Edited by Ashley J. Tellis and Michael Wills Special Studies Environmental (In)security in Asia: Challenging U.S. Interests Lorraine Elliott please note: For permission to reprint this chapter, please contact <publications@nbr.org>. To purchase the print volume Strategic Asia 2007 08: Domestic Political Change and Grand Strategy in which this chapter appears please visit <http://www.nbr.org> or contact <orders@nbr.org>. 1215 Fourth Avenue, Suite 1600 Seattle, Washington 98161 USA 206-632-7370
executive summary This chapter examines the implications of environmental degradation and resource decline in Asia for U.S. security interests and policy in the region. main argument: Asia suffers widespread environmental degradation and resource decline that undermine economic and human security and can impact more traditional security concerns. Conflict between states is unlikely to result, but environmental degradation could be a factor in social stress, communal violence, and political disaffection and instability. Responses in the region to environmental insecurities have been uneven, marked by material and political difficulties and by policy failure. policy implications: U.S. strategic policy (which in the sense explored here includes aid and environmental policies) would benefit from accounting more fully and effectively for negative environmental trends in Asia that can undermine U.S. policy goals of promoting regional stability, fostering democracy, and encouraging human prosperity. The most effective U.S. policy responses to environmental security challenges in Asia would focus on the causes of environmental degradation. In foreign aid policy, this will involve project and program support for environmental mitigation, environmental protection, and environmental resilience activities across a range of policy concerns, not simply energy and climate change. Support for environmental policies can deliver political and security benefits to the U.S., possibly offsetting other tensions in bilateral and regional relationships. The U.S. will, however, need to be seen by the region as a collaborative partner rather than pursuing its own policy interests. U.S. environmental security leadership in the region will be strengthened as Washington takes further action to reduce the U.S. contribution to environmental degradation that has global reach.
Environmental Security Environmental (In)security in Asia: Challenging U.S. Interests Lorraine Elliott In its 2004 report entitled A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, the United Nations Secretary-General s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change proclaimed that the biggest security threats extend to environmental degradation. 1 Following similarly authoritative predecessors including the UN Security Council, NATO, and the Millennium Summit of the UN General Assembly the High- Level Panel expressed concern regarding the impact of environmental degradation on global peace and security. Just before the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell proclaimed that sustainable development [is] a security imperative. He argued that poverty, destruction of the environment, degradation and despair are destroyers of people, of societies, of nations, a cause of instability that can destabilize countries, and even destabilize entire regions. 2 In April 2007 the UN Security Council held its first ever debate on the security consequences of global warming. Taking these concerns as its cue, this chapter examines the security implications of environmental degradation and resource decline for countries in Asia, for the region as a whole, and for the United States as Lorraine Elliott is Senior Fellow in the Department of International Relations at the Australian National University. She can be reached at <lorraine.elliott@anu.edu.au>. 1 United Nations Secretary-General s High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility (New York: United Nations Department of Public Information, 2004), 1. 2 Colin L. Powell, Making Sustainable Development Work: Governance, Finance and Public- Private Cooperation (remarks at State Department conference, Meridian International Center, Washington, D.C., July 12, 2002), http://www.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/ remarks/2002/11822.htm.
372 Strategic Asia 2007 08 a key strategic and political actor in the region. This chapter argues that environmental security should not be conceptualized solely through the lens of realist orthodoxies that focus on instability and conflict but should also incorporate human and environmental insecurities. Nor should the term be defined only by concerns about climate change and energy that have become prominent in U.S. security policy discourses. 3 The chapter also assesses the potential for cooperation and conflict over environmental degradation and resource scarcities. It suggests that conflict is a more complicated issue than some analyses predict and argues that cooperation presents a more strategic response to key environmental security challenges in the region. This chapter is divided into five sections. The first section reviews the intellectual and policy context animating environmental security as a form of non-traditional security. It takes as its starting point continuing debate over the answers both to the security problematic security for whom and from what and to the related question about what it means to be secure in a globalized world. To assess likely policy implications, section one identifies nine propositions examining the connection between environmental degradation and security. The second section outlines the most salient environmental challenges facing the Asia-Pacific region. The third section suggests how environmental degradation and environmental change may create actual security challenges for the region. The fourth section outlines regional responses to environmental (in)security, offering explanations both for the weak securitization of the Asia-Pacific s environmental challenges and for the limited institutionalization of environmental policy responses. The final section considers possible implications for three categories of U.S. policy: strategic, foreign aid, and environmental. Environmental Security: New Concept for Old Problems? Environmental security is a comparatively new term in the environmental and security lexicon, though the challenges it responds to are not. 4 The term s conceptual genesis is a result both of the rethinking of security following the end of the Cold War and of concerns stemming from globalization and modernity, sometimes encapsulated in the concept of a 3 Most notably in the 2006 National Security Strategy and the 2007 report prepared by a panel of senior retired U.S. generals and admirals for the Center for Naval Analysis. See National Security and the Threat of Climate Change, CNA Corporation, April 2007. 4 The literature on environmental security is extensive. The following provide useful explorations of the various interpretations and contestations surrounding the term and its policy implications: Simon Dalby, Environmental Security (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Jon Barnett, The Meaning of Environmental Security (London: Zed Books, 2001); and Lorraine Elliott, The Global Politics of the Environment (New York: New York University Press, 2004), chap. 9.
Elliott Environmental Security 373 world risk society. 5 Traditional concerns focused on the security of states from external military threat in responding to the questions security for whom (the referent ) and from what ; in a world risk society these concerns seemed limited in scope or even counter-productive in their purpose. Environmental security fits within two sometimes competing approaches to a non-traditional response to these security questions. The first approach is confined to a concern with non-traditional threats to traditional referent objects (i.e., states). Commentators have posited environmental degradation as a factor in the more traditional indicators of insecurity violent conflict and the outbreak of war. 6 In one of the most pessimistic but widely-read expositions of this position, Robert Kaplan argued that: [environmental degradation will be] the national-security issue of the early twenty-first century. The political and strategic impact of surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water depletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical, overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh developments that will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts will be the core foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate. 7 The second broad approach to environmental security anticipates not just non-traditional threats but also non-traditional security referents. Environmental degradation is understood as part of a suite of challenges to the security of people, communities, ecosystems, and possibly even nonhuman species. The Commission on Global Governance reported that threats to the earth s life support systems [along with] extreme economic deprivation, the proliferation of conventional small arms, the terrorising of civilian populations by domestic factions and gross violations of human rights challenge the security of people far more than the threat of external aggression. 8 This is a human security approach, articulated initially by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) as a universal, people-centered concern with human life and dignity and an antidote to conventional views of security that had for too long been shaped by the potential for conflict between states equated with threats to a country s borders. 9 5 Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). 6 Paul F. Diehl, Environmental Conflict: An Introduction, Journal of Peace Research 35, no. 3 (May 1998): 275. 7 Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy, The Atlantic Monthly 273, no. 2 (February 1994): 58. 8 Commission on Global Governance, Our Global Neighbourhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 79. 9 UN Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 1994 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 22, 3.