By Emmanuel Daudu
Environmental security refers to the protection of communities and individuals from potential environmental threats and risks that may arise from both natural and human-induced causes. These threats can arise due to various factors, including lack of knowledge, accidents, improper management, or intentional actions, and can occur within a specific nation or transcend national borders.
These environmental dangers can take many forms, such as natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, or wildfires. They can also include human-induced hazards like industrial accidents, pollution, deforestation, climate change, or the release of harmful substances into the environment. These environmental risks can have significant negative impacts on public safety, health, and wellbeing.
To address environmental security concerns, governments, international organizations, and communities work to develop policies, regulations, and practices focused on preventing and mitigating environmental risks. This may involve implementing measures to reduce pollution, promoting sustainable land and resource management, developing early warning systems for natural disasters, improving emergency response capabilities, and fostering international cooperation to address transboundary environmental challenges.
By prioritizing environmental security, societies aim to ensure the sustainability and resilience of their communities, minimize potential harm, and protect public health. The understanding and management of environmental risks are crucial for maintaining a safe and secure environment for present and future generations.
Environmental security is the relative public safety from environmental dangers caused by natural or human processes due to ignorance, accident, mismanagement or design and originating within or across national borders.
Environmental security is the state of human–environment dynamics that includes restoration of the environment damaged by military actions, and amelioration of resource scarcities, environmental degradation, and biological threats that could lead to social disorder and conflict.
Environmental security is the proactive minimization of anthropogenic threats to the functional integrity of the biosphere and thus to its interdependent human component.
By ensuring environmental security we mean guarding against environmental degradation in order to preserve or protect human, material, and natural resources at scales ranging from global to local.
The term environmental security refers to a range of concerns that can be organized into three general categories:
1. Concerns about the adverse impact of human activities on the environment.
2. Concerns about the direct and indirect effects of various forms of environmental change (especially scarcity and degradation) which may be natural or human-generated on national and regional security.
3. Concerns about the insecurity individuals and groups (from small communities to humankind) experience due to environmental change such as water scarcity, air pollution, global warming, and so on. Combining these we might conclude that the condition of environmental security is one in which social systems interact with ecological systems in sustainable ways, all individuals have fair and reasonable access to environmental goods, and mechanisms exist to address environmental crises and conflicts.
Environmental security is the maintenance of the physical surroundings of society for its needs without diminishing the natural stock.
Environmental security is protectedness of natural environment and vital interests of citizens, society, the state from internal and external impacts, adverse processes and trends in development that threaten human health, biodiversity and sustainable functioning of ecosystems, and survival of humankind. Environmental security is an integral part of Russia’s national security.
Environmental security is the state of protection of vital interests of the individual, society, natural environment from threats resulting from anthropogenic and natural impacts on the environment
Traditionally, there are two main definitions of security according to the two main points of view:
Environmental security. The major challenge concerns the global environmental change, focusing on the interactions between ecosystems and mankind, the effects of global environmental change on environmental degradation, the effects of increasing social request for resources, ecosystem services, and environmental goods.
Human security. This item addresses different security aspects like social or political security. In this context, values at risk are the survival of human beings and their quality of life.
The relevant objects of environmental security are complex, adaptive systems with two main components – the social, characterized by human intent, and the ecological, rising without intent; these have interacted historically, and society strongly determines the landscape ecological components of such systems.
To introduce environmental security with reference to SESs, it is useful to refer to the definition provided by Arnold Wolfers in 1962, stating “Environmental security, in an objective sense, measures the absence of threats to acquired values, in a subjective sense, the absence of fear that such values will be attacked.”
Basically, it is necessary to consider that
security of SELs must be assessed both objectively and subjectively, because security is meaningless unless there is somebody perceiving it;
security is value laden, and what we consider values is related to our normative systems that nowadays recognize concepts like ecosystem functions and services, ecosystem integrity, and sustainability as fundamental values for the survival and well-being of mankind; and
humans have been historically providing threats to those values from local to global scale, but there are also threats coming from natural hazards and disasters.
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