Although environment as an issue of security has become under concern for over 30 years, there is only few countries have an official definition of environmental security that unifies thought and action. Among the countries that do have definitions are: The Russian Federation and the Commonwealth of Independent States; the United States which has several working definitions and a DoD Directive which includes a programmatic definition; Embassy Representatives from Argentina and India indicated that their countries did have an official definition, Respondents in China, Australia, and Hungary said their governments were currently creating a definition. China considers environmental security under the umbrella of "environmental protection." Many other countries as well as international organizations still have doubt about the notion between environment and security. Besides, the relevant international organizations have not created a definition to guide policy. For example the United Nations Environment Program and the World Heath Organization do not have definitions for environmental security, and the United Nations Development Program only refers to it briefly in its 1994 annual report on human development. Only NATO continues to list environmental security as among its most important priorities.
In fact, environment and security concerns differ among countries. The developed countries are more likely to be concerned about environment and security in terms of global environment changes and the potential for instability and conflict in strategically important regions of the world. Developing countries on the other hand, with their domestic social and economic challenges, tend to be concerned with the issues of local and regional environmental problems, more from viewpoint of livelihoods. For instance, the United States has moved officially to redefine national security to encompass environmental threats after the end of the Cold war. Discussion of the links between environment and security has then extended far beyond an academic debate. The Bush administration was the first to acknowledge environmental security as part of overall U.S (national) security, the Clinton administration has integrated even further in this theme. The article ‘failed states’ written in ‘The Atlantic’ by journalist Robert Kaplan was read and discussed among Clinton administration officials.. The article popularized the idea that “chaos” will emerge as the main threat to global security in future decades. Kaplan declared that population growth and resources depletion would prompt mass migrations and incite group conflicts in Egypt and on the Indian subcontinent. Clinton referred to Kaplan’s article in describing a stark vision of a future world of overpopulated countries, depleted resources, and extreme divisions of wealth and poverty and called for a strategy of ‘sustainable development’ as a comprehensive approach to the world’s future. Also, in the 1994 national security document, the Clinton administration explicitly adopted the concept of environmental security which asserts that increasing competition for dwindling renewable resources ‘is already a very real risk to regional stability around the world.’ It calls for partnerships between governments and nongovernmental organizations as well as between nations and between regions, and for a ‘strategically focused, long term policy for emerging environmental risks.’ (Porter G, 1995) The view of the U.S. government is quite clear.
Resources are not equally distributed, and they are scarce, the relationship between scarce natural resources and international conflict is controversial. Conflict over the shared waters of international rivers has long been of interest to national security planners. (See Appendix 2) The Jordan River basin has often been presented as one of the key examples of where environment and security issues overlap. Jordan River is shared by Jordan, Israel, Syria and Lebanon. Central to the tensions that exist between Israel and the Palestinians is the availability of adequate fresh water supplies. The situation has become so extreme that King Hussein of Jordan singled out water as the only issue that would lead him to go to war with Israel. Water has long been considered a security issue in the region, and on numerous occasions, Israel and its neighbouring Arab states have feuded over access to Jordan River waters. In recent times, there was a proposed comprehensive plan for cooperative use of the Jordan River (the Johnston Plan) as early as the 1950s, but this was derailed by the disunity water policy among the four riparian states. Then at the time of the 1967 war, Israel was consuming almost 100 percent of its available fresh water supplies. After the war this situation changed in two ways: 1) it increased the fresh water available to Israel by almost 50%, 2) it gave the country almost total control over the headwaters of the Jordan River and its tributaries, as well as control over the major recharge region for its underground aquifers. The historical factors gave the riparian countries a false impression that war is the only way to escape from the crisis of water scarcity. Another example of environmental issue leading to international conflict is maritime fisheries. International conflicts over fishing grounds have been frequent in recent decades. Thirty such conflicts were reported last year alone, including several in which force was used. Without any international agreement on managing fish stocks that straddle between coastal zone, more than half the world’s major maritime fisheries already in serious decline from overfishing and the rest exploited up to or beyond their natural limits, the potential for political and even military confrontation is growing. Environment threats in these two cases have intersection with the international security, and it go far more than traditional competition for control over natural resources.
Nevertheless, war is not the final answer. As the population of the riverside states increase, fresh water supply from Jordan River will become more anxious. Sustainable water-use plans for both states must be well formulated as part of water-sharing agreements, including provisions for greater efficiency in water use by eliminating water subsides, choosing less water intensive crops, reducing water losses in irrigation, minimizing water pollution, and in long terms, population growth as well as migration should be control in a sufferable level. Hence, the primary reason for the decline in maritime fisheries is too many fishing boats with too many fishing technology. To protect the world’s fish stocks from further depletion, the international community will have to establish strict limits on entry into fishing industry; establish binding standards on capitalization of fishing fleets, excessive fleet size, and inappropriate fishing gear; and set a numerical limit on the total catch and the percentage of the total catch per entrant. To enforce such a tough international treaty is to protect a state’s interest in continued access to the resources. No military force is utilized in the above approaches, but they are practicable. This is what environment security approach offer and it made a clear alternative to traditional conflicts over renewable natural resources. It suggests that the key problem is to conserve the resources in order to maintain adequate supplies well into the future, rather than trying to control more of a resource that is being depleted. In most cases, global agreement is necessary for the resources conservation. A good example in facing environment threats without using armed forces is the worldwide cooperation in the global warming problems. The Kyoto Protocol was signed by many worlds’ nation in 1997 within the Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is a success that merely in five years time the thinning of the stratospheric ozone layer began to slacken, and the greenhouse gases reduce. Kyoto is a good case study to persuade other states that international cohesion is effective. Thus, Kyoto provided the evidence that environmental threats could be disentangle by international agreement instead of militarily ways.
In national level, Bächler and Spillmann (1996) stressed that social, political, and economic factors played key causal roles and the environment is usually not a sufficient cause for conflict. This indicates that environment degradation is usually just an indirect cause on violent domestic conflict. Nonetheless it is impossible to ascertain what would happen if the sustainable development been provided early enough. The relationship between environment and violence is interacting in many cases. Environmental and ethnic discrimination come together in ethno-political conflicts either when ethnic groups share a degraded and less productive ecological zone or when a less environmentally advantaged ethnic group moves into the ecological zone of a more environmentally advantaged ethnic group. Centre-periphery conflicts stem from different levels of access and control of environmental services between powerful centre populations and the marginalised periphery. However, those actions undercut the benefit of the marginal groups whom highly dependent on natural resources for survival could trigger a civil war at any time. E.g.The1993 violence erupted in the Narok district of Kenya's Rift Valley province. The local Maasai elites, supported by the central government, reacted harshly, expelling the Kikuyus from a water catchment’s area called Enoosopukia. Of course, it could be seen as an environmental excuse for ethnic cleansing in Narok, yet it could also be seen the violence as a by-product of environmental threats.
Obviously, there is a strong link between environment, conflict and security. And to a large extent, environment is a compact issue of and national/ international security. Even so, there are still many questions and dissents comprise in this topic. How to define ‘environmental security’? Should environmental threats under the umbrella of national/international security or should it be a subject on its own? Is the indirect cause like population pressure crucial to resulting violence? Along with the policy-making processes, the major area of disagreement regarded whether policy leadership should come from national governments or international organizations. The concept of environmental security has been opposed by some academics, national security specialists, and conservation congressional leaders too. They argued that the terms environmental security:
- muddies the concept of security/ drain the terms of its meaning;
- result in the militarization of environmental issue;
- was mainly a means of leveraging changes in budgetary allocations;
- environmental issues are not the primary causes of the conflicts.
R.B.J. Walker (1989) concludes that the concept of security is now more a symptom of the problem than a guide to the possibilities of peace and justice. The attitude towards environmental security maybe completely different if the concept of security is vice versa. To find out the best position for environmental security there is surely a need for further study on this topic.
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Appendix 1:
Provides a framework to help organize the "big picture" thinking about environmental security:
Source: The United Nations University
Appendix 2:
Table 2
Countries with per-capita water availability below 1700 cubic meter per year (1995).
This is a case study in the Inventory of Conflict and Environment (ICE). ICE is one of the Mandala Projects which intends to provide a common basis and method to looking at issues of conflict and environment.
