Understanding global security - Peter Hough

ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS TO SECURITY
a more rational and fruitful political response than conflict. Again, as with problems
of famine, the democratic peace thesis leaves room for optimism that we are not
entering an era of resource wars. Democracies are forced to confront resource allocation
questions as a matter of course and, increasingly, act on environmental
degradation even if no obvious human side-effect is apparent. In addition, democracies
(and some non-democracies) long ago came to the conclusion that resources
are more easily secured through trade and common management than conflict.
Access to fishing beds on the high seas is an issue of great importance in many states
and international competition to secure rights remains fierce, but the threat of the
global depletion of certain species has prompted unilateral acts such as the Canadian
suspension of cod fishing from the 1990s and the EU’s unpopular but necessary
conservation co-management strategy, the Common Fisheries Policy.
Environmental issues themselves as threats to security
Whereas much of the ‘environmental security’ literature to emerge in the 1990s
focused on adding environmental degradation to the list of conventional concerns
used to discern the potential military threats emanating from other states, a more
profound school of thought arose around the same time arguing for a deepening of
the meaning of security to incorporate issues of environmental change. Ullman, in
pioneering the widening of security concerns in 1983, sought to cast security in a
less statist light by including within its remit the security of individuals imperilled by
resource scarcity rather than just tacking on a new category of threats to the security
of states (Ullman 1983). By the end of the decade it was not only warming East–West
Cold War relations but the apparent actual warming of the earth that brought
environmental threats to security to the fore of international political concern.
In a 1989 article for the conservative and influential journal Foreign Affairs,
Jessica Mathews, a former member of the US government’s National Security
Council, followed Ullman’s line of reasoning in a more state-centred analysis. In
addition to calling for greater consideration of the effects of resource depletion on the
political stability of poorer states, Mathews argued that environmental problems with
global ramifications, such as ozone depletion, climate change and deforestation,
should become issues of state security concern (Mathews 1989).
Environmental threats to human security
Ozone depletion
In 1985 the British Antarctic Survey were able to prove conclusively what had been
suspected by scientists for at least a decade, that the earth’s ozone layer had a hole
in it above the southern polar region. The ozone layer is a protective gaseous shell
in the upper atmosphere which absorbs ultraviolet rays from the sun before they
reach the earth’s surface. This is a vital service for humanity (and other life forms)
since ultraviolet radiation can be life-threatening through causing skin cancer and
other serious ailments.
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