Understanding global security - Peter Hough

ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS TO SECURITY
endangered by the fact that states continued to exploit or pollute them oblivious to
the fact that the cumulative effect of this would eventually be their ruin or depletion
(Hardin 1968).
The Tragedy of the Commons concept became influential in the early 1970s
with concerns that the economic security of the developed world could be imperilled
by the earth as a whole exceeding its ‘carrying capacity’. One manifestation of this
was the rise of international political action on population control (see Chapter 4),
another was the popularization of the ‘limits to growth’ thesis which argued that
increases in industrial production and economic growth in developed countries would
have to be checked. Two very different solutions to the Tragedy of the Commons
parable can be found. First, you could have informed collective management to
regulate use of the village green for the benefit of all. Second, you could abandon
the idea of common land and divide the green up into individual holdings in the
expectation that each plotholder would graze sustainably, as it would be in their
own interests to do so since the costs could not be externalized as before. At the
global level both types of solutions are evident in the development in the 1970s of
international law for a ‘commons’ already subject to many centuries of contention, the
high seas. The ‘Common Heritage of Mankind’ principle agreed to at Stockholm
was crystallized ten years later as part of the Third UN Conference on the Law of
the Sea (UNCLOS III) with the agreement that deep seabed minerals would be the
property of the International Seabed Authority. This form of collective management
to sustain collective goods can be contrasted with the encroachment on the tradition
of the ‘freedom of the seas’ by the huge growth of waters claimed by states in the
legitimization at UNCLOS III of 200-mile ‘Exclusive Economic Zones’ (EEZs).
Although EEZs, on the one hand, could easily be accounted for by a conventional
Realist analysis of coastal states maximizing their power, the rationale offered for
their creation was that fish stocks and other resources would be utilized more
sustainably if under sovereign jurisdiction rather than subject to a ‘free-for-all’.
The gradual appreciation of three other challenges posed by environmental
change questions to conventional state-to-state relations since the mid-1980s has
elevated this realm of international politics to a higher diplomatic level and securitized
some of the issues.
Localised environmental problems can
become global problems
Although transboundary pollution and the management of the global commons were,
by the 1980s, firmly on the international political agenda, the majority of the harmful
effects of environmental change seemed only to be felt locally and as such were of
little concern to the international community. Domestic legislation in the developed
world had banned the use of notoriously polluting chemicals like DDT and curbed
the excesses of industrial emissions and waste disposal, leading to visible improvements
in animal conservation and better standards of human health. However, the
emergence of evidence that seemingly remote problems, experienced primarily in
LDCs, had wider repercussions served to bring a number of new environmental
issues to global political prominence.
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