Abstract
Our societies build largely on the concept of security and the ultimate justification for our present-day states is to ensure internal and external security of their citizens. While this task has traditionally focused on local and national scales, globalisation and planetary-scale challenges such as climate change mean that security connects also to a variety of sectors and has a stronger global dimension. Security is therefore increasingly connected with sustainability, which seeks to ensure that we as humans are able to live and prosper on this planet now and in the future. The concepts of energy security, food security and water security—as being used separately or together—manifest the burgeoning linkages between security and sustainability. This Special Issue brings together ten scientific articles that look at different aspects of security, sustainability and resilience with an emphasis on energy, food and/or water in the context of Finland and Europe. In this Editorial, we introduce the key concepts of the Special Issue, synthesise the articles’ key findings and discuss their relevance for the on-going deliberations on security and sustainability. We conclude that ensuring sustainable security—or secure sustainability—requires systemic, structured processes that link the policies and actors in these two important but still distant fields.
Highlights
Security, Sustainability and Resilience in Energy, Food and WaterSecurity and sustainability are increasingly connected
Security policy is rapidly getting more and more intertwined with policies and practices related to the use of natural resources, as can be seen from the booming concepts of energy security (e.g., [12,13,14,15]), food security (e.g., [16,17]) and water security (e.g., [18,19,20,21])
The results indicate that the greatest potential to net exports of virtual water could be achieved when local feed production was maximized for domestic use and export, and bovine meat consumption in Finland was replaced with a vegetarian substitute
Summary
These three resource sectors are inherently linked, as is envisaged by different nexus approaches (e.g., [26,27,28,29]) All these features encompass the relevance of these resources for both security and sustainability, and call for systemic and future-orientated thinking to understand the complexities and challenges included in such connections. Their broadened conceptualisation has arguably allowed different interpretations by various actors, making their practical implementation prone to political loadings The call for this Special Issue, “Enhancing Security, Sustainability and Resilience in Energy, Food and Water” in the Sustainability journal was open for multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary research articles that study security, sustainability and/or resilience with a focus on energy, food and/or water. Many of the Special Issue’s articles are linked to that project [6,44,45]
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