli Desert in northwestern China, areas which are at the extreme of degradation and cannot support human survival and development. These areas were labeled as non-evaluation areas, accounting for 9.72% of the national territorial area (Fig.  1 ). Thus, the area proportional to the evaluation area is 90.28% of China’s territorial area.

Comprehensive evaluation of ecological and environmental security

Diverse evaluation data were collected and quantified in different units and at different scales, for example, water scarcity was assessed at the Second-level of China’s Water Resources Zones, the soil erosion from water was characterized by the raster units of 1 km × 1 km, the karst rocky desertification data were collected at the raster units of 100 m × 100 m, and the PM 2.5 concentration data were collected at the municipal unit. To comprehensively assess the ecological and environmental security of the terrestrial ecosystems in China, we used a uniform grid of 10 km × 10 km to calculate the corresponding normalization scores for different security evaluation indicators. Finally, fourteen indicators from four aspects were aggregated by two aggregation methods to evaluate the ecological and environmental security at each uniform grid.

Area-weighted normalization score

We assigned evaluation scores of six security classes as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 from class 1 to class 6 for each security evaluation indicator at the unit. If one certain level is not included in the class, the scores of two classes were assigned the mean value of two corresponding classes. For example, the level A was not included in the classes of safety and basic safety for the evaluation of nitrogen deposition, therefore, both A 1 and A 2 were assigned as 1.5. Then, we used the uniform grid to calculate the area-weighted evaluation normalization score 46 , 47 by the following equation:

where \({S}_{i}^{j}\) denotes the area-weighted evaluation sore at each uniform grid, i is the serial number of security evaluation indicators, and j is the serial number of the uniform grid; \({S}_{ik}^{j}\) denotes the score of class k of security evaluation for i indicator at j grid; k is the class of security evaluation indicators ranging from 1 to \({n}_{i}^{j}\) ; \({n}_{i}^{j}\) indicates the class number of i indicator; \({A}_{ik}^{j}\) denotes the area of the k class of i security evaluation indicator in the j grid. The range of \({S}_{i}^{j}\) is from 1.00 to 6.00. A higher \({S}_{i}^{j}\) implies a more serious status for the corresponding security evaluation indicator. If partial areas were not evaluated using a certain indicator because of data unavailability, the given areas were excluded in the calculation of the equation ( 1 ).

Scaling transformation method

With the area-weighted evaluation normalization, security evaluation indicator data at different resolutions were unified on the same grid. This, however, results in a statistical bias of scaling up or down. In particular, the evaluation scores of security evaluation indicators with fine resolutions would be smoothed when scaling up to a coarser resolution. Therefore, based on the idea of histogram transformation in image enhancement 48 , 49 , we used the frequency histogram equalization to re-calculate the normalization scores from the raw data. Taking the indicator including six classes as an example, the scaling transformation of normalization scores were realized by the following steps. First, the area proportions of six security evaluation classes using the raw data were calculated to generate a frequency histogram with six classes (scores of class 1 to class 6 for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6). Second, we calculated piecewise normalization scores \({S}_{i}^{j}\) of six interval ranges, of which area proportions were consistent with area proportions of six classes in the histogram from step 1, i.e. (X 1 , X 2 ], (X 2 , X 3 ], (X 3 , X 4 ], (X 4 , X 5 ], (X 5 , X 6 ]. Third, six interval ranges of normalization scores were transformed to the scaling interval ranges of 1, (1, 2], (2, 3], (3, 4], (4, 5], (5, 6], which are consistent with six interval ranges calculated from step 2. \({S}_{i}^{j}\) at the interval range of (X 1 , X 2 ] were assigned 1. Other normalization scores were calculated at every pair of interval ranges by the following equation:

where \({S}_{ik}^{j^{\prime} }\) is the scaling transformation score, i , j , and k are the same symbol in the equation ( 1 ); X max and X min mean the upper and lower limits of interval ranges from normalization scores in step 2; \({X}_{{\rm{\max }}}^{^{\prime} }\) and \({X}_{{\rm{\min }}}^{^{\prime} }\) denote the corresponding upper and lower limits of the scaling interval ranges, respectively. Taking the \({S}_{i}^{j}\) at the interval range of (X 3 , X 4 ] as an example, it can be calculated as follows:

Aggregation method

With the area-weighted normalization and scaling transformation, the scaling normalization score of 14 security evaluation indicators at every grid \({S}_{ik}^{j^{\prime} }\) was calculated. Two aggregation strategies, including the veto aggregation and the balanced aggregation methods 28 , 50 , were used to comprehensively integrate evaluation scores of multiple indicators. The veto aggregation method focuses on the most serious security deficits of all indicators, which could help find the limit factor of ecological and environmental security. The equation is as follows:

where \({V}_{i}^{j}\) is the score calculated by the veto aggregation method; n is the number of security evaluation indicators.

The balanced aggregation method coordinates all indicators and calculates the mean value of indicator scores by the following equation:

where \({G}_{i}^{j}\) is the score calculated by the balanced aggregation method; w i denotes the weight of security evaluation indicator, which is equal to 1/ n .

Using the veto aggregation and the balanced aggregation methods, we evaluated the scores of water security, land security, air security and biodiversity security. Then, the water, land, air, and biodiversity security scores were grouped into six classes (class 1 : safety; class 2 : basic safety; class 3 : endangered security; class 4 : insecurity; class 5 : marginal crisis; class 6 : crisis) in ArcGIS 10.1 (ESRI Inc., USA) by Jenks natural break optimization for the balanced aggregation scores and the uniform interval ranges of [1.0, 1.5], (1.5, 2], (2, 3], (3, 4], (4, 5], (5, 6] for the veto aggregation scores. The uniform classes of the veto aggregation method could be easily interpreted based on the indicator classified standard. For example, if the score of the security evaluation is larger than 5.00, it implies that there is at least one security evaluation indicator up to the crisis level, which indicates a serious security status.

The final goal of ecological and environmental security was evaluated by aggregating four aspects of securities including 14 indicators. The final security scores were calculated by two aggregation methods by using the following equations:

where \(E{V}_{i}^{j}\) and \(E{G}_{i}^{j}\) are the ecological and environmental security evaluation scores by the veto aggregation and balanced aggregation methods, respectively; \(W{V}_{i}^{j}\) , \(L{V}_{i}^{j}\) , \(A{V}_{i}^{j}\) , and \(B{V}_{i}^{j}\) are the water, land, air, and biodiversity security scores calculated using the veto aggregation method, respectively; \(W{G}_{i}^{j}\) , \(L{G}_{i}^{j}\) , \(A{G}_{i}^{j}\) , \(B{G}_{i}^{j}\) are the water, land, air, and biodiversity security scores calculated using the balanced aggregation method, respectively. Moreover, the non-evaluation areas were classified to the class of “crisis” in the final evaluation of the ecological and environmental security. The ecological and environmental security scores were grouped into six classes in ArcGIS 10.1 by Jenks natural break optimization. Spatial distributions were visualized in ArcGIS 10.1.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41601095) and the consulting project sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Engineering. We are most grateful for the provision of part data by Yu Guirui, and Tang Kewang.

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Two Case Studies of Environmental-Security Connections

A presentation at the environmental grantmakers association meeting panel:, “overlooked at our peril: why military/security policy is ega’s business”.

Brainerd, Minnesota Arjun Makhijani 15 October 2001

My presentation will consist of two case studies that show the intimate connection between environmental problems and military/security questions.

• Oil, environment, and security
• Nuclear weapons, proliferation, and environmental contamination.

1. Oil, environment and security

At first sight the acts of terror committed on September 11, 2001 do not appear to be linked to oil. But they are. The link arises from the historical accident that the largest resources of oil on the planet are in Saudi Arabia, which is also the land with the two most holy sites of Islam. U.S. troops have been based there, uneasily, since the 1991 Gulf War. That has been the source of much anger in the region. It appears that many or most of the hijackers were from there, as is the person who seems to have financed and inspired them.

A great deal of violence has historically been associated with oil. Much of World War II was about oil. For instance, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came after the U.S. imposed an oil embargo to prevent Japan from getting access to and eventual control of Indonesian oil, which belonged neither to Japan, nor to the United States, nor to the Dutch colonialists who then ruled Indonesia. As another example, the CIA-supported overthrow of an elected government in Iran in 1953 (in reaction to nationalization of the Iranian oil industry) and its replacement by the Shah of Iran led to two and a half decades of repression in which substantial dissent was only possible in the mosques. The process was central to the dynamic that led up to the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran.

Several past military crises, with nuclear implications have been around the question of oil: Iran right after World War II, Lebanon-Iraq in 1958, the Israel-Egypt war and the associated Arab oil embargo in 1973, and the 1991 Gulf War. There has been much great power rivalry in the region, dating back to Victorian and Czarist times. One British and U.S. goal in modern times, for instance, was to prevent the Soviet Union from gaining access to an Indian Ocean warm water port in a region or a strong political foothold so close to the world’s largest oil reserves. Much of the mess in the region, including some of the motivation for the U.S. support of the Islamic opposition to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan at the end of 1979, had that as a motive.

In the present crisis, the politics of Central Asia, the Caspian region, the Caucasian region, and the Middle East, are becoming ever more tangled with the politics of terrorism and with the nuclear politics of Pakistan and India. Of course, this is in addition to the old-time nuclear powers, the United States, Russia, and China, who are present in the region. U.S. policy in Central Asia, like that of the other major powers, is closely tied to the immense oil and gas resources in the region. Now the U.S. has troops in that region. (For a fine, recent analysis of Central Asian oil resources and U.S. policy see Michael Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001). The U.S. military presence in Central Asia is already showing signs of becoming prolonged, in the same manner as that in Saudi Arabia after the Gulf War. According to recent news reports, the United States has made a long-term security agreement with the government of Uzbekistan, which is, by all accounts, a repressive one that has violated human rights. This could become a bone of contention between Russia and the United States, adding to the danger and complexity of the present crisis in the region.

Oil, of course, is also at the center of the global warming problem. Roughly half the emissions of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels are attributable to oil. Most urban air pollution comes from motor vehicles. Much of the pollution of the oceans comes from oil spills, both routine and accidental.

Are we condemned to these severe security and environmental problems unless we eliminate oil consumption and replace it by efficiency and renewables? I don’t think so. The security goal as regards oil is actually somewhat easier than addressing the greenhouse gas problem in its entirety. Reducing world oil consumption by 20 percent, which would amount to about 15 million barrels a day, through mileage standards and the like, would eliminate the political leverage of the Persian Gulf without eliminating the revenues of the countries in the region. This can be done in a decade, if pursued with the determination, on a worldwide basis, and probably with less resources than are now being devoted to war. And it would save a lot of lives – from reduced lung disease to reduced casualties, civilian and military, in the battlefield.

Were the security arguments for reducing oil consumption to prevail – and they are currently the most powerful ones – the benefits for the environment would, of use be immense. In fact, if the West and Japan were to reduce their petroleum consumption by 20 percent in ten years, it would approximately correspond to the fulfillment of their Kyoto Protocol targets. With security as the leading edge, there is now a better prospect for energy policies that would achieve other environmental goals as well, notably the creation of distributed electricity grids. My next case study shows that benefits can also flow from environmental work to the security arena.

2. Nuclear weapons, proliferation, and environmental contamination

I’ll use two examples to illustrate the connections between these issues. The first deals with water contamination and regulatory questions related to nuclear weapons production and nuclear waste management. The second deals with plutonium processing.

A. Water contamination

(i) Plutonium in the water: More than a ton (literally) of plutonium, enough to make 200 bombs, and other radioactive materials were packed in cardboard boxes, drums, and wooden boxes and dumped in unlined trenches over the in the Snake River Plain aquifer, the largest aquifer in the Northwest. Some of the water on site is already contaminated well above drinking water standards. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is not remediating the dumps, but spending over $5 billion a year on new weapons design, laboratory testing of nuclear weapons, and plutonium component testing (without nuclear explosions) underground in Nevada.

(ii) Tritium in the water: Tritium (T) is a radioactive isotope of hydrogen. Being chemically identical to hydrogen, it can replace one of the regular non-radioactive hydrogen atoms in water, H2O, making the water radioactive, HTO, or tritiated water. This water behaves like ordinary water in the human body and in ecosystems and hence becomes part of human cells, food, DNA….Tritiated water, HTO, like H2O, can cross the placenta and irradiate the developing fetus. It is a widespread pollutant resulting from nuclear weapons production (and also from nuclear power, especially from the Canadian heavy water reactor design). For instance, the Savannah River has tritium contamination from the Savannah River Site, in South Carolina. Remedial action is weak, in large measure because it is difficult. While the water is well within the allowable contaminant limit for drinking water, it is important to note that tritium standards are set not for developing fetuses or pregnant women, but for “standard man” – literally a 154-pound male. Like other radioactive materials, the maximum contaminant limit goal is zero, since the best evidence indicates that every increment of radiation produces additional cancer risk. With some radioactive materials the dangers are, I believe, considerably greater than reflected in present day regulations. Several radioactive materials — tritiated water, radioactive cesium isotopes, radioactive iodine isotopes, strontium-90, and carbon-14 — mimic non-radioactive materials the body needs. They all cross the placenta easily. Moreover, the synergistic effects of substances like tritiated water with non-radioactive toxics are essentially unknown. The Department of Energy now proposes to produce tritium for use in nuclear weapons in commercial nuclear reactors belonging to the Tennessee Valley Authority. It has proved very difficult to address this very serious breach of non-proliferation norms – the use of commercial reactors to make weapons materials – and I believe that the environmental and health arguments have been more persuasive. So far, the production plans have not been put into effect and are being maintained only as a contingency.

(iii) Relaxation of Safe Drinking Water Standards: The process for licensing the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository in Nevada has become the vehicle for a massive relaxation of Safe Drinking Water standards. Because it seemed unlikely even to the Department of Energy that the repository could meet the Safe Drinking Water Standards at the repository boundary, the DOE successfully put heavy pressure on the EPA to exclude under federal land around the proposed site from these standards, despite a great deal of hard work by many environmental groups. It wasn’t enough because burying nuclear power plant spent fuel and vitrified plutonium is seen as a goal that is desirable from a non-proliferation perspective. If the exclusion remains in place (it is under litigation both by environmental groups an industry, which thinks that Safe Drinking Water Standards should not apply at all), it will set a precedent that could harm water supplies throughout the country. This would be especially harmful in the West where water is scarce and a lot of land is federally owned. Both military and commercial radioactive waste would be disposed of at Yucca Mountain, should it be licensed. The repository threatens the only local source of water in the region, currently used for irrigation only twenty miles away from the proposed site.

Environmental work has been crucial to progress on nuclear disarmament. In one of the least remarked victories, work on health, environmental and safety issues led to the closure of most of the large nuclear weapons plants in the United States, such as plutonium and tritium production reactors in South Carolina and a large-scale plutonium pit manufacturing facility in Colorado, as the Cold War was winding down. There were no treaties requiring their closure. But they will not be reopened. Of course, the job is not done because some nuclear weapons plants remain open in the United States and in other countries and new ones have been proposed.

B. Plutonium processing and catastrophic accidents:

Plutonium processing creates liquid high level radioactive wastes stored in tanks. These tanks can explode under certain conditions. A 1957 explosion of such a tank in the Soviet Union at the Mayak site in the southern Urals contaminated about 6,000 square miles, and 30 towns and villages were permanently leveled. There was a near miss in 1980 in France. Two such plants are being operated at the Savannah River Site, where more than 30 million gallons of high-level waste are stored. There are 177 high-level waste tanks at Hanford Washington, near the Columbia River. Many of the tanks at Hanford and Savannah River Site are at some risk of fires due to build up hydrogen and/or other flammable chemicals.

Commercial plutonium reprocessing produces the same kind of highly radioactive waste as military plutonium reprocessing. It is being carried out in France Britain, Russia, Japan, and India. (The only U.S. commercial reprocessing plant was shut in 1972.) The French and British plants have contaminated marine life as far away as Norway. Several European governments have asked that these plants be shut – so far to no avail.

Commercial plutonium is uneconomical as a fuel, being five to 20 times more costly than uranium fuel. It can used to make nuclear weapons. The threat of loose nukes from diversion commercial plutonium is among the most serious proliferation problems in the world. There are 12,000 canisters of surplus plutonium stored in Russia alone (at the Mayak site). Just two of those canisters contain enough material to make a bomb.

Despite the fact that plutonium is uneconomical (there is no argument about this even within the nuclear establishment), the Russian nuclear ministry, Minatom, regards plutonium as a treasure. One day it will be economical, according to this reasoning. In the meantime? Well, it is a significant proliferation risk. Plutonium could also be used as a radiological terror weapon.

Much of this infrastructure of plutonium storage and production is vulnerable in varying degrees to terrorist attack or to diversion of materials from within. And global stocks of unused commercial plutonium have now grown to rival military stocks. They are now over 200 metric tons, or enough to make 30,000 nuclear bombs. Measurement and accounting errors in commercial as well as military plutonium production systems have often exceeded the amounts needed to make nuclear weapons.

It is noteworthy that the main opposition to commercial plutonium in Europe-France and Britain are the centers of the industry – comes from other European governments on environmental grounds. Sea life as far away as Norway has become contaminated due to the radioactivity discharges. Increases in childhood and juvenile cancer have been detected at both sites, though typically the nuclear establishments dismiss the findings, as though they knew with complete confidence they were not response. They are more used to saying mea culpa after a few decades.

The main local public opposition to commercial reprocessing has also been around environmental as well as economic issues. The security arguments have not taken hold, because governments have been too confident that they can actually control every contingency and that there will not be diversion. Perhaps that will change. But the security gains would be immense, were the environmental and economic arguments to succeed.

Some notes on process

Chris Wing suggested that I make some remarks on the process by which our work is done. None of the problems that I have discussed above can be solved solely within one country. Most of them affect the whole world. So we not only work with groups all over the United States, we work in the main countries where nuclear problems are severe. We rely on a few key advisors in each country where we do a lot of work to guide us. When we made the decision to work internationally some years ago, we also decided to publish in at least one of the principal languages of those countries. So the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (IEER) publishes its newsletter in English, Russian, French, Chinese, and occasionally in other languages. Our web site is also multilingual – currently in English, French, Russian, and to a limited extent in Chinese, and Japanese. We hope to add Spanish this year, in a small way, and perhaps Arabic next year. Our staff also has exceptionally wide language capabilities, besides having strong scientific and communications abilities. We note only share our knowledge with groups in other countries, but benefit equally from their expertise. Our international work has led us to develop international media outreach and, to a lesser extent, outreach to policy-makers abroad.

In the process of our international work, we found one of the world’s foremost experts on the proposed Yucca Mountain repository site in Novosibirsk, Russia. We began to work closely with one of the founding members of the Green Party in France, who is the leading activist against the plutonium separation plant in France, the largest in the world. There is a Gandhian center in western India, run by a physicist-physician couple, who have done what is, in my opinion, the best single health survey near a nuclear power plant. And all of these colleagues have come to the United States, as part of our program, to share their work and expertise with activists, researchers, and journalists here, even as we have shared ours with them.

Every year we hold a five-day technical training workshop for U.S. community leaders and activists as part of our goal of democratizing science. The participants get to know each other quite well in the process of rather intense technical sessions because they work together to prepare their own projects and presentations, which are invariably the best part of every workshop, whether it’s on water resources or de-alerting nuclear weapons. The presentations range from the purely technical, to poetry to plays written during the workshop. We had our first techno-musical dramatic presentation this year, exploring the ideas of Einstein and nuclear energy.

We have become close to many of the people that we work with here and all over the world. Let me illustrate with a personal anecdote. Two of our friends are working to shut down the commercial plutonium reprocessing plant located in the beautiful Lake District in northwestern England where Wordsworth wrote his poetry and Beatrix Potter dreamed up Peter Rabbit. On their farm, they have a pair of pair of geese, an old couple, whom they have named after my wife (a fellow scientist at IEER) and me. The personal richness that comes out of the process is central to what sustains my colleagues and me in our work on what is, after all, a grim subject. Because of that I often think that process is our most important product.

Subject: Climate Change , Energy Issues , and Nuclear Weapons . Posted on October, 2001. Last modified September, 2012. Download this page as a PDF

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• Statement on Tritium
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• Plutonium End Game
• Statement on Tritium before the House Committee on Intergovernmental Coordination, State of Georgia
• Nuclear Dumps by the Riverside: Threats to the Savannah River from Radioactive Contamination at the Savannah River Site

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Environmental Security: Concepts, Challenges, and Case Studies First Edition

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New study launches following the discovery of a second case of avian influenza spreading from cows to humans

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Medical Express Vaccination remains the most effective strategy for avian influenza prevention and control in humans, despite varying vaccine efficacy across strains.

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Published in the journal  Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics , the results of the paper are particularly timely following news on 22 May that the bird flu strain H5N1 had once again, for a second time, jumped from cattle in America to a human—prompting fears of subsequent human-to-human infection, with possible critical consequences.Instances of the avian  influenza  were first recognized in US cattle in March. Since then, this strain has mainly spread from cow-to-cow and scientists have discovered very high levels of virus in raw milk (pasteurized milk is safe, having shown viral RNA but not infectious virus). To date, two people, however, are known to have contracted the bird flu virus. Both patients—US farmers—only reported eye symptoms and with treatment they made a full recovery.

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Musk Lawyer Alex Spiro Can Participate in Texas Defamation Case

By Ryan Autullo

Elon Musk’s lawyer, Alex Spiro of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, can defend him against defamation claims in Texas, a state district court judge announced Wednesday.

Judge Maria Cantú Hexsel (D) of the 53rd Civil District Court in Travis County granted Spiro’s motion to participate as a non-Texas lawyer. Although such requests from out-of-state attorneys are typically granted without hesitation, Spiro’s was problematic.

Spiro, a partner based in Quinn Emanuel’s New York office, already worked on the case by preparing and signing a motion, and in defending Musk at a deposition. Opposing counsel alerted Hexsel that Spiro had engaged ...

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Optimizing tourism ecological security: a study based on NCA and FsQCA methods

• Published: 29 May 2024

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• Shuchen Lai   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1417-893X 1 ,
• Meng Zhang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0463-9031 2 &
• Zhen Su   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7613-2630 3  

Tourism Ecological Security (TES) is crucial to sustainable tourism development. This study establishes a TES research framework grounded in the “technology-organization-environment” paradigm and employs a mixed-method approach, integrating fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis and Necessary Condition Analysis. To examine the factor configurations conducive to achieving high TES, the Yangtze River Delta region of China is selected as a case study. The findings indicate that: (1) from 2011 to 2019, the overall TES level showed an overall upward trend over time. and cities with relatively high TES levels have better policy and economic advantages. (2) Financial support from the government plays an indispensable role in achieving high TES. (3) Although the configuration for achieving high TES is gradually changing from a financial support-led strategy to an economic development-led strategy, financial support is still essential. Theoretical and practical implications derived from the findings are explored and elucidated.

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This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation (No. 72262002) and Innovation Project of Guangxi Graduate Education (No. YCSW2023054).

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Shuchen Lai

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Guangxi Development Strategy Institute, Nanning, China

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SL and MZ collected data and analyzed the data. SL conceived the framework and wrote the manuscript. ZS and SL oversaw the entire project, provided comments and reviewed the final manuscript. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Lai, S., Zhang, M. & Su, Z. Optimizing tourism ecological security: a study based on NCA and FsQCA methods. Environ Dev Sustain (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-024-05065-8

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Received : 26 August 2023

Accepted : 18 May 2024

Published : 29 May 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-024-05065-8

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Case study: Cybersecurity, hybrid cloud spur St. Joseph’s Health data center upgrade

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This article is part of a VB special issue. Read the full series here: The future of the data center: Handling greater and greater demands .

When Jesse Fasolo joined St. Joseph’s Health nine years ago, the Paterson, New Jersey-based medical institution was easily 10 to 20 years behind when it came to digital transformation. 

“In healthcare in general, budget is always a concern,” said the healthcare company’s information security officer and head of technology infrastructure and cybersecurity . “That led to the environment being so behind-the-times: the lack of implementation, lack of investment in new technologies.”

Eight years later, St. Joseph’s has gone through two full transformations, completely overhauling its data center and dramatically improving compute and storage capabilities (not to mention now leveraging AI and exploring a hybrid cloud future). 

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“We had spinning discs, a large footprint, large power-hungry infrastructure that we have since consolidated,” said Fasolo. “Now I could put the data center in my dining room.”

A complex, cobbled-together data infrastructure environment

Tasked with bringing St. Joseph’s Health into the 21st century, Fasolo began by immediately analyzing all of its network technologies. 

The biggest issue, he said, was the complexity of the data infrastructure environment. There were multiple storage areas from multiple providers, some in support, some out of support. 

“Technology in general needs to be simple for people to manage it,” Fasolo said. 

Naturally, downtime is a big concern in healthcare, as it has a direct impact on patient care. In this regard, he likes to say that “minutes matter.”

Daily issues with system performance slowed down clinicians and IT staff, he explained, and it was almost impossible to leverage real-time data for patient care. Furthermore, Fasolo estimated that it would take 247 days to recover from a ransomware attack.

“We battled fires every day just to keep systems running,” he said. “Something as simple as a mass email with a PDF could cut into performance, keeping patients waiting to be admitted or doctors waiting for lab results.”

Flash-forward, active-active

After his initial assessment, Fasolo started examining tools that could increase uptime and provide flexibility while also being cost-conscious — because, as he put it, “How do you buy and acquire technology when you don’t have many funds?”

He ultimately settled on Pure Storage . The data storage hardware and software provider helped St. Joseph’s upgrade its storage and compute environments and eliminate all storage with spinning discs. “We are now a totally flash-forward, flash environment,” said Fasolo. 

The facility also did an “active-active” deployment five years ago. This data resiliency architecture distributes workloads across two or more nodes in a cluster to keep data safe and available in the event of an unexpected component failure. 

Additionally, St. Joseph’s is now able to use AI . In radiology, for instance, AI reads images, identifies anomalies and makes recommendations to specialists to help improve read accuracy and hasten treatment. At an operational level, the healthcare facility is able to query live data to track revenue trends, hospital utilization rates and patient status. 

Fasolo pointed out that the St. Joseph’s–Pure Storage partnership has enabled the healthcare facility to buy in smaller quantities and undertake deliberate, continual growth. St. Joseph’s typically performs a large annual expansion of data storage and capabilities based on trends. Currently, it is going through another iteration of compute and server upgrades.

A security-aware data center

When it comes to cybersecurity, “aware is a key word,” Fasolo said. 

It is critical to understand what could happen and plan accordingly, he said. Pure’s cybersecurity tools allow lock and two pin codes, and St. Joseph’s uses “MFA (multi-factor authentication) for everything we can.”

Should an attack occur, the healthcare facility can recover using immutable snapshots. The facility performs daily backups and snapshots every 15 minutes; the latter can be easily referenced if a bad actor attempts to do anything malicious.

“We have multiple layers of security defense,” said Fasolo.

Improving performance and reliability — and most importantly, patient care

Across the board, St. Joseph’s has seen improvements in performance and reliability for clinical applications. Interruptions to hospital operations and patient care have been minimized, and clinicians can access medical data in seconds to reduce wait times.

Email backups take two hours instead of four days, and users’ login times have been reduced from minutes to seconds.

Fasolo pointed out that “most clinicians and healthcare workers on the front line are not concerned with technology on the backend data center.” However, they are aware of significantly decreased outages and downtime, and they are “appreciative that technology is sustaining them and allowing them to work efficiently.”

Leveraging hybrid cloud

Looking ahead, Fasolo plans to move some workloads to the cloud, notably to archive data for compliance purposes. 

The trend in healthcare is toward “cloud-capable, cloud-hybrid” tools, he noted. Having hybrid storage and cloud block storage will allow St. Joseph’s to continue to use on-premise storage and compute while also having the option to go to the cloud to lower costs (compared to migrating all workloads to the cloud). Ultimately, this would provide another layer of recovery if the facility had an issue and needed to recover storage.

“Management and migration is something we’re after,” said Fasolo. “We need to have it as simple as can be, allow for automation where possible. When you put in something too advanced, you need more staff, more training and development, all of which will lead to burnout, failure, maintenance issues.”

Getting buy-in: Emphasizing business outcomes, not technologies

Healthcare is notoriously slow when it comes to digital transformation because of concerns around data privacy and compliance , among other factors. Getting buy-in from senior leadership is critical — but it must be approached the right way, said Fasolo. 

“Any leader in technology, infrastructure and security needs to align with the business, befriend senior leaders and explain in business terms what the investment will do for the entire company,” he said. 

A new data center tool can’t just be seen as a hardware or software product or explained in technical terms. Instead, IT leaders should lay out how technology can support strategic roles.

“When you start changing tone from a hardware IT purchase to enabling a company’s purpose, people start listening,” he said. 

From there, it’s important to show tangible performance, sustainability and improvements in efficiency to build trust. That can snowball into support for future initiatives. 

Fasolo also advised IT leaders to assess multiple vendors and go through proof-of-concept and implementation planning with vendors themselves — not resellers. The best partners provide not only technology tools but quick response and turnaround and remote and in-person support, he said. 

Ultimately, in healthcare, it all comes down to expanding patient care capabilities, Fasolo emphasized. That means improving time efficiencies, eliminating deficiencies and decreasing the time required to maintain IT environments.

“If I can make a physician or clinician’s capabilities faster, it obviously helps me sleep at night,” Fasolo said, “and it also allows me to help the facility maintain its mission.”

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