VIDEO: Simon Dalby on ‘Security and Environmental Change’

Simon Dalby, a geographer at Ottawa’s Carleton University, wants to put the “human” back into “human security” with his new book Security and Environmental Change. He is trying to find a common vocabulary to bridge the disparate languages of environmental science and security studies and enable them to mesh in a way that makes “intellectual sense.”


Dalby “argues that to understand climate change and the dislocations of global ecology, it is necessary to look back at how ecological change is tied to the expansion of the world economic system over the last few centuries. As the global urban system changes on a local and global scale, the world’s population becomes vulnerable in new ways.”



Environmental Change and Security Program Director Geoff Dabelko spoke with Dalby about his book outside the Global Environmental Change and Human Security conference in Oslo, Norway, where more than 160 experts and practitioners have gathered for three days of intense discussions.