NAME: SHARIQ ALTAF

ROLL NO: MBA-18-13

TOPIC: ENVIRONMENTAL PEACE AND SECURITY

Environmental security: Environmental security is described as a bundle of issues

which involves the role that the environment and natural resources can play in peace and
security, including environmental causes and drivers of conflict, environmental impacts
of conflict, environmental recovery, and post-conflict peace building. The scope of
security and insecurity is by no means limited to violent conflict or its absence but
includes the roots of sustainable livelihoods, health, and well-being. Environmental
security underpins the rationale for investment in global environmental benefits, and is
essential to maintain the earth's life-supporting ecosystems generating water, food, and
clean air. Reducing environmental security risks also depends fundamentally on
improving resource governance and social resilience to natural resource shocks and
stresses. The environment is better protected in the absence of conflict and in the
presence of stable, effective governance.

There are four dimensions of environmental security:

1. Ecosystem goods and services fundamentally underpin human well-being and

human security. Human beings depend on the earth’s ecosystems and the services
they provide. The degradation of these services often causes significant harm to
human well-being which, in the framework of the Millennium Ecosystem
Assessment, explicitly includes human security.

2. Conflict, irrespective of its source, affects the viability or sustainability of

investments in environmental protection and their outcomes. Violent conflict often
results in direct and indirect environmental damage, with associated risks for
human health, livelihoods and ecosystem services. Even where natural resources
play no role as a source of tension in spurring conflict, the threat of violence or
insecurity can undermine project implementation.

3. Ecosystem degradation, resource competition, or inequitable distribution of

benefits increases vulnerability and conflict risk. Environmental degradation is a
cause of human insecurity and can aggravate other sources of social division based
on ethnicity, class, religion, or economic position. While rarely the simple or sole
cause of conflict and insecurity, environmental change (including climate change)
 is increasingly characterized as a risk multiplier. Even where violent conflict does
not occur, longer-term environmental trends often act as stressors on rural
livelihoods and increase the vulnerability of natural resource-dependent
communities to social, economic, or environmental shocks.

4. Environmental cooperation can increase capacity for conflict management,

prevention, and recovery. Managing shared natural resources sustainably and
equitably can motivate greater cooperation, and can also help build institutions
that moderate and reduce the disruptive impacts of conflict, or aid post-conflict
reconciliation and rebuilding.

Environmental Peace:

Peace and the environment are two equally wide-reaching topics, and consequently they
could be studied separately and from a variety of perspectives. In this article, we will
endeavor to demonstrate the relationship between peace and the environment starting
with the idea that the preservation of both is significantly compromised by the current
economic system. It is the process of governing and managing natural resources and the
environment to support durable peace. It operates across the conflict lifecycle, and
includes efforts to prevent, mitigate, resolve, and recover from violent conflict.
Environmental peace building addresses renewable natural resources, non-renewable
natural resources, and ecosystems. Most importantly, it links diverse concepts and
activities, such as the water’s role as a source of conflict; good environmental governance
as a means of conflict prevention; shared natural resources as an entry point for dialogue
or as a basis for cooperation and trust-building; post-conflict peace building and natural
resource management; and conflict-sensitive natural resource development. The Rio
Declaration on Environment and Development was signed by 178 countries. It signifies
that the global community of states formally acknowledges that there is a connection
between peace, human welfare and environmental protection. Environmental security and
peace have a common intellectual and policy foundation in investigations of the
intersection between peace and development, which peaked in the 1980s through the
works of Galtung (1989), Hettne (1983) and Sǿrensen (1985), for example, and through
processes such as the Brandt Report (Independent Commission on International
Development Issues [ICIDI] 1983) and Palme Report (Independent Commission on
Disarmament and Security Issues [ICDSI] 1982) that investigated the costs of the
militaryindustrial complex. These processes merged with parallel efforts to include
environmental considerations in development. This arguably began with the United
Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) held in Stockholm in 1972,
which initiated a number of intergovernmental investigations and summits that merged at
times with parallel investigations into development and common security, culminating in
the World Commission on Environment and Development‘s (WCED) 1987 report titled
Our Common Future. The WCED report popularized the term ‗sustainable development‘,
introduced the term ‗environmental security‘, and led to the United Nations Conference
on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992.