Understanding global security - Peter Hough

ENVIRONMENTAL THREATS TO SECURITY
Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs)
Rio was also the catalyst for significant global political action in the area of human
health-threatening atmospheric pollution. UNEP’s Governing Council in 1997
endorsed the opinion of the UNCED-born Intergovernmental Forum on Chemical
Safety that an international, binding treaty be set up to phase out the production and
use of 12 POPs including eight organochlorine pesticides and polychlorinated
biphenyl (PCB) (Decision No: 19/13c). The Treaty was signed by 127 governments
at a Diplomatic Conference in Stockholm in May 2001, initiating a regime that will
continue to consider adding new chemicals to the original 12 through a Review
Committee. Born of UNCED, forged by UNEP and long promoted by environmental
pressure groups, the POPs regime, on the face of it, appears to represent a triumph
of environmentalism. There is little doubt, however, that the primary motivation of
the signatories was the alleviation of the suffering of their own nationals by these
chemicals rather than concerns for the fates of birds, fish or atmospheric quality.
‘This new treaty will protect present and future generations from the cancers, birth
defects, and other tragedies caused by POPs’ (Buccini 2000).
The production and use of the 12 outlawed chemicals has long ceased in most
developed countries but their properties ensure that they remain a domestic hazard
to their populations. The listed chemicals are all highly persistent, have a propensity
to travel globally in the atmosphere through a continual process of evaporation
and deposition and tend to bioaccumulate in human foodstuffs. Hence, sterility,
neural disorders and cancer in peoples of the developed world can be attributed to
the use of organochlorines in other parts of the planet. The political significance of
this is such that even President George W. Bush, hot on the heels of his government’s
revocation of the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, declared the USA to be a firm
supporter of international ‘environmental’ cooperation on POPs.
An appreciation of the carbon sink effect from the 1980s gave the problem of the
overexploitation of trees throughout the world a clearer human security dimension
and prompted efforts, principally by northern states, to set up a convention on
deforestation at the Rio Summit. This failed and left in its place a weak agreement
known as the Forest Principles which proclaims the virtues of sustainable forestry
management but, in effect, gives the green light to states to chop down trees at will
by asserting that forests are sovereign resources. Effectively regulating deforestation
is too much of an economic burden for most prolific ‘logging’ states to countenance
and is not seen as sufficiently threatening to human security to prompt other states
to exercise greater leverage on them.
Deforestation
Perhaps the clearest manifestation of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ effect in the world
over recent years has been the process of desertification, whereby deserts have
Desertification
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