Environmental security, geopolitics and the case of Lake Urmia’s disappearance

Abstract

ABSTRACTGeopolitics, climate change and environmental security operate in complicated and sometimes directly conflictual ways. Driven in part by national policies of food self-sufficiency in response to economic sanctions imposed on Iran by American and European policies, the destruction of one of the world’s largest inland lakes raises questions about the interaction of multiple forms of security, and in particular how securitizations by various actors interact at a number of scales. Lake Urmia in North Western Iran has rapidly dwindled in the last decade, a result of unsustainable water extractions to irrigate growing agricultural production of apples and other horticultural products. Clearly assumptions that security is additive across sectors and scales is not the case here as elsewhere, but the Urmia Lake episode emphasizes that they are in fact frequently operating at cross-purposes; national security strategies may compromise other forms of security quite directly. Blaming climate change, and possibly the deliberate use of climate modification techniques for the lake’s demise adds a key dimension to securitization discussions. This matters for security studies more generally now because climate change is increasingly being introduced as a macrosecuritization in international politics.