E3G

Environment and Security: A Forward Agenda

By Nick Mabey

Tackling these threats requires a very different type of security apparatus typified by three core approaches:

Preventive: greater emphasis on effective governance, prevention of conflict, and stabilisation of countries after conflict and crisis have emerged.

Integrated: the need for “whole government approaches” which combine military, diplomatic, developmental and justice system capabilities.

Convergent: ensuring the complementarities between different policy objectives and instruments are assessed when in setting priorities; for example, the economic, developmental and security benefits of tackling illegal logging.

These principles are also familiar as forming the core of “sustainable development” policy approaches, and in many ways security policy is becoming more like other areas of international policy. At the core of the challenge is how to motivate consistent investment of financial and political capital into long term prevention of conflict and reduction of instability.

Driving Security System Reform

This is a major task of strategic and public sector reform, and will take years to complete.

There is also a chance that the emergence of more traditional military threats could reverse this progress. Assuming this reversal does not happen, these trends will make it easier to incorporate environmental and resource issues into security policy, but only as one driver of future risks. Security strategies also need to better integrate other rising structural risks of instability driven by HIV/AIDs, religious fundamentalism, economic dislocation from trade shifts, rapid urbanisation and drug trafficking and use.

Understanding how these different issues interlink and re-enforce vulnerability to crisis and conflict is at the core of defining effective responses. For example, how will commodity dependence, trade liberalisation, organised crime, youth unemployment and climate change evolve to impact the stability of the Caribbean? How will this affect organised crime and the drug trade, and what can be done to lower the risk of crisis?