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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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32 Environmental Security

Joshua Busby is Associate Professor in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin.

• Published: 05 April 2018
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This chapter assesses the connections between the environment and security by reviewing two waves of scholarship, the first mostly qualitative literature from the 1990s on the general links between environmental problems and conflict and the second generation of scholarship from the 2000s, much of it quantitative, on climate change and security. In the process, the chapter interrogates the meaning of the terms “the environment” and “security,” including efforts to broaden the meaning of security to include concepts such as human security. Where the earlier literature provided important insights on the causal mechanisms linking environmental change and conflict, it was limited in its generalizability and specification of scope conditions. The second generation of climate security research has more generalizability but has yet to tease out the causal pathways between climate change-related processes and security outcomes.

What is the link between the environment and security? The answer depends on the meaning of “security” and the research methods used. Focused mainly on case studies, the first major wave of scholarship on environmental change and violence emerged just as advocates and scholars sought to redefine security in the late 1980s. A second wave starting in the mid-2000s zeroed in on whether climate change was associated with conflict and was joined by quantitative social scientists employing big data and innovative research designs. As this chapter shows, along the way aspirations for a transformation in how we conceive of security narrowed to more tractable research questions about violence.

The trajectory is understandable but unfortunate. With climate change and unprecedented pressures on the natural world, environmental degradation may pose an existential challenge for some places and key ecosystem services and systems like carbon dioxide storage, coral reefs, and more. A security agenda that solely looks at violence is impoverished, transforming global problems into largely local affairs. Since many environmental problems, including but not limited to climate change, emanate from external forces and intersect with trade, aid, and alliances, the challenge is how to study problems of unknowable gravity where past patterns offer limited guidance. To imagine how the future could be different, however, we need to understand the intellectual history. 1

32.1 The First Debate: The Opening

The traditional meaning of national security has “meant protection from organized violence caused by armed foreigners” ( Del Rosso 1995 : 183). Though it historically referred to protecting the state’s territorial integrity, it has a broader meaning than state survival. Countries have interests beyond their borders for which they may be willing to fight. These “vital interests” may be tied to the country’s “way of life,” its access to critical natural resources, and be considered so important that a challenge would threaten national security ( Art 2003 : 3).

Moves to link environmental issues to security date back to the mid-1980s when scholars and advocates sought to widen the concept to encompass environmental concerns, health, human rights, and development. In 1983, Richard Ullman wrote that defining security in military terms “causes states to concentrate on military threats and to ignore other and perhaps even more harmful dangers” ( Ullman 1983 : 129). He called for a different approach based on harms that could (1) quickly and drastically cause a degradation in the quality of life of a people; and (2) threaten to narrow the options governments and other actors had to respond. With this definition in hand, “natural” disasters such as droughts and floods or epidemics could rise to the level of concern long occupied by interstate war to internal violence ( Ullman 1983 : 133).

With the Cold War winding down, this demand gained more traction. There was considerable optimism that the environment could finally get the attention it deserved. Jessica Mathews (1989: 177) captured this perspective: “Man is still utterly dependent on the natural world but now has for the first time the ability to alter it, rapidly and on a global scale.” The dystopian underpinning of environmental threats loomed large in this assessment. Journalist Robert Kaplan captured the zeitgeist in his 1994 essay “The Coming Anarchy” in which he suggested the environment would be the defining national security issue of the early twenty-first century ( Kaplan 1994 ).

That essay helped bring Canadian scholar Thomas Homer-Dixon to the forefront. He and his collaborators delivered an ambitious and complex portrait of the links between the environment and conflict, drawing on case studies of Rwanda, South Africa, and other places (Homer-Dixon 1991 , 1994 , 1999 ; Homer-Dixon and Blitt 1998 ; Percival and Homer-Dixon 1998 ). Alongside Kaplan’s cruder version, Homer-Dixon’s scholarship helped catapult environmental security onto the agenda of the Clinton administration ( Peluso and Watts 2001 : 4).

Homer-Dixon foresaw a future of environmentally-driven scarcity potentially leading to violence, particularly within developing countries ( Homer-Dixon 1991 : 78). While inspired by the eighteenth-century cleric Thomas Malthus, Homer-Dixon sought to avoid criticism of being seen as an “environmental determinist.” 2 He wrote that environmental factors were neither necessary nor sufficient for conflict ( Homer-Dixon 1999 : 7). Moreover, understanding the environmental contribution to conflict was complicated given a tangled chain of causation, interactions between environmental and social causes, effects that only occur above certain thresholds, and feedback loops ( Homer-Dixon 1991 : 86, 107, 1999: 105–6, 174). While he despaired of assessing the relative causal importance of environmental factors, Homer-Dixon argued that some conflicts cannot be understood without including environmental scarcity ( Homer-Dixon 1999 : 7–9).

He distinguished three different kinds of environmental scarcity that could, when coupled with social and political factors, lead to conflict. The first was supply-induced scarcity due to environmental degradation, the second demand-induced scarcity due to population growth, and the third unequal resource-based distribution or structural scarcity (Homer-Dixon 1994 , 1999 : 15). Whether situations lead to violence depends on the capacity for societies to innovate and overcome scarcity (Homer-Dixon 1994 , 1999 ). Significantly, Homer-Dixon focused on renewable resources, such as fisheries and timber or processes like the hydrological cycle and the climate. Non-renewable resources like oil and minerals, which scholars think of as important drivers of conflict, are not part of his framework.

Homer-Dixon generated three hypotheses of conflict types: (1) simple scarcity between states; (2) group identity-based conflicts within states affected by internal migration; and (3) relative deprivation conflicts where economic decline disrupts social institutions and leads to domestic strife. He found little support for the first hypothesis but stronger support for the other two ( Homer-Dixon 1994 : 18–25). Needless to say, Homer-Dixon’s was not the only research effort; other major initiatives, also largely case-study based, generated broadly similar results (e.g. Baechler 1998 , 1999 ,).

While Homer-Dixon narrowed the focus to violent conflict, others sought to broaden the agenda under the umbrella concept of “human security” ( UNDP 1994 ; Barnett et al. 2010 ). Efforts to promote this agenda culminated in a chapter on human security in the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ( Adger et al. 2014 ; see also Dalby 2009 ). There, human security was defined “as a condition that exists when the vital core of human lives is protected.” The “vital core” of human security extends beyond material well-being to include “culturally specific” non-material factors that people require to fulfill their interests ( Adger et al. 2014 : 759). This broad definition of security has its detractors. As Roland Paris argued, “human security seems to encompass everything from substance abuse to genocide” ( Paris 2004 : 371). Moreover, the definition makes causal analysis challenging since factors that could cause human security are part of the definition ( Paris 2004 : 371). While I largely agree that human security may conceptually stretch the concept of security too far, the attention to individual well-being has some salutary properties, emphasizing the safety and well-being of individuals and not just the territorial integrity of states.

Despite these efforts, the narrower research agenda on the environment and violence has dominated and been the primary focus of criticism. Dan Deudney’s critique has continued resonance. He saw efforts to securitize the environment—that is to label the environment as a security issue—as a strategic ploy by advocates to generate more attention. While national security issues typically command higher priority and resources, securitizing the issue has risks, including the tendency for countries to interpret responses to security problems in terms of national self-interest rather than the collective good ( Deudney 1990 : 467).

Homer-Dixon’s methodology also came in for criticism. Instead of selecting only cases of violence, Marc Levy (1995: 57) counseled that it would be better “to compare societies facing similar environmental problems but exhibiting different levels of violent conflict. That would permit some precision in identifying the conditions under which environmental degradation generates violent conflict and when it does not.” Objections such as these (e.g. Gleditsch 1998 ) underlay efforts to leverage quantitative methods (for a defense, see Homer-Dixon and Levy 1995 ; Schwartz et al. 2001 ). But those studies faced a new set of challenges and generated mixed results. With rough estimates of environmental scarcity, Hauge and Ellingsen found that forest loss and freshwater availability were more highly correlated with lower-level armed conflicts than civil wars, though land degradation was significant for both. They conclude regime type and economic development are more important drivers of conflict ( Hauge and Ellingsen 2001 ). 3 For his part, de Soysa brought in debates about whether greed or grievance is a more significant motivation for violence. He found that natural capital, including both renewable and non-renewable resources, is unrelated to the incidence of internal conflict but that mineral wealth on its own was so related ( de Soysa 2000 ). While providing some support for greed-based theories, de Soysa’s aggregate measure of natural capital is even cruder than Hauge and Ellingsen’s indicators. 4 The US-government supported State Failure Task Force provided a third quantitative assessment but did not find any statistically significant direct relationship between environmental variables and state failure. They did, however, find environmental factors affected infant mortality, a strong predictor of state failure ( Esty et al. 1999 ).

Beyond the critiques and efforts by quantitative scholars, criticism also emerged from political ecologists Nancy Peluso, Michael Watts, and their collaborators. Informed by Marxist approaches to political economy, they argued that Homer-Dixon perpetuated “automatic, simplistic linkages” between scarcity and conflict and gave insufficient attention to regime type ( Peluso and Watts 2001 : 5, 18). As Colin Kahl notes Peluso and Watts “focus mainly on questions of distribution without fairly considering the ways in which rapid population growth and environmental degradation exacerbate conditions of inequality” ( Kahl, 2002a : 138). 5 Kahl’s own work is something of a bridge to these arguments. He sought to understand under what conditions demographic and environmental stress (DES) could lead to conflict. Kahl focuses on state exploitation , where elites “capitalize on scarcities of natural resources and related social grievances to advance their parochial interests” ( Kahl 1998 : 82). Kahl argued states with exclusive institutions and stark cleavages (what he calls “groupness”) are more vulnerable to environmental scarcity-related conflicts (Kahl 1998 , 2002b , 2006 ).

32.2 The Second Debate: Climate Change and Security

A new literature on climate and security emerged in the mid-2000s and is awash with data, in terms of the variety of environmental indicators, their temporal coverage, and the degree of geographic disaggregation made possible by improved satellite and geo-referenced coverage. 6 This revolution facilitated statistical tests of connections between proxies for climate change impacts (i.e. droughts, temperature change, and rainfall volatility) and security outcomes, namely the onset and incidence of violent conflict within states.

After nearly a decade, however, this research has produced mixed findings. As the 2014 IPCC chapter on human security concluded: “The evidence on the effect of climate change and variability on violence is contested. Although there is little agreement about direct causality, low per capita incomes, economic contraction, and inconsistent state institutions are associated with the incidence of violence” ( Adger et al. 2014 : 758; for summaries of the state of the literature, see also Nordås and Gleditsch 2007 ; Gleditsch 2012 ; Scheffran et al. 2012 ; Salehyan 2014 ). Where there are reasonably robust correlations between climate hazards and conflict, such as for temperature, there needs to be more development of causal mechanisms and the selection of paired cases (some with and some without conflict) to demonstrate the scope conditions for when climate factors lead to violence. To understand this assessment, it helps to walk through a number of studies.

The climate–conflict debate has largely, though not exclusively, been between quantitative scholars aligned with Norway’s Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO) and California-based scholars Edward Miguel, Marshall Burke, and Solomon Hsiang (e.g. Hsiang et al. 2013 ). While Miguel and co-authors have found strong correlations between climate-related variables and conflict, PRIO scholars for the most part have not. At the risk of over-simplification, their disputes have largely become ones of model specification and differences over methodology. Other prominent scholars among many include Marc Levy (Levy et al. 2005 , 2008 ; Levy 2014 ) and John O’Loughlin (O’Loughlin et al. 2014a , 2014b , 2012 ). Three special issues—a 2007 issue of Political Geography , 7 a 2012 issue of the Journal of Peace Research , 8 and a 2014 Political Geography 9 —included many other leading figures.

The connections between climate and security contemporaneously emerged in the mid-2000s in the policy community. Nigel Purvis and I wrote a study for the United Nations, where we emphasized climate-driven humanitarian emergencies as the most proximate concern ( Purvis and Busby 2004 ). Debates accelerated after the release of several US think-tank reports around 2007, including one by the CNA Corporation, a joint CNAS-CSIS effort, and my paper for the Council on Foreign Relations ( CNA Corporation 2007 ; Campbell et al. 2007 ). 10 These reports emphasized the potential role of climate change as a threat multiplier in the exacerbation of security problems, with a particular focus on US national security. Other countries like Germany and the UK also carried out similar efforts ( WBGU 2007 ; Mabey 2008 ). Discussions culminated in high-level attention to climate and security by the US government and the United Nations Security Council ( Busby 2016 ).

The policy literature often chooses high-profile conflicts and tries to surface a climate signal as a key driver. For example, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon identified climate change as an important cause of the conflict in Darfur, Sudan, though scholars debated the relative importance of environmental versus political factors. 11 Similarly, think-tank scholars have suggested drought helped give rise to the Arab Spring through the impact on food prices and riots ( Werrell and Femia 2013 ). The role played by drought in the lead up to the Syrian civil war has also received particular attention. 12 One troubling issue is that individual case studies that only examine instances of conflict suffer from the selection problem that faced Homer-Dixon. This is particularly true if advocates shoehorn prominent examples into the environmental conflict box. In some accounts, the causal pathways between environmental change and conflict are dealt with by assertion rather than detailed process tracing.

A parallel academic discussion emerged contemporaneously to the policy debates ( Barnett 2003 ; Barnett and Adger 2007 ). This research focused largely on whether proxies for climate change were correlated with conflict, with Africa receiving particular attention. Early studies found promising results. In 2004, Edward Miguel and collaborators tested the relationship between economic growth and civil conflict in Africa ( Miguel et al. 2004 ). Given reverse causality between violence and economic growth, they used rainfall variation as an instrumental variable: rainfall could affect conflict through economic growth but could not itself be affected by conflict. They found that negative growth shocks of 5 percent increase the likelihood of civil conflict by more than 12 percent in the following year. They argued that lower economic growth would both increase individual incentives to engage in conflict and undermine state capacity to repress violence ( Miguel et al. 2004 ). 13

In 2005, Marc Levy and collaborators took advantage of disaggregated subnational data to assess the connections between rainfall anomalies and conflict outbreak for the world. They found rainfall anomalies were correlated with high-intensity civil conflicts but not low-intensity ones. They argue that rainfall variability affects the economy and state capacity to manage conflicts ( Levy et al. 2005 ).

Cullen Hendrix and Sarah Glaser in their paper on Africa also focused on civil conflict ( Hendrix and Glaser 2007 ). They examined the contribution of long-term trends (including a location’s climate suitability for agriculture and freshwater availability) to conflict onset. They also assessed the contribution of inter-annual deviations from normal rainfall to trigger the onset of conflicts. They found that higher than normal rains and land suitable for agriculture were negatively correlated with conflict, but only when controlling for other social, political, and economic factors. Good rains in a single year reduce the incentives for engaging in conflict because farming is more attractive. At the same time, areas that are amenable to agriculture over the long term have higher economic returns, also diminishing the likelihood of conflict ( Hendrix and Glaser 2007 ).

Some scholars used temperature rather than rainfall measures as their climate variable. A 2009 paper by Burke and colleagues found for every 1 degree increase in Celsius, there was a 4.5 percent increase in the incidence of violent conflict ( Burke et al. 2009 ). Buhaug found the results did not hold up when one included additional data, used alternative model specifications, or included other variables such as political exclusion ( Buhaug 2010 ). Other studies also found limited effects for different kinds of climate-related phenomena, with stronger evidence that political institutions and population density were more important drivers of conflict ( Raleigh and Urdal 2007 ). PRIO affiliated researchers found no association between drought and civil wars in Africa; marginalized ethnic groups were correlated with conflict onset, providing further support for the political exclusion argument ( Theisen et al. 2012 ).

In Theisen’s study of Kenya, water scarcity was actually correlated with reduced conflict ( Theisen 2012 ). In other articles, it appeared that abundance might be a more potent mechanism triggering conflict as groups have more reason to clash in times of plenty. Better rains might give raiding parties engaged in communal conflict more cover to conceal attacks. 14   Raleigh and Kniveton (2012) found this pattern of rainfall abundance accentuating communal conflict (such as between herders and farmers) while anomalously dry conditions enhanced rebel conflict. 15

Other studies emphasized political variables over environmental ones. Gates and Butler in their assessment of range wars between pastoralists and farmers in East Africa argued that asymmetric property rights rather than resources per se fuel banditry by poorer parties ( Butler and Gates 2012 ). Similarly, Benjaminsen and colleagues in their examination of similar conflicts in the Sahel attributed the violence to agricultural encroachment that impeded mobility by pastoralists, opportunism in rural areas with the decline of the state, and rent-seeking behavior by elites ( Benjaminsen et al. 2012 ).

A 2013 meta-analysis by Solomon Hsiang and co-authors fueled the debate further. They estimated the average effects of a variety of climate indicators (temperature increases, positive deviations in rainfall, negative deviations in rainfall) on violence across 60 different studies, examining both “personal violence” (which included studies of baseball pitchers beaning more batters on hot days) as well as “inter-group” violence (which included studies of state collapse, civil wars, and other measures). Their provocative claim was that every standard deviation of climate indicators increased the frequency of interpersonal violence by 4 percent and inter-group conflict by 14 percent ( Hsiang et al. 2013 ). Buhaug and co-authors raised various objections—about model specification, choice of control variables, and other arcana—that resulted in a back and forth with Hsiang and his collaborators ( Buhaug 2014 ; Buhaug et al. 2014 ; Hsiang and Meng 2014 ). The 2013 Hsiang et al. piece included studies of ancient Egypt and fifteenth-century China whose relevance to the contemporary period is questionable. In addition, as opposed to average effects, the field has been moving toward identifying discrete causal pathways between specific climate phenomena (such as too much rain) and particular kinds of conflict (such as communal violence).

Thus far, most studies have tested direct relationships between physical hazards and conflict rather than indirect pathways through economic growth or food prices. Recent contributions from Koubi et al. (2013) and Smith (2014) addresss these lacunae. Where Koubi et al. did not find a connection between rainfall and conflict through economic growth, Smith found rainfall shocks increased protests and other forms of social conflict through effects on local food prices in Africa. 16

Other recent studies have taken advantage of refined data sources. For example, von Uexkull and colleagues found that negative rainfall anomalies during the growing season in Asia and Africa influenced conflict likelihood under certain conditions, namely when groups are highly dependent on agriculture and politically excluded from power ( von Uexkull 2014 ). Another paper in this vein by Maystadt and Ecker connected drought to civil conflict in Somalia through the effects on livestock prices ( Maystadt and Ecker 2014 ).

Some papers have tried to nail down pathways to violence through the effects on migration and disasters. Again, here the evidence is mixed. There is strong evidence migrants can increase the potential for conflict as groups struggle for access to resources ( Salehyan and Gleditsch 2006 ). Reuveny argued climate-related migration could lead to inter-ethnic conflict over resources, distrust, and rivalry between socio-economic groups ( Reuveny 2007 ; see also Reuveny and Moore 2009 ). However, other studies suggested movements related to climate might be temporary and less likely to trigger conflict ( Gleditsch et al. 2007 ; Raleigh et al. 2008 ).

A different literature has examined the effects of natural disasters on conflict. Some studies have posited that disasters make conflict less likely by inducing cooperation between the state and rebels; others suggest really severe disasters can deprive rebels of the resources to continue the fight ( Kelman 2006 ; see also Schaffer 2011 ; Walch 2014 ). Nel and Righarts showed the effects of disasters on conflict to be the most severe in low- and medium-income countries with high inequality, low economic growth, and mixed political regimes (either partially democratic or partially authoritarian). While the effects were stronger for earthquakes and volcanoes, the results held up for climate-related disasters ( Nel and Righarts 2008 ). However, Slettebak found climate-related disasters actually made conflict less likely ( Slettebak 2012 ; for similar results, see Bergholt and Lujala 2012 ). Other studies have examined connections between disasters and regime survival ( Flores and Smith 2010 ; Quiroz Flores 2015 ).

An understudied area is the role played by institutions in dampening the potential for conflict in the face of climate shocks and competition over resources. One reason interstate disputes over water have thus far rarely resulted in armed conflict is because of transboundary institutions to manage river basins. Studies by Stefano et al. and Tir and Stinnett found the robustness of these institutions was correlated with lower incidence and risk of conflict ( Stefano et al. 2012 ; Tir and Stinnett 2012 ).

Nearly all these studies use datasets and cases from the past to say something about the future. However, the geographic distribution and intensity of weather events in the future (of rainfall, temperature) may not resemble past patterns ( Busby et al. 2012a ). The policy community is less constrained by data and can posit possible future scenarios. Thus, we see more efforts by the policy community to explore the security significance of unfolding events such as Arctic sea ice melt and interstate rivalry over access to resources ( Borgerson 2008 ). However, as Gleditsch argued, the future is not evidence for political scientists. He is generally dismissive of forecasting as akin to fortune telling ( Gleditsch 1998 ). That said, some studies, including Hendrix and Glaser and Burke et al. have exploited climate projections to inform estimates of future conflict ( Burke et al. 2009 ; Hendrix and Glaser 2007 ). Another study estimated potential conflict risk under different scenarios of future economic growth and various climate mitigation efforts ( Hegre et al. 2016 ). I have used both historic data on physical exposure and projections of future climate change to identify likely climate security hot spots in Africa (Busby et al. 2012a , 2012b , 2013 , 2014a , 2014b ).

32.3 Concluding Thoughts

We have some directions for where the field is and ought to be headed. There is rightfully more emphasis on indirect causal pathways between climate hazards and conflict through economic growth, migration, and disasters, with particular attention to food prices and agricultural production. Scholars have exploited better geo-referenced datasets to examine subnational conflict patterns and a variety of kinds of conflict. We are also seeing scholarship on regions other than Africa, including Asia and the Middle East. The best work seeks to specify the conditions under which climate-related hazards lead to particular kinds of conflict, distinguishing between kinds of states (such as between exclusive and inclusive institutions, states with stark group cleavages), kinds of contexts (such as between urban and rural areas), and kinds of hazards (such as swift onset versus slow onset). 17

As Hendrix (2016) suggests, it also time to revisit the earlier debate on the circumstances under which demographic and environmental stress lead to mass atrocities and other security outcomes. Since other forms of resource pressures such as poaching of wildlife and deforestation continue on a large scale, scholars of environment and security should also broaden their research beyond climate change.

Going forward, as responses to climate change take shape, there is the potential that measures to mitigate emissions and adapt to the consequences of climate change themselves may become a source of friction between and within states. These include whether countries meet their mitigation commitments, efforts to keep hydrocarbons in the ground, geo-engineering, support for clean energy, attempts to divert water or acquire foreign agricultural lands, as well as border fences. 18 All of these developments portend a rich research and challenging policy agenda going forward.

In what follows, issues such as conflicts related to water, fisheries, and timber are given short shrift. The environmental consequences of war itself are not discussed (cf. Chalecki 2010 ; Dalby 2010 ; Hendrix et al. 2016 ).

Malthus thought the rate of population growth would inexorably exceed the capacity of food production to expand, leading to boom–bust cycles of population growth and famine ( Malthus 1798 ).

Theisen largely could not replicate these findings with the original data or with better time series data ( Theisen, 2008 ).

An updated literature review found more support for abundance arguments than scarcity ones ( Koubi et al. 2013 ).

The venue for Kahl and Homer-Dixon’s rejoinders to Peluso and Watts was the report series from the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP). Since 1994, ECSP has served as an important outlet for scholars interested in environment and security.

There is a different literature on water and conflict that finds interstate water wars have almost never occurred ( Wolf 1998 ).

See http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09626298/26/6

See http://jpr.sagepub.com/cgi/collection/special_issue_on_climate_change_and_conflict?page=2

See http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/09626298/43

See also my 2008 paper in Security Studies for a more theoretical account of the ways climate change could pose a threat to US national security ( Busby 2008 ).

Ban Ki-Moon (2007) . Homer-Dixon argued climate factors were key to understanding the origins of the conflict while De Waal discounted their significance ( de Waal 2007 ; Homer-Dixon 2007 ).

The claim is that the drought was mismanaged by the Syrian state which led to rural–urban migration and those new migrants were among those who joined the early protests against Assad. His repression, in turn, escalated to violence and the formation of a violent rebellion ( Friedman 2013 ; Polk 2013 ; Gleick 2014 ).

Ciccone provided a critique of this methodology and suggested these findings disappear if one uses rainfall levels rather than growth rates in rainfall ( Ciccone 2011 ).

Meier et al. (2007) . See also Hendrix and Salehyan (2012) ; Salehyan and Hendrix (2014) .

Raleigh and Kniveton (2012) . For their part, Fjelde and von Uexkull found the opposite—that large negative deviations in rainfall in Africa were associated with more conflict ( Fjelde and von Uexkull 2012 ).

( Smith 2014 ). Buhaug has two pieces on food prices that conflict with Smith and with each other ( Wischnath and Buhaug 2014 ; Buhaug et al. 2015 . See also Hendrix and Brinkman 2013 ).

For a similar take, see Hendrix et al. (2016) .

Dabelko et al. (2013) .

Adger, W. N. , J. M. Pulhin , J., Barnett , G. D. Dabelko , U. Oswald Spring , C. H. Vogel . 2014 . Human Security. In C. B. Field , V. R. Barros , D. J. Dokken , K. J. Mach , M. D. Mastrandrea , T. E. Bilir , M. Chatterjee , K. L. Ebi , Y. O. Estrada , R. C. Genova , B. Girma , E. S. Kissel , A. N. Levy , S. MacCracken , P. R. Mastrandrea , and L. L. White (eds.), Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects , pp. 755–91. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge and New York: IPCC.

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Environmental Security

Introduction, general overviews.

• Environmental Security and Human Security
• Environmental Cooperation, Conflict and Refugees
• Water Security
• Energy Security
• Food Security
• Emerging Trends—Climate Security

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Environmental Security by Christopher A. Scott , Bhuwan Thapa LAST REVIEWED: 15 January 2015 LAST MODIFIED: 15 January 2015 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199363445-0012

Environmental security, as a subset of broader concerns over human security, is addressed from the disciplinary perspectives of international relations, political science, geography, development studies, and environmental studies. The concept of environmental security views ecological processes and natural resources as sources or catalysts of conflict, barriers or limits to human well-being, or conversely, as the means to mitigate or resolve insecurity. Security over natural resources—particularly energy and increasingly water—seen in terms of territorial control, treaty arrangements, and trade agreements (including the application of economic instruments) over production and conveyance of resources to demand locations, has tended to frame the analysis in international relations and political science. While spatial and transboundary concerns over resources continue to occupy geographers, attention in the field of geography is drawn increasingly to social equity and environmental justice dimensions of resource use and outcomes. Development studies focused on emerging economies and societies in rapid transition addresses environmental security in terms of differential national or regional access to resources and impacts, e.g., associated with pollution, deprivation, etc. And among other points of concern, environmental studies addresses environmental security in terms of local, intra-household, and gender-differentiated access to water, energy, and food as well as outcomes such as public health, nutrition, and quality of life. While the term environmental security has existed since at least the 1980s, its prominence in academic and political circles rose significantly after the 1994 Human Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme, which formulated the broadly accepted concept of human security. This report identified environmental security together with economic, food, health, personal, community, and political security as core components of human security. Since the 1990s, the definition and scope of environmental security have broadened to include multiple subsets, including food security, energy security, and water security, as well as emerging notions of adaptation and resilience to hazards, e.g., climate security, and all of these are referred to in this article. No attempt is made to treat the broad and ever-widening field of environmental security exhaustively. The principal aims are to trace the evolution of security discourses, consider securitization of the environment and natural resources, and assess new conceptions of environmental security in the context of global change. This work is funded by the Lloyd’s Register Foundation, a charitable foundation helping to protect life and property by supporting engineering-related education, public engagement, and the application of research.

After the end of the Cold War in 1990, the term security was expanded to include economic, environmental, and human securities, which can affect state stability but more broadly are determinants of human well-being. An early, influential piece, Ullman 1983 distinguishes human security (as access to, and enjoying the benefits of, quality of life) from state security (as strategic control over threats—real or perceived—as well as resources). Allenby 2000 , Rwabizambuga 2007 , and Swanström 2010 demonstrate that security had conventionally been associated with military and state power to ensure sovereignty, stability, and peace as well as to pursue armed conflict. As noted in the introduction, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 1994 has been instrumental in advancing the human dimensions of security. In its broadened conceptualization, environmental security views ecological processes (anthropogenically influenced or not) as well as natural resources (water, land, forests, fisheries, etc.) as direct or contributing factors that cause or induce conflict and insecurity. Detraz 2009 discusses three linkages between environment and security: (1) environmental degradation directly or collaterally inducing conflict, (2) environmental degradation exerting negative impacts on human security, and (3) ecological security, in which human activities pose negative impacts on the environment. Trombetta 2008 and Graeger 1996 provide an overview of different perspectives on environmental security. These articles discuss seminal work on environmental conflict, military and environmental security, environmental cooperation, a human-security approach to environmental security, and climate security.

Allenby, Braden R. 2000. Environmental security: Concept and implementation. International Political Science Review 21.1: 5–21.

DOI: 10.1177/0192512100211001

Allenby develops an analytical framework to support the evolution of the environmental security concept into operational programs by separating environmental security into four components: resource, energy, environmental, and biological securities.

Detraz, Nicole. 2009. Environmental security and gender: Necessary shifts in an evolving debate. Security Studies 18.2: 345–369.

DOI: 10.1080/09636410902899933

Exploring the linkages between environmental security and gender, Detraz explains three components that link environment and security: environmental conflict, environmental security, and ecological security. The paper focuses on linkages between environmental security and gender and provides concrete examples of gender roles in resource management.

Graeger, Nina. 1996. Environmental security? Journal of Peace Research 109–116.

DOI: 10.1177/0022343396033001008

Graeger studies the conceptual and methodological value of the “environmental security” concept. The paper analyzes the concept of “securitizing” environment through military measure and its trans-nationalization role through international treaties.

Rwabizambuga, Alexis. 2007. Environmental security and development. Conflict, Security & Development 7.1: 201–225.

DOI: 10.1080/14678800601176618

Rwabizambuga argues that the linkage between human and environmental securities and development is strong in developing countries where human security is closely tied to natural resources. The author supports this theory with examples of resource management in African countries.

Swanström, Niklas. 2010. Traditional and non-traditional security threats in central Asia: Connecting the new and the old . China and Eurasia Forum Quarterly 8.2: 35–51.

The study analyzes the interaction between traditional threats (military conflict, terrorism) and nontraditional ones (illicit drug trade) in Central Asia. It also provides a historical evaluation of how nontraditional security, such as environmental, food, and economic securities, has influenced national security in the region.

Trombetta, Maria Julia. 2008. Environmental security and climate change: Analysing the discourse. Cambridge Review of International Affairs 21.4: 585–602.

DOI: 10.1080/09557570802452920

The paper provides a useful overview of different schools of thought on environmental security and how these discourses evolved over time in different disciplines. The author discusses the theory of securitization, which emphasizes the logic of war applied to sectors from which it has been excluded. Concerning securitization of the environment, the debate shifts from the traditional logic of security, which is based on emergency and contingency, to a logic of prevention and management.

Ullman, Richard H. 1983. Redefining security. International Security 8.1: 129–153.

DOI: 10.2307/2538489

The paper attempts to broaden the concept of national security to include nonmilitary forms of security, such as the environment. Advanced countries could face nonmilitary threats due to socioeconomic and political disruptions in developing countries or changes in demand and supply of natural resources in developing regions induced by population and economic growth.

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). 1994. Human development report 1994 . New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

The seminal report proposes a new paradigm for sustainable development through a framework of human security, which emphasizes the safety of human beings from chronic threats, such as hunger, lack of sanitation, and diseases, and from sudden and harmful disruptions in patterns of life. The report identifies environmental security, which is concerned with minimizing environmental threats posed by water scarcity, air pollution, natural disasters, and deforestation, as one of the seven categories of human security.

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You are here: Home » Climate Change » Two Case Studies of Environmental-Security Connections

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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Related content:

• Statement on Tritium
• Nuclear Waste threatens water resources
• 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

Energy and Environmental Security in Developing Countries Case Studies of Countries in Southeast Asia

• First Online: 03 March 2021

Cite this chapter

• Azni Zain Ahmed 11 ,
• Abdul Rahim Ridzuan 11 ,
• Azlin Mohd Azmi 11 ,
• Baljit Singh A/L Bathal Singh 11 &
• Ramlan Zailani 11  

Part of the book series: Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications ((ASTSA))

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Southeast Asia (SEA) is composed of Brunei, Myanmar, Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The population is forecasted to expand by 20% with the urban population alone growing by over 150 million people which is the driving force behind the region’s growing energy demand. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and six other countries in the Asia–Pacific region comprising of: Australia, the People’s Republic of China, India, Japan, Korea and New Zealand forming the ASEAN + 6 group, whose share of global energy demand is expected to reach 40% by 2040 making this region the world’s most dynamic economically. Southeast Asia’s supply of energy comes from more than 50% of fossil fuels (led by oil, coal and natural gas) and 17% from renewables but the supply is now depleting fast as these countries have become net importers of oil rather than exporters since 2018. The region is also relatively well endowed with renewable energy sources particularly in hydro and solar and other types of renewable energy (such as geothermal found mainly in the Philippines and Indonesia). Although this region has set out a target to contribute 23% of its primary energy supply from renewables by 2025, conventional fossil energy still dominates the regional energy mix. Energy security has now become an issue as it affects Southeast Asia’s efforts to secure their energy requirements in a sustainable manner environmentally and economically. Continuous reliance on energy imports, especially of oil and gas, to sustain economic growth serves as an example of Asia’s energy insecurity. Natural gas security has also become a concern in the region, as it is expected to account for 85% of the growth in global gas trade between now and 2040. The energy impacts on environmental systems and climate change have strong links to energy security. More than 60% of global carbon dioxide emissions are produced from energy supply and transport. Continuing to subsidise the cost of energy to citizens over the course of the next ten years will not be sustainable. It becomes necessary to reform some present policies and formulate new policies to ensure the energy security of these countries. Governments in the region also need to employ alternative energy sources and collaborate to maintain energy security not only for their own countries, but for the rest of the region as well. Recent reports by the World Economic Forum (WEF) have favorably focused on ASEAN countries based on their current energy systems and readiness to adapt to future needs. This chapter therefore, discusses on the current scenario of energy in the light of climate change, sustainability in environment, energy security issues and economy in ASEAN + 6, barriers, possible solutions, and case studies of mitigation efforts as well as policies laid out and implemented with specific examples from Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and the Philippines.

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Zain Ahmed, A., Ridzuan, A.R., Mohd Azmi, A., A/L Bathal Singh, B.S., Zailani, R. (2021). Energy and Environmental Security in Developing Countries Case Studies of Countries in Southeast Asia. In: Asif, M. (eds) Energy and Environmental Security in Developing Countries. Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63654-8_2

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Influence of mineralized organic carbon in marine sediments on ecological heavy metal risk: Bohai Bay case study

• Li, Congxiao
• Liu, Jingjing

The organic matter in sediments can mineralize over time, which impacts the morphology of the heavy metals therein, which in turn affects the assessment of the risks posed by heavy metals. We used the sediments of Bohai Bay as the study object and analyzed the effects of different organic carbon mineralization levels on the concentrations of heavy metals (Cr, Pb, Cu, Zn, and Cd) using water extraction and potassium permanganate oxidation. The mean concentrations of Cd, Pb, Cu, and Zn in Bohai Bay were within the limits recommended by the World Health Organization. The proportions of the active and inert organic carbon fractions were 61.72% and 32.94%, respectively. Organic carbon mineralization most strongly impacted Cd and Pb levels, with releases accounting for 47.92% and 25.75%, respectively, of the oxidizable fractions. The release of all heavy metals, except for Cr, increased with increases in organic carbon mineralization, and heavy metals were released at a maximum rate of 12.94% when the organic carbon was highly mineralized, whereas Cr was released at a maximum of 0.023% during the first stage of organic carbon mineralization. In terms of spatial distribution, the concentration of mineralizable organic carbon in the sediments of the estuaries was substantially higher than that in other marine areas. Estuary sediments were more easily affected by organic carbon mineralization; therefore, the heavy metals in the oxidizable fraction of the estuarine region were more easily transformed into unstable heavy metal forms, posing high risk levels. Therefore, this study highlights the effects of organic carbon mineralization on heavy metal morphology and stability, when evaluating the ecological risk of heavy metals in marine sediments.

• Heavy metals;
• Morphology;
• Organic carbon mineralization;
• Ecological risk;
• Anthropogenic activities

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