“The countries in which terrorism could gain a foothold contain vast areas that are poverty-stricken and lawless. The common denominator within these areas is the absence of human security for the local population,” argues Major John Bellflower in “The Soft Side of Airpower” in the Small Wars Journal. “[A]dopting a human security paradigm as a counterinsurgency strategy could generate positive effects in the war on terror, particularly within AFRICOM,” and the Air Force could play a significant role in bringing human security to vulnerable populations, he claims.

When we picture the Air Force as an instrument of soft power, we tend to think of planes airlifting humanitarian aid into impoverished or disaster-stricken areas. But Bellflower argues that the Air Force could also help fulfill the longer-term health, food, economic, environmental, and community aspects of human security. For instance, the Air Force currently provides short-term health care in Africa through MEDFLAG, a biannual medical exercise. Bellflower suggests MEDFLAG “could be expanded to include a larger, centrally located field hospital unit that could serve a number of dispersed clinics.”

Bellflower also advocates deploying the Air Force’s Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineers (REDHORSE) into impoverished, unstable areas to build airstrips, drill wells, and employ local labor to construct “clinics, schools, police stations, community centers, or whatever is needed for a particular area. Additionally, these units could repair existing facilities to allow electricity, water, and other needed life support systems to become functional or construct earthen dams or the like to protect against natural disaster and meet environmental security needs.” Employing young men to build this infrastructure “results in a lower chance of these individuals succumbing to the lure of terrorist group recruiting tactics,” asserts Bellflower.

Bellflower joins a growing cadre of academics and practitioners arguing that the Department of Defense (DoD) should be more involved in peacebuilding and international development. He makes an original contribution in detailing how the Air Force—typically viewed as the most hands-off branch of the armed forces—could help stabilize poor, volatile regions. Yet his vision would likely attract objections from both sides. Many humanitarian aid groups would resist what they view as DoD’s repeated incursions into an area in which it lacks expertise and has ulterior (i.e., national security) motives. On the other side, many military personnel would view this as an example of mission creep, and would hesitate to send soldiers into risky areas simply for humanitarian reasons.

Photo: A U.S. Air Force Europe airman from the 793rd Air Mobility Squadron moves humanitarian supplies into position for loading in support of the humanitarian mission to Georgia in August 2008. Photo courtesy of Captain Bryan Woods, 21st TSC Public Affairs, and Flickr user heraldpost.

“Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that there can be no development without security—and no security without development,” says the miniAtlas of Human Security, a global atlas illustrating international and civil conflicts, as well as human rights abuses. The atlas explains that human security comprises the broader pillar of freedom from want (for basic necessities like food, water, shelter, education, employment, and health care) and the narrower pillar of freedom from violence. Although freedom from want is vital to sustainable development and long-term security, the atlas only maps instances where freedom from violence has been marred by inter- or intrastate conflict.

While the atlas openly admits its exclusion of the broader pillar of human security—which notably includes environmental issues—it nevertheless misses the opportunity to acknowledge that the environment can span both pillars of human security. Though the atlas notes that the environment can be used as a weapon of violence—by poisoning wells, for instance—it never explains the role of the environment as a cause of violent conflict—in land disputes, local conflicts over water, or by spurring climate change-induced migration.

The authors of the miniAtlas of Human Security argue that today, most violent conflicts are rooted in poverty and politics. “Poor countries, unlike rich ones, lack the resources to address the grievances that can spark armed uprisings,” the report explains, and “poor countries tend to have weak security forces and so find it difficult to deter rebellions and to crush those that cannot be deterred.” In addition, dictatorships and “anocracies—regimes that are neither dictatorships nor full democracies—are the most prone to armed conflict” and human rights abuses. Though generally speaking, both of these statements are true, there are other causes of violent conflict that are just as important and have serious implications for human security.

For instance, the environment has helped spark conflict in many parts of the world. Competition over natural resources—whether diamonds in Angola and Sierra Leone, timber in Liberia, or coltan in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo—has been a source of violent conflict between warlords, governments, and civilian populations. Getting policymakers to recognize that the environment is a cause of violent conflict is an essential step to preventing conflict, as well as conducting successful post-conflict environmental and disaster management. Until we recognize that the environment can increase the risk of violence, global security itself will suffer.

Photo: The Zambezi (Chobe) River borders eight African states: Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In an effort to improve governance and prevent violent conflict from erupting, these eight states are working for the establishment of a commission to govern this vital water resource. Courtesy of Flickr user Mara 1.

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“Governance is key. If you don’t have a competent government after the war, you’re not going to solve the problems that weren’t solved before the war because of incompetent governance,” said Charles Kelly at “Sustaining Natural Resources and Environmental Integrity During Response to Crisis and Conflict,” a November 12 event.

The University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health recently received $15 million from the Fred H. Bixby Foundation to expand the Bixby Program in Population, Family Planning & Maternal Health into the Bixby Center for Population, Health, and Sustainability. The Bixby Center will highlight population’s impact on global public health, climate change, poverty, and civil and international conflict. “I think the huge challenge for the human race in the 21st century is whether we can move to a biologically sustainable way of life on this planet,” said Malcolm Potts, chair of the Bixby Center. “Population plays an essential role in that,” he added. The Bixby Center will also address the well-documented unmet need for family planning around the world.

Although it will be housed within the School of Public Health, the Bixby Center will partner with the Blum Center for Developing Economies, the Berkeley Center for Global Public Health, the Berkeley Population Center, and other initiatives.

The U.S. Supreme Court invalidated two restrictions on the Navy’s use of sonar during submarine training exercises off the coast of southern California. The restrictions had been designed to protect whales and other marine mammals.

Sierra magazine features letters to the next U.S. president from international environmental leaders, including Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka, founder and CEO of Ugandan NGO Conservation Through Public Health and recent author of “Sharing the Forest: Protecting Gorillas and Helping Families in Uganda.” “As we become increasingly aware of the great threat of climate change to life on Earth, we must not forget the other immediate threats of poverty, disease, and population growth,” writes Kalema-Zikusoka in Sierra. “These threats are interrelated and need to be addressed simultaneously.”

The Pacific Institute has released an updated version of its popular Water Conflict Chronology. The earliest entry is from 3,000 B.C.; the most recent occurred last month.

Representatives of Arab and Mediterannean governments met in Tunis this week to discuss strengthening their collaboration over environmental security, reports China Daily.

“NATO’s current conceptualization of environmental security needs to be broadened and deepened,” argues Janelle Knox-Hayes in Oxford International Review.

Health in Harmony is promoting conservation and providing access to health care in West Kalimantan in Indonesia through an innovative development project, reports New America Media.

“When looking at what we need to do, I think stabilizing climate, stabilizing population are the two big ones. If we fail at either of those…civilization is in serious trouble,” warns Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute in Washington, DC, in the latest podcast from the Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP). Following a recent event, “Thinking Outside the Grid: An Aggressive Approach to Climate and Energy,” co-sponsored by Wilson Center on the Hill and ECSP, Brown elaborated on the themes of his latest book, Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, and addressed climate change’s impact on natural resources, food security, and energy independence. He argues that the United States must critically re-examine its energy infrastructure and invest heavily in alternative energy technologies.

I 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.

A 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.