Environmental Security

Abstract

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.