A new security paradigm: it's easy to equate "national security" or "global security" with military defense against rogue states and terrorism, but a leading U.S. military expert says that view is far too narrow--and could lead to catastrophe if not changed.

• Author: Foster, Gregory D.

Whatever else the year 2004 might be noted for by future historians--the U.S. political wars, the genocide in Darfur, the strategic debacle in Iraq--it may well turn out to have been a seminal year for the field of environmental security--the intellectual, operational, and policy space where environmental conditions and security concerns converge.

So too, one hopes, might it have been the year when U.S. policymakers and the American public began to awaken, however belatedly, to the need for an entirely new approach to security and for the fundamental strategic transformation necessary to achieve such security.

The highlight of the year in this regard was, for two essentially countervailing reasons, the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai. On one hand, by broadening the definitional bounds of peace, the award gave new legitimacy to those who would embrace unconventional conceptions of security, especially involving the environment. "This is the first time environment sets the agenda for the Nobel Peace Prize, and we have added a new dimension to peace," said committee chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes in announcing the award. "Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment."

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On the other hand, no less noteworthy were critics of the award, whose expressions of disparagement typified and reaffirmed the stultifying hold of traditionalist thinking on the conduct of international relations. Espen Barth Eide, former Norwegian deputy foreign minister, observed: "The one thing the Nobel Committee does is define the topic of this epoch in the field of peace and security. If they widen it too much, they risk undermining the core function of the Peace Prize; you end up saying everything that is good is peace." Traditionalists everywhere, including most of the U.S. policy establishment, no doubt took succor from such self-righteous indignation and resolved to perpetuate the received truths of the past that have made real peace so elusive and illusory to date.

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Beyond the Peace Prize, two other events ten months apart served as defining bookends for what could turn out to have been the undeclared Year of Environmental Security. The first was an attention-grabbing article, "The Pentagon's Weather Nightmare," that appeared in the February 9, 2004 issue of Fortune magazine. Describing a report two futurists--Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of Global Business Network--had recently prepared for the Defense Department on the national security implications of abrupt climate change, the article generated a flurry of intense but short-lived excitement and speculation on whether, why, and to what extent the Pentagon was finally taking climate change seriously.

The second bookend event came at the end of the year with the issuance of the final report of the internationally distinguished, 16-member High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change that UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan had appointed in November 2003 to examine the major threats and challenges the world faces in the broad field of peace and security.

These two particular events, potentially significant enough in their own right, should be viewed in the larger context of several other magnifying events that occurred over the course of the year.

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For starters, Sir David King, chief science adviser to British prime minister Tony Blair, raised eyebrows and hackles with a controversial article in the January 9, 2004 issue of Science magazine. King cited climate change as "the most severe problem that we are facing today--more serious even than the threat of terrorism," and accused the U.S. government of "failing to take up the challenge of global warming." In a subsequent speech to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he added: "Climate change is real. Millions will increasingly be exposed to hunger, drought, flooding and debilitating diseases such as malaria. Inaction due to questions over the science [a thinly veiled reference to Bush administration foot-dragging] is no longer defensible."

In March, former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix added further fuel to the fire in a BBC television interview with David Frost: "I think we still overestimate the danger of terror. There are other things that are of equal, if not greater, magnitude, like the environmental global risks." This statement reinforced an equally pointed one Blix had made a year earlier: "To me the question of the environment is more ominous than that of peace and war.... I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict."

In May, the blockbuster 20th Century Fox disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, portraying the cataclysmic global consequences of accelerated climate change, was released to theaters nationwide (with European release scheduled for October). Some, such as Sir David King and former vice president Al Gore, promoted or endorsed the movie, clearly not because of its admittedly unrealistic compression of time and exaggeration of catastrophic effects, but because of its potential for awakening and sensitizing the public to the plausibility and seriousness of abrupt climate change. Others fiercely criticized the movie for trivializing such a vital issue. Anti-doomsayer Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor of The New Republic, assailed the "cheapo, third-rate disaster movie" for its "imbecile-caliber" science: "By presenting global warming in a laughably unrealistic way, the movie will only succeed in making audiences think that climate change is a big joke, when in fact the real science case for greenhouse-gas reform gets stronger all the time."

In a major September address in London, Tony Blair, faced with continuing criticism from his opposition, called climate change "the world's greatest environmental challenge ... a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence." "Apart from a diminishing handful of skeptics," he said, "there is a virtual worldwide scientific consensus on the scope of the problem."

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Then in October, the United Nations Environment Programme's Division of Early Warning and Assessment issued a thought-provoking new report, Understanding Environment, Conflict, and Cooperation, that resulted from the deliberations of participants in a new initiative to leverage environmental activities, policies, and actions for promoting international conflict prevention, peace, and cooperation. The subject matter of the report is not new, but the question it implies is: whether new life can be breathed into what was, throughout most of the 1990s, a lively debate over whether and how the environment and security are related and interact. Since the Kyoto negotiations of 1997, that debate has been largely moribund, to the detriment of both U.S. policy and strategic discourse more generally.

Revivifying Environmental Security

Even if the events recounted above had not occurred this past year, the findings and recommendations of the UN High-Level Threat Panel and the introduction into the public imagination of abrupt climate change as a matter of prospective national security concern would stand as forceful stimuli for policy practitioners, scholars, and the general public to accord environmental security more serious and immediate attention.

This article goes to press before the actual release of the High-Level Panel's final report; but publicly available preliminary work by the United Nations Foundation's United Nations & Global Security Initiative, in cooperation with the Environmental Change & Security Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center, prefigures how the Panel's thinking is likely to be guided on environmental matters. This introductory passage from a discussion summary presented to the Panel is indicative of that thrust:

Environmental changes can threaten global, national, and human security. Environmental issues include land degradation, climate...