Routledge Handbook of Environmental Security

Richard A. Matthew, Evgenia Nizkorodov, Crystal Murphy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781351607537
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Handbook on Environmental Security provides a comprehensive, accessible, and sophisticated overview of the field of environmental security.

The volume outlines the defining theories, major policy and programming interventions, and applied research surrounding the relationship between the natural environment and human and national security. Through the use of large-scale research and ground-level case analyses from across the globe, it details how environmental factors affect human security and contribute to the onset and continuation of violent conflict. It also examines the effects of violent conflict on the social and natural environment and the importance of environmental factors in conflict resolution and peacebuilding.

Organized around the conflict cycle, the handbook is split into four thematic sections:

• Section I: Environmental factors contributing to conflict;

• Section II: The environment during conflict;

• Section III: The role of the environment in post-conflict peacebuilding; and

• Section IV: Cross-cutting themes and critical perspectives.

This handbook will be essential reading for students of environmental studies, human security, global governance, development studies, and international relations in general.

1

Introduction

Richard Matthew and Evgenia Nizkorodov

DOI: 10.4324/9781315107592-1

The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Security is the first unified work to examine the linkage between environmental and human systems across all three stages of the conflict life cycle: pre-conflict, violent conflict, and post-conflict. The handbook brings together a diverse set of leading experts from academic and practitioner communities to provide a comprehensive overview of the risks posed by environmental shocks and stresses and the prospects for environmental peacebuilding. This book thus serves as a reference for both practitioners and scholars, presenting leading theories and causal mechanisms, policy recommendations, and critical avenues of further research.

Background

The end of the Cold War (1989–1992) and, in the assessments of many experts, the end of grand ideological rivalry, encouraged a broad rethinking of threat, vulnerability, and national security. At the same time, Our Common Future (WCED, 1987) and the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, undergirded by decades of interdisciplinary research worldwide, presented compelling scientific evidence of global environmental change so severe that it threatens the future of humankind (and many other species) and requires an extensive and urgent global response, captured in the concept of sustainable development. These two powerful discourses converged into an innovative and influential conversation among academics, activists, policymakers, and other interested stakeholders about the relationships between changes to the natural environment and human and national security imperatives. Complicated questions quickly emerged: How does and might environmental change affect the prospects for war and peace? Should the emphasis of security thinking and practice shift toward the human scale, or at least include it? Was the integrity of the living planet itself a security concern?

While thinkers from Plato and Thucydides to Thomas Malthus and Halford Mackinder have explored security from an environmental perspective, stressing both variables of geography and resource access, Homer-Dixon (1991, 1994, 1999) was among the first to examine the direct link between environment and violent conflict in the post–Cold War context of rethinking security (see also Dabelko & Matthew, 2000; Diamond, 1994; Deudney & Matthew, 1999; Matthew, Gaulin, & McDonald, 2003). While his arguments were influential in policy circles, especially in the United States during the Clinton-Gore era, and popularized by writers such as Robert Kaplan (1994), they were downplayed or dismissed by many skeptics and critics (e.g., Lomborg, 2001). A decade later, however, the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007, also Cruz et al., 2007, arguments reinforced in IPCC, 2018) generated considerable interest in possible linkages between climate impacts and violent conflict, interest that often generated strong, but unevenly supported, predictions about where the world was headed (e.g., CNA, 2007; German Advisory Council, 2008; Gleick, 2012; McElroy & Baker, 2012; Sachs, 2005; Smith & Vivekananda, 2007; Stern, 2007; UNGA, 2009) Also, around this time, a second wave of more explicit evidence-based research began to take shape, modifying but also adding considerable weight to early conceptual claims (e.g., Floyd & Matthew, 2013; Kahl, 2006; Le Billon, 2015; Pearce, 2007; Welzer, 2012), although important and insightful critiques continued (e.g., Benjaminsen, Alinon, Buhaug, & Buseth, 2012; Slettebak, 2012).

Research interest also began to move in exciting new directions. For example, in response to the UNDP report (1994) focused on the concept of “human security,” itself a controversial topic (e.g., Banuri, 1996; Paris, 2001; Suhrke, 1999; Tehranian, 1999), work began to emerge on how human security was being affected by environmental and climate change (e.g., Collier, 2007; Lonergan, 1999; Matthew, Barnett, McDonald, & O’Brien, 2009). This is an important area of inquiry and practice and a relationship that appears frequently in the following pages. Other research examined linkages between human migration, conflict, and conservation (e.g., Oglethorpe, Ericson, Bilsborrow, & Edmond, 2007).

Insofar as the conflict cycle is concerned, research on the environment during war and the environment post-war also expanded dramatically. Studying what happens to the natural environment during violent conflict is a challenging undertaking. Much has been learned from intrepid scholars venturing into high-risk geographies and also from the pioneering work of UNEP’s Post-Conflict and Disaster Branch, which was established to evaluate the environmental impacts of conflict and which has produced numerous detailed assessment reports in over 20 countries. This field-based research demonstrates the high costs of some coping strategies during war, as people are forced to abandon farms and other livelihoods and turn to forest resources in order to survive while hiding. It also demonstrates that insofar as war slows economic activity, some forms of natural capital may actually benefit during periods of violent conflict. And it shows how natural resources have been used to fund war and how the state of war has facilitated the unregulated exploitation of natural resources for personal and corporate profit, creating incentives to continue the conflict. Analysis by Oli Brown (2013) concludes, for example, that 18 conflicts have been directly funded by natural resources since 1990.

Finally, and partly in response to the post–Cold War concept of “peacebuilding” introduced by the United Nations, considerable research has focused on the role of the environment and natural resources in peacebuilding processes (e.g., Conca & Dabelko, 2002; Matthew, Halle, & Switzer, 2002; UNEP, 2009.) The importance of environmental factors in conflict resolution and peacebuilding has led to a number of criticisms of peacebuilding programs and many recommendations for how these can be improved. Peacebuilding has been described by the United Nations as “a range of measures targeted to reduce the risk of lapsing or relapsing into conflict by strengthening national capacities at all levels for conflict management, and to lay the foundations for sustainable peace and development.” These measures tend to fall into a handful of programming areas across the life cycle: basic services; restoring security; resettling people and facilitating a return to work; building governance capacity; and cooperation and confidence building such as creating opportunities for justice, truth, and reconciliation projects.

Unfortunately, since the end of the Cold War, peacebuilding activities have often resettled people, kick-started economies, and attracted investors in ways that are environmentally unsustainable. A decade after the initial investments, people in countries such as Rwanda and Sierra Leone have found the gains they experienced through the peacebuilding process partially offset because they have become more vulnerable to flooding (because they have been settled in floodplains), or soil erosion (because they are working steep hillsides), or respiratory ailments (because mining concessions have been granted quickly and without adequate assessments of their social and environmental impacts), and so on. Integrating environmental issues into peacebuilding and investing in climate resilience have, in the past decade, become widely accepted as essential.

Indeed, since about 2007, UNEP has led, with some success, an effort to address this deficiency in peacebuilding. Typically, its recommendations focus around building the capacity in a post-conflict country to assess environmental conditions and trajectories; manage natural resources sustainably; settle returnees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) with a better understanding of the potential ecological impacts of different decisions; handle land disputes that are often complicated by disagreements about the actual situation before the war, about the character and legitimacy of changes in ownership negotiated during the conflict, and low levels of trust in adjudicating systems; identify sustainable investment opportunities; and develop and implement a plan for adapting to climate change and building resilience to climate impacts.

Of course, there can be no final word when it comes to a complex evolving issue like the conflict cycle. Many factors can contribute to war and peace, and in a world characterized by multiple forms of inequality, widespread poverty, inflammatory social media, technologies that can confer tremendous destructive capacity into the hands of very small groups, frequent economic crises, and mounting pressure on some communities to move, it is impossible to predict the constellations of variables that will prove most volatile. Nonetheless, we believe a strong case can be made that the significance of the environment in violent conflict, human security, and peacebuilding will likely increase in the future. Research on planetary boundaries and tipping points suggests that humans have irreversibly altered fundamental ecosystem functions and biogeochemical cycles at an unprecedented rate and scale (Hoffmann, Irl, & Beierkuhnlein, 2019; Steffen et al., 2015; UNEP, 2019). Human-induced warming has reached a global average of 1°C above pre-industrial levels (IPCC, 2018) and is likely to reach 1.5°C of global warming by 2030. The IPCC warns that exceeding 1.5°C may result in detrimental and irreversible changes to ecological and human systems such as shifts in disease vectors, increased frequency and magnitude of natural disasters, decreased water supply and quality, sea level rise, and a drastic loss of biodiversity. These ecological impacts, coupled with a growing population, will ultimately increase competition for resources, displace millions of people from their home countries, and increase the likelihood of violent conflict (Black et al., 2011; Dalby, 2020; Duffy, 2016; Ionesco, Mokhnacheva, & Gemenne, 2017; Institute for Economics & Peace, 2020; Rigaud et al., 2018; Spijkers et al., 2019; Yilmaz, Zogib, Urivelarrea, & Demirbaş, 2019). Without robust mitigation and adaptation, low-income regions already have been and will continue to be disproportionately affected by these ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Contributing authors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Defining environmental peacebuilding
• Section I Environmental factors contributing to conflict
• Section II The environment during conflict
• Section III The role of the environment in post-conflict peacebuilding
• Section IV Cross-cutting themes and critical perspectives
• Index