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.”

Today’s Center for a New American Security (CNAS) annual conference was replete with heavy hitters like General David Petraeus discussing the world’s top security challenges, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North Korea. But at an afternoon panel, CNAS’s Sharon Burke argued that although environmental and natural-resource issues may not get their own section in the Presidential Daily Briefing, they are intimately intertwined with many of the high-profile security issues that do.

President Obama recently called for a stronger focus on agricultural development in Afghanistan, said Burke, as part of a broader approach to increasing stability and improving Afghans’ quality of life. But decades of war have contributed to severe deforestation and land degradation, and farmers “can’t plant their seeds if the land is barren, and that’s where we are right now,” she said.

The panel also served as the launch for CNAS’s new Natural Security program (see working paper) and blog, which aim to study the “national-security implications of natural resources use,” said Burke. The program grows out of CNAS’s investigation of the security impacts of climate change and energy over the past several years. Burke explained that it was difficult to discuss energy and climate change without also talking about water, land, biodiversity, and a host of other related issues, so CNAS decided to create a program that would not attempt to separate these interconnected issues.

Burke was joined by former U.S. Senator John Warner, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, Roderick Eggert of the Colorado School of Mines, and Commander E. J. McClure of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

“[F]or global trade, global food security, and global energy security, the Indian Ocean is critical,” says Amit Pandya in The Indian Ocean: Resource and Governance Challenges, the most recent addition to the Stimson Center’s Regional Voices: Transnational Challenges report series. “And it remains a stage for the pursuit of the global strategic and regional military interests of all world and regional powers.”

During a launch event on May 21, Pandya—the project director behind the series—sat with Stimson Director Ellen Laipson, Vice Admiral Kevin Cosgriff, USN (Ret.), and East-West Center in Washington Director Satu Limaye to reflect on the report and discuss the myriad challenges facing Indian Ocean states in the maritime resources and governance sectors.

The 21st Century’s “Center Stage”

The Indian Ocean’s international profile has been bolstered by the region’s rising economic prowess and political clout, significant resource wealth, and critical shipping routes—which transport the vast majority of oil leaving the Persian Gulf. Journalist Robert Kaplan recently labeled the region “center stage for the 21st century” because of its importance to global trade and energy, as well as the fact that it hosts the “dynamic great-power rivalry” between India and China.

The Stimson report is divided into two sections: the first comprises several articles written by authors from Indian Ocean littoral states, while the second includes pieces from Pandya and Laipson that analyze and interpret general trends in regional ocean governance.

Ocean Resources, Maritime Security

“In the last half-century, the production of fish and fish products in the Indian Ocean (IO) region has increased tremendously as a result of improvements in fish capture technology and rising demand caused by a growing global population,” write Edward N. Kimani et al. in their article in the report, which examines southwest Indian Ocean fisheries. These trends have precipitated conflict between small-scale artisanal fishers and industrial fishers, in addition to placing enormous pressure on ocean ecosystems. Effective management mechanisms must be implemented in order to address overfishing and its consequences for global food security and ecosystems. (A forthcoming documentary, The End of the Line, takes an in-depth look at overfishing.)

In a similar vein, Mak Joon Num’s contribution, “Pirates, Barter Traders, and Fishers: Whose Rights, Whose Security?”—roundly praised by speakers at the report launch—considers the diverse range of stakeholders operating in the Straits of Malacca and the Sulu Sea. Malaysian trawler fishers, Acehnese pirates, and Filipino barter traders compete to glean their livelihoods from the ocean. All are victims and predators in their own right, Mak Joon Num argues, and climate change, poverty, and a lack of coordinated ocean governance policies exacerbate the present problems of resource scarcity, disputed sovereignty, and unsustainability.

Shifting to the northwestern littoral states of the Indian Ocean, Mustafa Alani presses the case for a comprehensive maritime security compact in the Persian Gulf, which holds more than 30 percent of the world’s known oil deposits. The Gulf Cooperation Council provides the foundational structure for such an agreement, which would likely comprise several levels of cooperation, ranging from “soft security”—managing fishing and environmental degradation, search-and-rescue coordination, and marine transport—to “strategic security”—coordinating naval exercises and anti-terrorism operations.

Questions of Governance

In order to address these challenges, concerned states must put forth “more effort at the national level to integrate civilian and military aspects of maritime policy,” Laipson concludes in the report’s final lines. “We also need a fresh look at the regional and international levels to ensure that governance of the maritime realm strives to manage the complex interplay of human and natural activity and to maintain the Indian Ocean as a sustainable zone for commerce, energy, security, and peace.”

Population: A Missing Factor?

While the report does an excellent job of illuminating the resource and governance challenges in the Indian Ocean, it fails to substantively consider one factor that will have a profound influence on all others: population growth. Burgeoning populations in Indian Ocean states will have considerable consequences for resource management, governance, poverty, and security in the region, particularly in relation to migration, human trafficking, overfishing, and ecosystem health.

Photo: Artisanal fishers off the Malabar coast of India. Courtesy Flickr user mckaysavage.

MORE

The International Institute for Sustainable Development has released two reports on climate change and security: Rising Temperatures, Rising Tensions: Climate change and the risk of violent conflict in the Middle East and Climate Change and Security in Africa.

In “The Changing Face of Israel,” a Foreign Policy web exclusive, Richard Cincotta and Eric Kaufmann explain how Israel’s demographics are influencing the country’s politics.

CNN’s Inside Africa reports on a bill in the U.S. Congress that seeks to quell the violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by forcing American companies to disclose the sources of their minerals.

Population Action International’s Kathleen Mogelgaard reports from international climate change negotiations in Bonn, Germany, on how climate change disproportionately affects women and the poor.

A Christian Science Monitor op-ed on global demographic trends cites Wilson Center Senior Scholar Martin Walker.

On Grist, Earth Policy Institute Founder Lester Brown explores the massive migration that would be precipitated by even partial melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.

ABC’s Earth 2100 documentary, airing tonight at 9:00 p.m. EST, will feature many ECSP speakers—including Jared Diamond and Peter Gleick—as well as the Center for a New American Security’s (CNAS) Clout and Climate Change War Game. Held in Washington, D.C., in July 2008, the war game focused on the national security implications of climate change.

Earth 2100 explores possible worst-case scenarios for this century that could be triggered by a “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion, and climate change. Environmental security expert Thomas Homer-Dixon tells host Bob Woodruff that “energy, climate food, population, economic pressures—any one of these challenges might be very serious in and of itself. But because they are happening all simultaneously, it’s going to be very difficult for our governments to cope.”

During the climate-change war game, “every country sort of hewed to what you would expect,” said CNAS Vice President for Natural Security Sharon Burke at an ECSP event earlier this year.

“The EU team spent the first two hours debating whether they could really be a country; the Indian team instantly came up with a negotiating strategy that sounded cooperative and brilliant but was completely impossible to execute; the Chinese team was, ‘No, we’re not going to do anything unless you pay us’; and the American team was keen to lead, only nobody was following,” she said.

One of the key lessons from the game, Burke added, was that “everything comes down to what China is prepared to do.” She also described insights from the war game in a New Security Beat guest post.

Several war-game participants are now members of the Obama administration, including Todd Stern, the lead U.S. negotiator on climate change; Michèle Flournoy, under secretary of defense for policy; and David Sandalow, assistant secretary for international affairs at the Department of Energy.

An ABC producer working on Earth 2100 consulted ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko earlier this year.

“Addressing the issue of the environment in the context of conflict resolution, conflict prevention, peacekeeping, [and] peacebuilding becomes ever more important because we know from everything we have learned—and are learning every day—about climate change that one thing is for certain: The world is going to be under more stress,” says UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Director Achim Steiner in a short expert interview on YouTube.

Yet in another original Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) video, Steiner emphasizes that environmental issues do not lead inexorably to conflict. “History shows that human societies are not prone to looking for conflict but rather for conflict resolution, particularly when it comes to fundamental elements of life support systems, be it water, or be it clean air or other issues—we have seen the model of cooperation emerge.”

Steiner was at the Wilson Center in March 2009 for the launch of From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment, a new report by UNEP’s Disasters and Conflicts Programme. According to From Conflict to Peacebuilding:

• Forty percent of intrastate conflicts within the past 60 years have been strongly linked to natural resources.
  
• Such conflicts are twice as likely to relapse within the first five years of peace.
  
• Less than a quarter of peace agreements for these conflicts address natural-resource issues.

Watch other short expert commentaries—on water, demographic security, climate change and security, and other issues—on ECSP’s YouTube channel.

The Copenhagen climate conference will be “the most important gathering in human history,” said the United Kingdom’s environment secretary, Hilary Benn, at the Wilson Center on May 14, 2009 (full text of speech). While “an agreement on cutting emissions would be the biggest single step we could take to safeguard [natural] resources,” said Benn, “even such an agreement will not—indeed cannot—encompass all of the things we need to do to safeguard our environment.”

“The most glaring threat is that of dangerous climate change. But it is not the only example of the problems we create when we exploit the world’s resources unsustainably,” explained Benn.

“The spiraling price of food in 2008 was a wake-up call. Riots threatened political stability. Export bans threatened world trade. Wheat prices doubled, rice quadrupled. And another 75 million people were threatened by poverty and hunger,” Benn said.

Although food prices have fallen recently, continuing growth in the global population—expected to reach at least 9 billion by 2050—and rising standards of living in poor and middle-income countries mean that world food production will need to double by 2050. This demand for food—especially more meat and dairy products—will put increasing pressure on land and water. Conflicts could erupt over these scarce resources if they are not managed properly, Benn warned.

Already, wealthy governments and corporations are buying farmland in Africa and other parts of the developing world—leading to unrest. Widespread anger at South Korean company Daewoo’s proposal to purchase more than half of Madagascar’s arable land contributed to the ouster of former Malagasy President Marc Ravalomanana.

Benn highlighted an apparent Catch-22: “Development is the best way of lowering the rate of population growth and so, in turn, lowering the pressure on resources. But development also increases income, and therefore demand.”

The way to free ourselves from this cycle, Benn said, is to create an environmentally sustainable economy, so that economic development does not degrade the environment. He proposed:

• Starting to build tomorrow’s sustainable economy even as we work to contain today’s economic crisis;


• Changing the incentives in our economies—through regulation and financial inducements—to promote environmentally sustainable choices;


• Creating the jobs that will power this new sustainable economy; and


• Working together as an international community to address water scarcity, food security, and biodiversity loss.

Benn called for U.S. leadership on climate change and other environmental issues: “We need America to apply all of its great energy to the task we, together, face.”

Photo: Hilary Benn. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.

MORE

In Conservation magazine, David Malakoff examines how cellulosic ethanol may threaten biodiversity around the world.

A Comprehensive Approach to Congo’s Conflict Minerals, a report by the Enough Project, argues that ending resource-related violence in the DRC will require: