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Taking a Livelihoods Approach to Understanding Environmental Security
February 17, 2012 // By Kate DiamondMORE
Since the concept of “environmental security” first gained traction in the early 1990s, research on the issue has been overwhelmingly focused on how environmental change impacts state security. That has been to the detriment of policymakers trying to preempt instability and conflict, according to the University of Toronto’s Tom Deligiannis in his article, “The Evolution of Environment-Conflict Research: Toward a Livelihood Framework,” published in February’s Global Environmental Politics.
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Teaching Environment and Security at West Point
February 16, 2011 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoMOREU.S. strategic assessments like the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the 2010 National Security Strategy, and the Director of National Intelligence’s annual threat assessment have placed natural resources, climate change, population, and poverty squarely on the American security agenda. But are these broad statements in doctrine and threat assessments translating into tangible changes, such as new approaches to the education of future military officers? My colleague Sean Peoples and I recently spoke with faculty and cadets at the U.S. Military Academy about how West Point’s Geography and Environmental Engineering Department is integrating these issues directly into their curriculum.
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From the Wilson Center
Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace
Download Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace from the Wilson Center.MORE
How does globalization affect natural resource issues such as water on local, national, and international levels? Can our common dependence on these stressed resources be a force for bringing people together rather than dividing us? What lessons can we learn from sharing insights from communities at these very different levels of organization?
Pathways to Peace
In January 2010, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and the Fetzer Institute invited 22 scholars and practitioners to a two-day seminar to discuss these questions and the deep connection between caring for the environment and caring for community. Pathways to Peace: Defining Community in the Age of Globalization was the second seminar in a three-year initiative to combine scholarship, public policy, and local practice to articulate and support global conflict transformation and reconciliation in communities throughout the world. Examining the effect of environmental peacebuilding on communities, the discussion explored how governments, NGOs, the private sector, and other interested parties can generate positive outcomes while minimizing negative ones.
Participants from Canada, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Israel, Kenya, Nepal, Switzerland, the Philippines, and the United States brought to the table a wide range of experience and expertise from diverse fields, including peacebuilding, community building, health care, economic development, conflict resolution, and foundation management. By convening leaders in environmental peacebuilding and community building, the Wilson Center and the Fetzer Institute drew on a wide range of experience and perspectives related to environment, conflict, and peacebuilding practice and research. The group used water access and peacebuilding case studies as a means to enter into dialogue about the challenges of global community engagement.
Shared Waters
In preparation for the seminar, geographer and renowned water expert Aaron Wolf of Oregon State University contributed a paper, “The Enlightenment Rift and Peacebuilding: Rationality, Spirituality, and Shared Waters,” in which he laid out the complicated, sometimes conflictual, and often surprisingly collaborative aspects of negotiations over water resources. For Wolf, given water’s life-sustaining quality but limited quantity, it seems intuitive that “water should be the most conflictive of resources.” However, he maintains that “while press reports of international waters often focus on conflict, what has been more encouraging is that, throughout the world, water also induces cooperation, even in particularly hostile basins, and even as disputes rage over other issues…there is a long, and in many ways deeper, history of water-related cooperation.”
On this foundation, Wolf illustrates four stages of water conflict: from adversarial, to reflective, to integrative, to action. Lessons from the “spiritual understanding of water conflict transformation” he says, “offer not only new understanding of current disputes, but also models, tools, and strategies for more effective water conflict management and transformation.”
Seminar participants used Wolf’s paper as a starting point from which to write short papers based on their own expertise and experience. From Kenya to Nepal to Harlem, participants shared their perspectives on the challenges and promises of environmental issues, community building and organizing, and peacebuilding.
This report, Our Shared Future: Environmental Pathways to Peace, draws from the rich dialogue of the seminar and seminar papers to share the broad range of experience and the insight of the participants. To learn more about these remarkable programs and the people working on natural resources, peacebuilding, and community development, see the complete list of papers on page 120, which can be downloaded from the Wilson Center. -
Reading Radar
The Impact of Environmental Change and Geography on Conflict
MORE“Environmental Change, Strategic Foresight, and Impacts on Military Power,” published in Parameters by Chad M. Briggs, the Minerva Chair of Energy and Environmental Security at the Air University, USAF, tackles the changing definition of “environmental security” and how the concept can help planners better prepare for the effects of climate change and an elevated focus on energy security. New potentially destabilizing issues like glacial melt, sea-level rise, and Arctic ice melt are on the horizon, writes Briggs. China and others are already planning for these events, and it’s important that the United States does the same, starting with a greater appreciation for the impact of environmental security on vulnerability and risk. “Due to past practices and bureaucratic stovepipes, implementation is limited more by initiative and imagination than actual resources,” he writes.Clionadh Raleigh of Trinity College Dublin and the International Peace Research Institute finds in “Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Does Physical Geography Affect a State’s Conflict Risk?” that a region’s geography does not have a uniform effect on its likelihood of experiencing conflict. Raleigh’s conclusions, published in International Interactions, run counter to traditional histories which often emphasize the importance of physical geography, specifically with regard to civil war and insurgencies. Focusing on the Great Lakes region of Africa, Raleigh finds that other factors – like how populated an area is and its proximity to valuable natural resources – correlate higher with an area’s propensity for violence than any other factor. -
Walker’s World: From Warming to Warring: A Review of Cleo Paskal’s New Book
January 15, 2010 // By Wilson Center StaffWilson Center Senior Scholar Martin Walker recently reviewed Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map by Cleo Paskal, for his UPI column, “Walker’s World.”MORE
Excerpts:The Copenhagen summit showed that climate change is as much about geopolitics and power as it is about the weather. China‘s blunt refusal to accept any binding limits on its carbon emissions, despite the agonized pleas of small island governments facing extinction, demonstrated that this new aspect of the game of nations is going to be played as hardball.
And yet, as Cleo Paskal argues in her pioneering new book “Global Warring,” China is also powering ahead on every aspect of climate change. While protecting its right to pollute (because it depends heavily on coal as its main homegrown energy source), China is using state subsidies to seize the lead in solar power manufacturing….But perhaps Paskal’s most striking story is the way that China is also seeking to become a major player in the arctic. China has acquired an icebreaker, a seat with observer status on the Arctic Council and its own arctic research base at Svalbard. (China also has two research bases in the Antarctic.) …
Paskal’s book is full of such vignettes, illustrating the way that climate change and the intensifying competition for resources is starting to change the nature of power politics. Paskal, a Canadian who is a fellow of London’s prestigious Chatham House think tank and a consultant for the U.S. Department of Energy, has been a pioneering scholar of the new terrain where climate change confronts national security, where geopolitics, geoeconomics and global warming all collide. It is not just rivalry for oil and gas supplies and water, but also for fishing rights and undersea mining and mineral rights that may well be up for grabs when some of the lowest-lying Pacific island countries disappear under the rising waves. …
“We need to start thinking about the legal and economic implications of these developments now, before we have to start tackling them in the middle of a crisis or a humanitarian emergency,” Paskal told a seminar at Washington’s Woodrow Wilson Center Friday. …
Paskal sees China and Russia taking these issues more seriously that the United States and Europe, and her book is not just a wakeup call for Western leaders but is also an arresting and original work on climate change, probably the most important book on the environment to be published this year.
“As pressure is put on food, water supplies and national boundaries, famine and war may become more frequent,” Paskal concludes. “This instability may make populations more tolerant of autocratic governments, especially nationalistic capitalist ones where the political, economic and military sectors combine to protect existing resources and aggressively try to secure new ones. China and Russia already have a head start on this model.” -
VIDEO—Alexander Carius, Adelphi Research: Finding Empirical Evidence for Environmental Peacebuilding
December 18, 2009 // By Dan Asin“One of the shortcomings of the entire debate on natural resources, climate security, and conflict is the question of empirical evidence,” Adelphi Research co-director Alexander Carius told ECSP’s Geoff Dabelko in a video interview.MORE
The German government, UNEP, and others are investigating transboundary natural resource cooperation initiatives, also known as “environmental peacebuilding” programs. But before fully committing to the idea, they want more information. “Empirical evidence cannot be created just by outlining the usual cases that we know where it has worked,” said Carius, who indexed successful environmental peacebuilding programs in ECSP Report 12.
In some cases, empirical evidence is already available—it’s just unapparent. Conflict analytical frameworks and environmental peacebuilding protocols exist, but they “reside in different programs,” said Carius, rendering the information inaccessible. Packaging this already available information into coherent messages and delivering it to relevant agencies is “the next step,” he said.
In addition, efforts to collect new data are already underway. UN post-conflict analysis teams are combining their academic expertise with on-the-ground experiences to find not only empirical evidence, but also “usable, practical tools” that can be used by agencies at home, said Carius.
Carius sees a bright future for environmental peacemaking: “The largest potential is with the bilateral donor agencies, because they do much more practical projects on the ground,” he said. New and reformulated evidence, Carius hopes, will give environmental peacebuilding the traction it needs to take hold in bilateral aid agencies like USAID. -
Nobel Pursuits: Linking Climate Efforts With Development, Natural Resources, and Stability
December 11, 2009 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoMOREThe only mention of climate change in President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech falls squarely in the climate and security context. He introduces the climate imperative by highlighting natural resources and development connections to stability and human well-being.
In these two paragraphs, the President identifies the key communities that must come together, first in dialogue and then in cooperation, but who so commonly don’t: development, natural resources, health, climate, peacebuilding, and security.It is undoubtedly true that development rarely takes root without security; it is also true that security does not exist where human beings do not have access to enough food, or clean water, or the medicine and shelter they need to survive. It does not exist where children can’t aspire to a decent education or a job that supports a family. The absence of hope can rot a society from within.
Photo: President Barack Obama looks at the Nobel Peace Prize medal at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway, Dec. 10, 2009 (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza).
And that’s why helping farmers feed their own people — or nations educate their children and care for the sick — is not mere charity. It’s also why the world must come together to confront climate change. There is little scientific dispute that if we do nothing, we will face more drought, more famine, more mass displacement — all of which will fuel more conflict for decades. For this reason, it is not merely scientists and environmental activists who call for swift and forceful action — it’s military leaders in my own country and others who understand our common security hangs in the balance.
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