Environmental Change, Strategic Foresight, and Impacts on Military Power

Abstract

Redefining the Environment for Scenario Planning After 20 years, a clear definition of environmental security has yet to be adopted at critical policy levels. Since 1989, researchers have argued that security cannot be understood well without taking environmental factors into account, and that future environmental changes will create new security risks and potential for conflict. The surge in interest during the post-Cold War 1990s was more a reaction to specific historical events than actual security, as environmental issues had long been intertwined with security risks and military operations. Environmental factors have always been crucial, but planners have often assumed the consistency of environmental conditions without question. The environment was always perceived as something external and constant, and while environmental damage may result from military preparations and operations, strategic interests were hardly threatened. The last few years have witnessed a new form of environmental security discussion in which global changes present unique risks to stability and operations and new methods are being developed to assess these risks. The military community can play a key role in such strategic scenario planning, and in developing early warning systems for energy and environmental insecurity. (1) Rather than take a simplistic view of environmental and conflictual dynamics, military planners are qualified to assess complex and uncertain risks, but, in so doing, they are required to engage with a larger community of researchers and scientists. This article will define the nature of environmental risks as understood by scientific data, illustrate how environmental changes pose risks to both operations and strategic interests, and recommend how to integrate environmental risks with strategic scenario planning. Environmental security is presently understood based on definitions from the 1990s, where emphasis was often placed on resource scarcity leading to violent conflicts in developing countries. Environmental security is still largely based on realist theories of political science, which posit that states are the primary actors and units of analysis in the international world, and violence is a primary expression of power. The basic argument is that increasingly scarce resources cause competition and conflict and will ultimately result in violence between or, perhaps, within states. These arguments were led by Thomas Homer-Dixon and were popularized in 1994 by Robert Kaplan in an influential article predicting chaos and violence in Africa. (2) Kaplan's mistake, and that of most environmental security researchers in the 1990s, was in conceiving environmental change and degradation as merely local issues in less developed regions. Local populations tended to be blamed for resource scarcity and violence in their own regions, an overly simplistic characterization that failed to encapsulate the complexity of both historical violence and environmental dynamics, including global trade patterns. (3) Researchers in the 1990s failed to substantiate claims of a resource scarcity-conflict link. Although environmental factors could be key factors in conflict, the conflicts themselves could never be reduced to a single, rational cause like deforestation. The scarcity-conflict theories also tended to overstate the direct link between environment and violent conflict, while ignoring crucial, intermediary relationships. (4) When applied to less developed regions, areas of existing violence, therefore, gained more attention than areas that may be more vulnerable to environmental changes, even if the violence had little to do with environmental factors. (5) The resurgence of interest in environmental security risks, particularly climate change impacts on the military, was most visibly illustrated in a Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) 2007 report, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, signed by 12 former 3- and 4-star US military officers. …