Environmental Security Concerns: Sources

We are witnessing a new phenomenon in the global arena: the environmental dimension to security issues. It reflects those environmental factors—water, soil, vegetation, climate, and whatever others are prime components of a nation's environmental foundation—that ultimately underpin all our economies and hence our societies and our political stability. When these environmental resources are degraded, our security declines too. In fact, any adverse environmental factor can serve as a source of economic disruption, social tension and political antagonism. While it may not always trigger outright confrontation, it helps to destabilize societies in an already unstable world—a world in which we can expect the destabilizing process to become more common as growing numbers of people seek to sustain themselves from declining environments. This thesis is illustrated with particular reference to three issues: water supplies (and scope for water wars), energy demand/supply, and a host of other environmental problems with widespread impact such as desertification, global warming and population/ poverty pressures. Plainly we need to move on from national security to collective security.