Showing posts from category security.
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Caroline Thomas: Environmental, Human Security Pioneer
›November 12, 2008 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoI never met Caroline Thomas. But I certainly benefited from her human security insights.
The Southampton University professor passed away last month at 49, leaving behind notable contributions to the field of environment and human security. In her 1987 volume In Search of Security: The Third World in International Relations, Thomas was one of the first to enunciate the insufficiency of traditional security approaches. She explained that statist security perspectives said little about the immediate environment, development, and health threats facing the majority of the world’s population—residents of the so-called Third World.
Thomas’ call for a broader definition of security was rooted in her focus on pressing threats to human well-being in developing countries. In an obituary of Thomas in The Guardian, Tony Evans describes the book’s contributions:While today the term is used in a variety of contexts – environmental security, food security, fresh water security, health security and so on – this was not the case until the 1980s. Security previously meant only the military security of the state. In proposing to broaden the agenda beyond its narrow focus on war and arms control, Caroline sought to include issues that confront the people of the developing nations, rather than their states….Caroline argued that questions of security and insecurity were qualitatively different for people in developing nations because the imperial powers had withdrawn, having paid little regard for their future. The people of decolonised states were left in conditions of economic, political, social and military turmoil, with fewer resources for avoiding future misery.
Reflecting a common British academic perspective, Thomas highlighted power inequities between the global North and South in the post-colonial era. At the same time, she did not undercut the utility of her arguments by descending into over-the-top caricatures or creating straw-man arguments, blunders that other British critics of environmental and human security research have not always managed to avoid.
Thomas’ focus on power extended to inequities in market relationships. Much of the early environment and conflict work spent too little time considering international trade in natural resources between developing and developed countries and consumer behavior in industrialized nations. Too often, early environment and conflict research focused narrowly on the local dynamics of natural resource extraction or environmental scarcity and what roles they played in contributing to violent conflict.
Thomas’s work should place her permanently on the short list of key early contributors responsible for broadening security’s definitions. -
Support Grows for Integrating Environment, Energy, Economy, Security in U.S. Government
›November 5, 2008 // By Rachel WeisshaarA new presidential administration always gives rise to a certain amount of bureaucratic restructuring. But for months now, momentum has been building behind the notion that governments need to improve the integration of their environmental, energy, economic, and security policies. Last month, Edward Miliband was named head of the UK government’s new department of energy and climate change. Last week, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper tapped former industry minister Jim Prentice to lead a new ministry of environment, economy, and energy security. “I think that, as more and more countries are coming to realize, we cannot separate environmental and economic policy,” said Harper.
Yesterday, Grist’s David Roberts, noting that responsibility for addressing climate change is currently spread among the departments of State, Defense, Interior, Agriculture, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, and Energy, offered several possibilities for restructuring the U.S. government to improve its ability to address climate change and energy, including creating a cabinet-level Secretary of Climate; expanding and empowering the Department of Energy or the Environmental Protection Agency; or—my favorite—appointing “some kind of czar,” because “[e]verybody loves a czar.”
Initiatives linking these challenges are popping up in Congress, universities, and the military. Senator Ken Salazar (D-CO) frequently speaks of the interrelated challenges of energy, environment, security, and economic growth “[O]ur addiction to foreign oil is a threat to our economic security, environmental security, and national security,” he said last year. The University of Colorado Law School recently established the Center for Energy and Environmental Security, which develops practical solutions to help move the world toward a sustainable energy future. In addition, the 2008 National Defense Strategy explicitly links energy, environment, and security: “Over the next twenty years physical pressures—population, resource, energy, climatic and environmental—could combine with rapid social, cultural, technological and geopolitical change to create greater uncertainty.”
A few small-scale initiatives to integrate environmental, economic, energy, and security policies within the U.S. government already exist. Yesterday, Carol Dumaine, deputy director for energy and environmental security at the Department of Energy, delivered a talk at the Harvard University Center for the Environment where she discussed a fledgling project to use unclassified data and a global network of experts in government, industry, and NGOs to identify interrelated environmental and energy security threats. Dumaine presented on the same project at a September 2008 conference on open-source intelligence sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It remains to be seen whether the Obama administration will continue this and other ongoing projects, or instead launch new projects of its own on these issues. -
Weekly Reading
›In “Who Cares About the Weather?: Climate Change and U.S. National Security” (subscription required), Joshua Busby argues that although advocates have overstated some of climate change’s impacts, it nevertheless poses direct threats to conventional U.S. national security interests, and therefore deserves serious consideration by both academics and policymakers.
An article in the Economist examines the melting Kolahoi glacier, which could soon threaten water supply and livelihoods in the Kashmir valley.
“Marauding elephants in northern Uganda have added to the challenges faced by civilians trying to rebuild their lives in the wake of 20 years of civil war, destroying their crops and prompting some to return to displaced people’s (IDP) camps they had only recently left,” says an article from IRIN News.
In an EarthSky podcast interview, Lori Hunter of the University of Colorado, Boulder, discusses her work researching how HIV/AIDS affects families’ use of natural resources.
Payson Schwin of the World Resources Institute recently interviewed Crispino Lobo of the Watershed Organization Trust about his work helping rural Indian villages escape poverty by managing their natural resources sustainably.
A research commentary from Population Action International explores family planning trends in Pakistan, as well as the relationships between demography and security in this critically important country.
Despite—or perhaps because of—its extremely high population density, Rwanda has launched a series of initiatives to protect its environment and reduce poverty, reports the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.
The Population Reference Bureau has released two new policy briefs examining population, health, and environment issues in Calabarzon Region and the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao.
Stalled Youth Transitions in the Middle East: A Framework for Policy Reform proposes changes to education, employment, and housing that would offer Middle Eastern youth additional opportunities. “Young people in the Middle East (15-29 years old) constitute about one-third of the region’s population, and growth rates for this age group are the second highest after sub-Saharan Africa,” say the authors. “Today, as the Middle East experiences a demographic boom along with an oil boom, the region faces a historic opportunity to capitalize on these twin dividends for lasting economic development.”
An October 2008 brief from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs uses examples from Africa and Latin America to explore ways to ensure that non-renewable resource revenues contribute to sustainable development.
Video is now available for “Breaking Barriers: Family Planning, Human Health and Conservation,” a session at this month’s Conservation Learning Exchange conference in Vancouver. -
PODCAST – Wouter Veening on Environment-Security Linkages
›October 29, 2008 // By Wilson Center StaffEnvironmentalists from around the world gathered in Barcelona from October 5-14, 2008, to discuss issues impacting a sustainable world at the World Conservation Congress. ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko interviewed Wouter Veening, co-founder and chairman of the Institute for Environmental Security (IES) in The Hague, following his discussion of “Environment and Security Challenges for Change.” In this podcast, Veening discusses the impact of climate change on traditional security threats and the global implications of failing to effectively address this issue. Dabelko analyzes related environment-security links in a chapter in IES’s Inventory on Environmental and Security Policies and Practices, as well as in numerous Grist dispatches from the IES 2004 Hague Conference on Environment, Security, and Sustainable Development. -
Rebels Overrun Government Troops in Eastern DRC; Thousands Displaced, Including Virunga’s Gorilla Rangers
›October 29, 2008 // By Rachel Weisshaar
Renegade General Laurent Nkunda’s fighters seized Virunga National Park headquarters at Rumangabo on Sunday, overtook the town of Rutshuru yesterday, and continue to advance on the regional capital of Goma, facing little resistance from either Congolese government troops or MONUC, the UN peacekeeping force. Thousands of local residents have fled the fighting, including 53 gorilla rangers who were in the park when it was taken by Nkunda’s rebels. Twelve of the rangers made it back to the relative safety of Goma today, after more than two days dodging bullets in the forest with no food or water, but the rest remain missing. Almost nothing is known about the condition of the park’s mountain gorillas, which represent half of the world population of 700. -
Weekly Reading
›In an open letter on water policy to the next U.S. president, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute urges the next presidential administration to develop a national water policy; highlight national security issues related to water; expand the United States’ role in addressing global water problems; and integrate climate change into all federal planning and activity on water.
A recent survey conducted by Liberia’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that land disputes are a key threat to peace in Liberia, reports BBC News.
Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the former Soviet Union, called for a global glasnost, or openness, on environmental problems. “This financial turmoil, which will heavily affect the real economy, was absolutely predictable, and it is only one aspect of the wider crisis of all the current development systems,” said Gorbachev. “In fact, there are connected simultaneous crises that are rapidly emerging. These relate to energy, water, food, demography, climate change and the ecosystem devastation.”
The World Health Organization has developed a plan for research on the health impacts of climate change, reports the Science and Development Network. -
The New U.S. Army Field Manual on Stability Operations: Visionary Shift or Missed Opportunity?
›October 17, 2008 // By Will RogersLast week, the U.S. Army released its new field manual on stability and reconstruction operations, FM 3-07, the 10-month interagency brainchild of the Army, State Department, and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Some have hailed the doctrine as a fundamental shift in Army policy that recognizes the significance of non-military threats to U.S. national security, while others have criticized it as a missed opportunity to critically re-examine notions of what constitutes security.
The new doctrine aims to shift the burden of fostering stability in fragile states from the Army to the State Department and USAID, which are better prepared to address non-military threats. To paraphrase Lieutenant General William Caldwell IV at an October 8, 2008, event sponsored by the Center for Strategic and International Studies: The Army is up against non-military threats that can cause widespread destabilization—such as, access to basic necessities like food, water, and shelter—and with its traditional mandate to win wars with overwhelming military force, the Army does not have the expertise to address these threats.
Instead, a new Civilian Response Corps under the State Department and USAID will receive crisis training from the Army to prepare for managing conflict scenarios. The Army hopes that this interagency effort will expand civilian agencies’ capacity to prevent instability from devolving into state failure, which increases the chances of the Army being deployed. Sustainability and human security are clearly viewed as ways to achieve stability and prevent costly military deployments, not as goals in and of themselves.
According to Geoff Dabelko, director of the Environmental Change and Security Program, it is important “to distinguish whether addressing sustainability needs is a tactic or a goal or both. It can be both for militaries but at times it is merely a tactic to achieve stability rather than a fundamental rethink of how security should be defined.”
Tad Davis, the Army’s deputy assistant secretary for environment, safety, and occupational health, recently said, with respect to military operations and access to water in Iraq, “You can get out there…and deploy to an area for conducting operations, but if water’s not there for drinking purposes and for cooking, showering, laundry, things like that, then you’re not going to be able to sustain the force.” Clearly, Davis views environmental sustainability as key to the Army’s operations, but not necessarily as a critical component of a lasting peace.
Yet others argue that the Army would be wise to adopt long-term environmental sustainability and human security as immediate goals, as they would reduce the frequency with which the Army is dragged into conflicts. Dabelko wonders whether the War on Terror might be more successful “if part of a diversified response to the attacks of 9/11 would have included an aggressive effort to address poverty as an underlying source of grievances around the world rather than having just a uni-dimensional strategy of use of force. The symbolic and the real impact of such a strategy might have been quite tangible.” Nonetheless, the Army’s recognition that security is broader than military force is a laudable step—hopefully not the last—in the right direction.Photo: Two Iraqi girls from Al Buaytha, Iraq, pump water from a U.S. Army-supplied portable water tank. Courtesy of flickr user James Gordon. -
Watching the World Grow: The Global Implications of Population Growth
›October 16, 2008 // By Will RogersIn a recent nationwide Roper Poll commissioned to study the U.S. public’s attitudes toward population, barely 50 percent of respondents believed there is a strong link between global population growth and climate change, reported Thomas Prugh of World Watch magazine at the September 30, 2008, launch of World Watch’s population issue co-sponsored by the Worldwatch Institute and the Environmental Change and Security Program. People need to learn about population growth’s impact on climate change and other indicators of environmental health, said Prugh.
To Grow or To Shrink? That Is the Question
Historically, governments viewed population growth as a sign of a nation’s vitality; some promoted it by offering incentives to have more children. Prugh noted that such pronatalist attitudes are far from obsolete: “Last year, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared September 13th a national holiday for conceiving children. And couples who delivered a baby nine months later, which not coincidentally would have been on Russia Day, got refrigerators for that accomplishment,” he said. In contrast, many governments are now promoting voluntary family planning rather than population growth. But a lack of political urgency has limited their success. “Support and funding for family planning is actually flat or in decline,” Prugh emphasized.
Empowering Women and Expanding the Discourse
Population has always been an “incredibly gendered issue,” argued Robert Engelman of the Worldwatch Institute, which is one reason for the lack of public discourse on the subject. He called for a broader discussion of population and urged women who work in the sexual and reproductive health and rights fields to actively participate. If you “don’t talk about population from your perspective and from what you know about these issues, others will,” he warned, “and they may not know as much as you do about it.” For Engelman, providing access to family planning and placing population decisions in the hands of women “is natural—this is understandable—and in general, it’s a very good thing.”
The Good, The Bad: Urbanization
“This is the first year, 2008, in which half of us have become city-dwellers,” said Karen Hardee of Population Action International, a development that will have both positive and negative consequences. Urban populations have better access to family planning and education. However, urban growth can outpace local governments’ ability to enforce environmental regulations, treat hazardous and solid waste, and limit air pollution. At the same time, Hardee argues, technological innovation, access to information, efficient land and energy use, and better living conditions—as well as economies of scale—can limit urbanization’s negative environmental impacts. “Urbanization is inevitable, and it’s also accelerating, with most of the growth in the population in developing countries,” she stated.
Population and the Changing Nature of Security
“To be sure, rapid population growth does not have a simple causal relationship with conflict. And to suggest so would fail to take into account additional aggravating factors, such as poverty, poor governance, competition over natural resources, and environmental degradation,” said Sean Peoples of the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program. But population dynamics can fuel instability and increase the risk of a country falling victim to intrastate violence. According to The Shape of Things to Come, a report by Peoples’ co-author, Elizabeth Leahy, countries with youthful age structures—where 35 percent of the population is younger than 15—have a 150 percent greater chance of seeing conflict erupt than countries with more balanced age structures, due to pervasive joblessness, lack of education, and competition over resources.
Since countries with very young and youthful age structures represent a great challenge to international stability, population should be included in national security discussions. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently said, “We also know that over the next 20 years certain pressures—population, resource, energy, climate, economic, and environmental—could combine with rapid cultural, social, and technological change to produce new sources of deprivation, rage, and instability.” But there is hope of avoiding insecurity: “Progress toward more balanced age structures occurs when health care improves, leading to lower mortality rates and longer life expectancies, and when fertility rates fall, which happens when women and men have access to the services they need to choose their own family size,” said Peoples.
Photo: Thomas Prugh. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.
Renegade General Laurent Nkunda’s fighters seized 
Last week, the U.S. Army released its new 
In a recent nationwide 
