21.1: Human Security in World Affairs: Challenges

The arguments presented in the introductory chapters amount to two main propositions. First, the present situation and our prospects for the immediate future cannot be adequately addressed by traditional security thinking. In fact, traditional security policies and their underlying beliefs and values are partly responsible for our current predicaments. As argued in Chapter 3, Chapter 10 and Chapter 11, those underlying beliefs and values included an uncritical confidence in limitless growth, in the ability of technological progress to solve all our problems, and in certain essential characteristics that distinguish humans from all other living beings and render us ‘sapient,’ responsible and rational, enlisting the resources of our entire planet in order to create the perfect world for untold billions. Of course, we were overdue for some sobering up.

This applies to citizens of developed countries in the sense that their addiction to cheap abundant energy and inequitable consumption creates security risks that are not easily recognised under the dominant ideologies of the Conventional Development Paradigm (CDP), political realism, and cornucopianism. The proposition also applies to citizens of developing countries insofar as their dependence on exploitative trade relationships and counterproductive development schemes make it difficult for them to gain the necessary latitude for addressing their specific security challenges. Their incessant pursuit of fossil-fuel-based ‘development’ renders the global ‘climate emergency’ next to intransigent. Chapter 11 and Chapter 12 show how our uncompromising pursuit of a narrow and biased interpretation of progress has led us into a gruesome, unstoppable war against non-human ‘nature’, our very own support base, that has now escalated to grotesque dimensions: Of the entire mammalian biomass on Earth, domestic animals constitute a whopping 60%, humans as a species make up 36%, while the Earth’s entire inventory of wild mammals has shrunk to a mere four percent (Bar-On et al., 2018). Those problems are not even recognised under traditional security models or any ‘hard’ interpretation of human security.

The second proposition states that human security in its multidisciplinary interpretations and multidimensional models can in fact inform effective policies that could vastly improve humanity’s prospects across cultures and around the world. Such policies could address massive security threats that have largely escaped attention because of ideological blinkers, lack of information or inappropriate value priorities. Extending the scope of human security in its comprehensive sense to include future generations can also address the particular dangers indicated in future scenarios involving various combinations of collapse and reform. In this chapter we will again refer to Raskin’s (2016) six scenarios discussed in Chapter 1 (summarised in Table 1.1) because they admirably cover the possible range. The models and the experts behind them are telling decision makers what must be done, and have done so for decades (as documented in the series of World Scientists’ Warnings: Ripple et al., 2017). The problem is that so far those messages have fallen on deaf ears. Instead, the Great Acceleration continues unabated and the war rages on – despite protests and pandemic.

Various chapters reinforce those two propositions with evidence from the areas of conflict studies, international law, the situations of individuals within and without the state, the failing and rebuilding of states, the depletion and scarcity of resources, and from climate change. In Chapter 6 Hennie Strydom explained how International Humanitarian Law developed and mirrored the transition from state-centered to human-centered security thinking and the replacement of inter-state armed conflicts by internal ones. Hence, the causes for internal violent conflict have joined the list of traditional reasons for war as major challenges to human security. Those causes include intolerable socioeconomic inequity, tensions between ethno-cultural or religious factions, displacement of ever larger populations, and the failure of states in exercising their obligations towards the citizenry. Those causes also drive numerous other aspects of human insecurity besides armed conflict, which underscores again the basic fact that avoiding violence (i.e its direct, structural, and cultural types) only constitutes a necessary, but by no means sufficient, condition for security.

‘Ultimate Security’ Is Receding from Our Reach

What also emerges from those first two thirds of the text is that many threats to human security are rooted in humanity’s relationship and interactions with the rest of nature, according to Myers’ (1993b) dictum of ‘ultimate security.’ The global environmental crisis in its numerous dimensions is largely driven by humanity overshooting the capacity of ecological support structures. Collectively we are quite literally ‘living beyond our means’, as the UN’s Millennium Assessment Board (UNEP-MAB, 2005) put it. Much suffering, hardship, and loss of biodiversity could have been avoided had the international community arrived at this realisation a few decades earlier when the Club of Rome (Meadows et al., 1972, 2004), and others issued their first warnings about the world approaching limits to growth (Ripple et al., 2017). The Club of Rome’s multivariate computer simulations yielded scenarios that varied in the amounts of non-renewable resources, and in the extent and timing of international countermeasures. Though their assumptions and arguments were never refuted in principle, their critics made much of the fact that the timing of many of their predictions proved off target – an aspect that the authors had clearly declared as neither realistic nor relevant for drawing fundamental conclusions from their forecasts, namely that humanity’s course is unsustainable. Subsequent studies (e.g. Bardi, 2011; Meadows et al., 2004; Turner, 2008; Rockström et al., 2009; Ewing et al., 2010; WWF, 2018) confirmed their conclusions: Global limits to growth are quantifiable and ‘ontologically objective’ (see Chapter 11), they manifest as discrete ecological boundaries, and human activities are variously approaching or transgressing them.

The trouble with overshoot, be it ecological or socioeconomic, is that its manifestations become worse with every year that it remains unmitigated. In the case of ecological overshoot those manifestations include desertification, soil erosion, salination, pollution, loss of biodiversity, resource depletion and pandemics. That self-reinforcing principle means that the necessary measures to address it effectively will need to be even less compromising, more costly and hurtful, and more drastic with every year that is wasted. In any case, for many non-human species at the brink of extinction those measures would arrive entirely too late. Not only do the negative consequences of overshoot increase over time, its self-reinforcement means that they grow exponentially, which means that we tend to overestimate the amount of time left to implement counterstrategies. Moreover, prolonged overshoot engenders the likelihood that tipping points are passed, triggering sudden systemic readjustments, which can manifest as a collapse. With every year that effective solutions are delayed, the likelihood of collapse (and its severity) increases. As most of the negative trends contributing to the Great Acceleration (i.e. emissions of GHGs and other pollutants, consumption, technological expansion, income inequality and military expenditures) are not only proceeding but still accelerating, we can state with confidence that whatever efforts to counteract overshoot might have been attempted, they have not met with evident success. The only two trends in the set that seem to have passed their inflection points, meaning that their rates of increase are no longer increasing, are global population growth and global economic growth; however, their slowing was less the result of deliberate policies but of inadvertent transition effects.^[1] The SDG agenda as the only global initiative towards sustainability were hampered from their inception by misguided expectations of ‘development’, by internal contradictions and by ignoring overshoot (O’Neill et al., 2018). On the whole, we conclude that overshoot continues to proceed virtually unmitigated by any effective countermeasures. This renders some limited collapse increasingly likely (Kolbert, 2006; Bendell, 2018; Rees, 2019).

Collapse: When and How?

From the foregoing we conclude that a certain extent of collapse seems all but inevitable. The reasons have been discussed throughout this book; they may be summarised as humanity’s failure to ensure environmental security through a timely reduction of our ecological overshoot and of our growth. Because environmental security underpins the other pillars to such a large extent, its absence is likely to destabilise most other aspects of human security. On that premise, the important questions are when and how collapse can be expected. Unfortunately, chronological predictions have tended to prove false. Retrospectively the failure of such predictions can be explained by the unknown influence and location of tipping points (Galaz et al., 2014). A more productive approach would be to ask what aspects of global change might operate as proximal triggers and how ‘bad’ those changes will need to get before their manifestations will be perceived as collapse. In order to address those questions, we need to first clarify what we mean by ‘collapse.’

From its beginnings, human history has been marked by ups and downs in the extent of human security that was enjoyed by regional populations. Severe declines in one or several pillars were interpreted as ‘collapses.’ Although the present threats are unprecedented in their global extents, they are being perceived inequitably and their impacts are experienced inequitably around the world (with the exception of COVID-19). This was made clear with regards to climate change in Chapter 9. Invariably it is the world’s poorest who have suffered the brunt of collapses, and it will be no different next time; the planetwide extent of the present crisis will merely result in a planetwide variation in the extent of victimisation. In most of its manifestations, collapse will eventuate regionally.

What will be the most likely triggers of collapse? In an updated forecast Jorgen Randers (2012), a member of the original Club of Rome team, suggested that of all manifestations of overshoot, global warming will play the most decisive role in determining humanity’s future during this century. As a result of international inaction, CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere will continue to rise and cause at least +2 °C by 2052. This warming by two degrees has been widely considered a critical threshold, beyond which non-linear increase (‘runaway greenhouse’) might take over. ^[2] Randers further suggested that the more benign scenarios described in the Club of Rome’s original analysis, in which humanity manages to control production and population increases ^[3], are probably no longer within our reach because humanity has failed to act in time (Grossman, 2012). Some data suggest that the projections of the IPCC habitually underestimate the actual climate impact (McKibben, 2010).

As discussed in the introduction and Chapter 9, a range of diverse secondary threats to environmental security arises from global warming and associated climate change. They include flooding of coastal lowlands, more severe weather events, floods and droughts, epidemics, and further constraints on the supplies of food and water, as well as associated health threats (O’Brien, 2010; WWF, 2018). Leading economies will stagnate while some emerging economies will grow which will exacerbate overshoot (in 2019 at 170%), though more slowly. The resulting economic losses, food insecurity, mass migrations and health crises would weaken economies and social orders to a degree that compromises the rule of law and the authority of central governance. Chapter 5, Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 focus on the many challenges to socio-political security, health-related security, and economic security that arise from that general malaise. The increasing global inequity in terms of consumption, resource allocation, and reproductive rate that exists among countries, cultures and classes contributes to this susceptibility (Davies & Sandstrom, 2008; Dobkowski & Wallimann, 2002; Heinberg, 2013). Paul Bellamy’s detailed account in Chapter 5 of the connections between poverty and insecurity makes that abundantly clear.

One knock-on effect of climate change that seems particularly prone to trigger collapse is the depletion of natural resources, especially food and potable water. As explicated by Richard Plate in Chapter 10, human nature predestines us for resource depletion, and the rate at which cultures deplete their resources tends to outpace the rate at which they become aware of that fact. Climate change and the regional threats it poses to agriculture come on top of that constitutive source of food insecurity, at a time when unprecedented population sizes and cultural trends towards increasing meat consumption are already straining the Earth’s biocapacity (Brown, 2011; Grossman, 2012). Historical precedents suggest that food shortages and widespread malnutrition engender violent conflict, social upheaval and health insecurity (Heinberg, 2013). In the same vein, climate-induced shortages of other resources will exacerbate the risk of violence that resource depletion always engenders (Morales, 2002; Parenti, 2011; Homer-Dixon, 1999); most wars of the future will be over resources.

A further effect that is likely to contribute to regional incidents of collapse is the displacement of large populations from inundated coastal plains, from arid or flooded former agricultural regions, and from areas threatened by armed conflict (Myers, 1993a). Those refugees will strain the services and infrastructures of host countries and give rise to intercultural conflicts of the kind that are now plaguing the European Union (Lautensach, 2018a).

The global spread of misplaced notions of free-market laissez-faire policies raises another threat to human security (Chua, 2003). Conditions of weakened governments and widespread public disaffection and destitution favour the emergence of false prophets and demagogues who seek to mobilise followers for their own sinister political purposes. While some might conclude from the present situation that we have already arrived at that point – kakistocracies have been multiplying on the North American continent and elsewhere – historical precedents suggest that the danger from populist autocrats continues to grow, as the other variables increase.

From ‘Feeding the Hungry’ Towards the ‘Minimum Sufficient Welfare for the Greatest Sustainable Number’

Because of the contingencies of overshoot these problems cannot be effectively remedied by efforts that only focus on ‘eliminating poverty’ as the humanitarian ideal, along with SDG #1, demands—independently how one defines poverty. ^[4] The contingencies of overshoot impose a tragic inversion on the traditional humanitarian agenda of ‘development’. Mere equitable redistribution of food no longer suffices, even if it were politically feasible. At this point in time, if a global dictatorship allocated exactly equal amounts of resources to every human being, we would still all starve, albeit rather slowly (see footnote 5). Secondly, the fact that our current demand amounts to at least 1.7 planets (WWF, 2018) means that in spite of perfect equity two of every five people would be consuming part of the food producing machinery itself (WWF, 2018). Next year it would be a few more, and so forth. People living in more extreme biogeographical regions and latitudes would be hardest pressed because they tend to rely on greater amounts of animal protein. The fact that humanity, together with all domesticated mammals, already constitute 96% of all mammalian biomass on this planet could not speak more loudly on the subject of overshoot. Moreover, the population continues to grow even while food prices rise and fresh water and soils grow scarcer (Brown, 2003; Dobkowski & Wallimann, 2002). This means that neither the redistribution of resources, nor a new global diet (Hirvonen et al., 2020), nor the magical production of more food from thin air by some technical innovation, can be the sole prescription for food security ^[5], even though they would certainly help to temporarily alleviate some of the worst shortages.

In order to ensure lasting environmental security for all, and with that fulfil an essential condition for the other pillars of human security, humanity must reduce its total environmental impact before nature does this for us in painful ways, and before many more species are lost. Richard Plate and Ronnie Hawkins argue this in Chapter 10, Chapter 11, and Chapter 12. The difficulty with integrated plans that could address the multifaceted range of problems, such as Lester Brown’s (2003) ‘Plan B’, is that they demand an unprecedented extent of political will that can only be regarded as unrealistic. After years of squabbling over such plans to address poverty and hunger, the international community has now been confronted with an even bigger challenge: the likely possibility that irreversible climate change sharply decreases agricultural productivity and sets us back even further.

Regardless of how severe climate change will turn out, it will mean that the Earth will produce not more food for a growing humanity but less – perhaps substantially less. This will be a result of established agro-ecosystems functioning less well or collapsing entirely, while new agro-ecosystems that could cope with the new conditions of Eaarth (McKibben, 2010) will be slow in developing. Overshoot and climate change are trashing the holy grail of utilitarianism, usually phrased as ‘the greatest good for the greatest number.’

The I=PAT relationship (McCluney, 2004; see Chapter 1) clearly indicates that we can choose among a range of solution states that encompass numerous combinations of global population sizes and per capita affluence and technology use; all those solutions that are sustainable include population sizes below the current level (how far below depends partly on how long it will take us to get there and how severe the climate changes) (Grossman, 2012). Furthermore, Potter’s (1988) hierarchy of survival modes suggests that some of those solutions are morally preferable to others—e.g. miserable survival for all at five billion vs. acceptable survival for all at two billion. Others (e.g. Cohen, 2005; Ehrlich & Ehrlich, 2004) came to similar conclusions years ago. All that points to the question of how many people below the maximum the Earth should support (Pimentel et al., 1999). This is primarily a moral question, weighing welfare against numbers.

The need to reduce our numbers does not only arise from our excessive impact but also from the amount of misery that is already being experienced by much of humanity. The growing scarcity of key resources, particularly food and potable water, causes suffering that would be avoidable with a smaller population. Cohen (2005) framed the challenge of global food security in the analogy of a communal dinner table where some guests go hungry; the problem can be solved in three ways: (1) make a bigger pie, (2) put fewer forks on the table, (3) teach better manners. Ehrlich et al. (1995) reduced the challenge to a ‘race between the stork and the plough’ that is being won by the stork. The chapters on scarcity as well as abundant literature (e.g. Cribb, 2010; Roberts, 2008; Dobkowski & Wallimann, 2002) indicated that little, if any, room remains to increase food supply (i.e. speed up the plough, or make a bigger pie). In effect, reducing the global population and changing our ‘manners’ are our only remaining options, and neither seems satisfactory—the former on ethical grounds, the latter for its limited potential. We will discuss what limited opportunities might remain open in the next section. The upshot is that the holy grail of utilitarians now amounts to the minimum sufficient welfare for the greatest sustainable number. This number is probably no more than about four billion people, and perhaps less than one billion (Pimentel et al., 1999; Cohen, 2005; McCluney, 2004); either way, they will not be consuming much animal protein.

Under the new imperative to tighten our belts it becomes clear that not all conceptions of human security are equally helpful. Those that take into account the primacy of environmental security and the population problem can contribute to constructive solutions and show the way out of overshoot. In contrast, those conceptions that are mainly informed by the Conventional Development Paradigm (represented, e.g. in Bindé, 2001) can only help in the short term (as evident in GDP increases) and will in the long term do more harm than good by reducing natural capital (as evident in decreases of other statistics, e.g. the Inclusive Wealth Indicator, IWI) and by further increasing humanity’s collective impact (IHDP, 2014). Rising GDP and shrinking IWI have been observed with some ‘emerging economies’ such as Brazil and India. Another case in point is the much acclaimed Green Revolution that vastly boosted food production during the 1970s. In the short term it relieved shortages and prevented impending famines; in the long term, however, it will be regarded a disaster, as Plate argued in Chapter 10. The couple of decades of time that it bought us were not used wisely; instead, they were squandered in pursuit of further growth under the belief that this revolution would never end. Now we are again facing famines – except that our numbers have tripled, our ecosystems are weaker, tens of thousands of species have disappeared, natural resources are further depleted, pollution has become worse, and the global climate is changing in uncertain ways. No other misadventure of conventional development policies illustrates the failings of the CDP better than this missed opportunity. Its humanitarian goals were rendered unattainable by our obsession with economic growth.

So much for conventional ‘development.’ What about more idealistic conceptions of human security? The UN’s principle of ‘freedom from needs’ becomes even less meaningful if the hierarchy of human needs is in fact culturally contingent as Brown and Gehrmann argued in Chapter 4. A culture that subscribed to a long term view of human welfare would have rejected external food aid because they would have correctly regarded it as merely adding to their problems (Hardin 2011). But even Sen’s (1999) more flexible principle of ‘development as freedom’ is unable to accommodate ecological constraints. Rather, development needs to be understood as any measure that furthers the transition to sustainability (Keiner, 2006; Lautensach & Lautensach, 2013). This includes a general commitment to non-violent resolution of conflicts as Wilmer explained in Chapter 19.

The most informative and comprehensive description of sustainable human security is represented in Kate Raworth’s (2017) Donut Model, describing a safe operating space for humanity. This operating space is presented as the space between two concentric rings of boundaries. The outer ring is formed by nine environmental boundaries that limit our ecological impact; the inner ring is formed by twelve sociopolitical boundaries that represent basic needs. Combining the requirement for environmental sustainability with those for sociopolitical and cultural sustainability makes intuitive sense, as a grossly unjust and inequitable society will prove to become unstable before long, no matter how ecologically sound its policies may be. At the time of writing, not a single country meets all those conditions for situating itself within the ‘safe operating space’; close approximations were shown by Vietnam and Cuba (O’Neill et al., 2018).^[6]

Reinterpretations of ‘development’ often meet with objections based on human rights. The tension between human rights and human security is discussed in Chapter 4 and Chapter 15. Rights become limited not only by other rights but also by the inconvenient fact that insisting on some rights (i.e. rights that are not grantable) will create insecurity, as is explained in Chapter 15. In her critique of dominant interpretations of human rights Thomas (2001) blamed the enshrining of property rights under human rights law, which can, under conditions of limited resources, work at the expense of disenfranchised minorities. In the light of overshoot certain other human rights seem similarly counterproductive, such as the right to a ‘clean environment,’ ‘safe drinking water’ or ‘adequate nutrition.’ Given an excessively large global population (today’s seven billion plus would qualify) and a single planet at our disposal, no government can grant such privileges to all. One additional ‘right’ that has arguably proven not only ungrantable but outright harmful is the right to procreate at will (Lautensach, 2015).

Overshoot not only necessitates that we change some of our notions about rights—it forces us to dig deeper into the human psyche. In Chapter 11 Ronnie Hawkins asserts that humanity’s relationship with the rest of nature is not only shaped by ecological contingencies but also from within every one of us and from within our cultures. By labeling nature as the non-human ‘other’, an inanimate heap of ‘resources’ for the taking, consisting of marvellously useful little automatons just waiting to prove their utility to human endeavours, we ultimately set ourselves up for moral bankruptcy and ecological suicide. Others have observed this as well (Crist, 2017; Curry, 2011; Gorke, 2003); but Hawkins also explores the cultural, historical, and metaphysical grounds from which this attitude sprouted. In her “Letters from the Front” (Chapter 12) she exposes the cruelty and arrogance behind the atrocities in our war against nature. What emerges are not just the deeply questionable ramifications of the dominant environmental ethic behind such development schemes as the UN’s Millennium Goals and Agenda 2030, but a thoroughly unsettling critique of what it means to be ‘modern’ and what constitutes progress.

Besides the obvious need to change our notions about human security, about rights, about nature, and about modernity, another moral imperative that arises from the foregoing is to change our value priorities with respect to each other. As ecologies simplify and economies falter, centralised governance and the rule of law will become more tenuous. This means not only that most of us need to re-learn how to run self-sufficient, resilient communities. It also means that we exercise compassion for those whom the crisis will have displaced from their homes, destitute masses with no recourse (Brito & Smith, 2012). The citizens of failed states run the danger of becoming stateless which at this time severely compromises their security and autonomy as Anna Hayes documents in Chapter 7. Other aspects of human insecurity in failed states are described in Chapter 6, Chapter 8, and Chapter 16. The ranks of displaced multitudes are certain to swell once rising sea levels have inundated some of the world’s heavily populated coastal lands. In the absence of decisive initiative by the UNHCR that would impart on environmental refugees the status of ‘world citizens’ (or at the very least accord them full official refugee status) (Pearce, 2011), their fate depends on the charity of other countries and charitable NGOs—which, in the midst of shortages and economic downturns, cannot be taken for granted. Limited collapse will also mean that a considerable portion of humanity will not survive to their normal life expectancy (Lautensach, 2020). Clearly the human conscience represents as important a ‘tipping point’ as do geophysiological variables.