1.2: Current Challenges – New Questions

Inclusive interpretations of human security and related multidimensional models have attracted some criticism.^[5] We already addressed the charge of securitisation above. Like all complex theoretical models its application requires more data than are usually available; often this makes it difficult to assess specific problem situations and to design appropriate countermeasures. Moreover, the priorities and time frames of the different pillars sometimes differ or even clash. Viewed through the lens of sustainability, some of the SDGs contradict each other (see Chapter 3) and the UN’s blindness to ecological overshoot renders their aspirations unrealistic. While those difficulties are obviously real they can be interpreted as directions for further refinement of the concept, rather than providing grounds for its abandonment. The present state of the world displays a huge variety of threats to people’s security, only a small subset of which could be, and was, addressed through traditional security thinking and associated policies. This messy situation alone justifies giving new ideas a chance, and the extent of international support which the human security concept has received indicates an emerging general consensus along that line.

Admittedly, not all interpretations of human security are equally useful; some create more problems than they can solve. Development agencies operating under national, super-national or non-governmental umbrellas often interpret human security in biased ways that suit their missions–economic, libertarian, humanistic, and environmental – with varying degrees of success. The majority of the MDGs were not achieved by their target year of 2015, and so far the SDGs have met with mixed results as well (United Nations, 2019). Some of that shortfall probably results from a narrow interpretation of human security that relegates sustainability to a mere afterthought (as, for example, in McIntosh & Hunter, 2010) and interprets environmental degradation as a kind of natural disaster—a dangerous misconception as we will show below.

Another problem arises directly from the UN’s framing of human security as freedom from fear and from want (Annan, 2005). With the choices for satisfying wants waning, the alternative of selecting and prioritising among them becomes more urgent. Principles of security are thus paraphrased in negative terms as freedom from a condition that is evidently undesirable. Elsewhere (Lautensach, 2006; Lautensach & Lautensach, 2010) we suggested that such negative definitions are less helpful than they sound. Aside from the logical difficulties with negative definitions, ‘freedom,’ ‘fear’ and ‘want’ are not only highly subjective and emotive concepts, they tend to vary much over time; the extent to which individuals will experience those sensations depends on differential metabolic states, emotional states, situational and associative contexts, and especially cultural backgrounds. An absence of wants or needs can also be caused by an absence of self-confidence, a negative self-image or a defeatist self-concept. Nor is it possible to reduce those wants and needs to minimum requirements for survival. The SDGs have clarified those issues to some extent but they also raised new questions, as will be discussed in Chapter 3.

A more practical objection to those popular interpretations of human security states that the focus on freedoms blinds the observer to the problem of limits or of scale. In any given quasi-closed system (such as an island, a desert oasis, or a planet) the extent to which the human inhabitants’ needs and wants can possibly be satisfied depends on the population size (Royal Society, 2012). Other variables, such as individual affluence, life style, and technological sophistication also apply, but only temporarily. For example, the same freedom from water shortage for a region in sub-Saharan Africa can be achieved without much effort for a population of a few thousand while remaining utterly unachievable, or at least unsustainable, if that population ever measured in the millions—as they do now.

The advent of the Anthropocene has profoundly and irreversibly changed our understanding of human security (Chapter 3) (Burtynsky et al., 2018). Anthropocene is the proposed name for a new era marked by profound environmental change caused by a single species – Homo sapiens. Essentially those changes amount to Earth having become a different planet – Eaarth, as Bill McKibben (2010) called it. Global anthropogenic change concerning climate (see Chapter 9), resources (Chapter 10), and biodiversity (Chapter 11 and Chapter 12) presents new threats, unprecedented in their extents if not their nature.^[6] The Union of Concerned World Scientists have issued regular warnings since 1979, pointing to the further increases in human and ruminant populations, in meat production, in world GDP, in tree cover loss, in fossil fuel consumption, in air passengers, and in CO₂ emissions; especially disturbing are the current signs of impact: climate change and warming, ocean acidification, extreme weather, sea level rise, burning of forests and melting of ice caps (Ripple et al., 2017).

In specific contexts (such as a pandemic), it is necessary to prioritise among those threats and identify major sources of insecurity in a community, or region, or increasingly even globally. Combining an attention to threats with the need for sustainability, Alkire (2002, p. 2) defined the objective of human security as “to safeguard the vital core of all human lives from critical pervasive threats, and to do so without impeding long-term human flourishing.” In the light of the Anthropocene, some regard ‘flourishing’ to no longer be a realistic choice of words, considering that our survival seems to be at stake. What used to be regarded as proactive agenda for preventive policies is increasingly developing into a rearguard battle with natural forces bent on rectifying our global ecological overshoot. For example, returning to the issue of water security (a topic that will be discussed further in Chapter 10), such source analysis would focus on possible causes of water shortage, on the systemic requirements for water security, the limits of the local system, and the current dynamics and trends in the region in order to arrive at long-term effective and sustainable policies. Almost always it turns out that population size governs the problem; every problem seems manageable while it is low and no remedy seems very helpful once it is too high (Ryerson, 2010).

The Anthropocene brings to our attention the prime importance of environmental security, defined as security from “critical adverse effects caused directly or indirectly by environmental change” (Barnett, 2007, p. 5). Heterodox economists, human ecologists and most indigenous cultures worldwide have long understood that all human enterprise takes place and depends on ecological support structures^[7] with limited capacities for supplying resources and for recycling wastes. In that we are no different from other animals. What distinguished our species and its immediate ancestors during the past million years or so was a proclivity for expanding our habitat, for colonising diverse environments by adapting to them and by modifying them to our needs (Rees, 2004; see Chapter 3 for a time line).

As noted by numerous authors (e.g. in Heinberg & Lerch, 2010, and in Chapter 3), that proclivity is now for the first time no longer working in our favour. By modifying almost every ecosystem on the planet, by extracting and processing resources in ever more complex ways, and by harnessing diverse energy sources to great effect we succeeded in propagating far beyond the numbers of other medium sized omnivorous mammals. Even by the 1980s our species appropriated over 40% of the total biomass annually produced on Earth (Vitousek et al., 1986); three decades later that amount has increased further (Bar-On et al., 2018). As humans introduce competitor species, modify ecosystems, deplete habitats, and modify landscapes and climates, our environmental impact has driven hundreds of thousands of species into extinction. Our limited skills at managing ecosystems could not prevent the ‘trophic downgrading’ of many systems into less complex stable states with fewer species (Estes et al., 2011). Biologists are now referring to the ‘sixth extinction,’ a massive loss of species that resembles past cataclysms in the Earth’s history but is proceeding much faster, at five to 74 species per day and still accelerating (Kolbert, 2014). The tragedy in this development lies not just in the irreversible loss of life forms that took millions of years to evolve; because we are part of the web-like communities of species, subject to dependencies from which no species can be exempt, the loss of biodiversity^[8] threatens our very own security (see Chapter 12).

To paraphrase the words of Ursula LeGuinn, the relationship of humanity to the Earth resembles that of an infant to its mother, simultaneous utterly dependent and utterly exploitative. This notion seems as self-evident as it remains controversial; it does not sit well with people who would rather believe that populations and economies can grow unencumbered by physical limits. That belief, referred to as cornucopianism (Ehrlich & Holdren, 1971), still dominates the rhetoric of election campaigns, neoclassical economic models, and even humanistic programs for development aid. Rhetoric and unscientific beliefs aside, all living organisms depend on the services of their host ecosystems and are susceptible to their limitations. It was for this simple reason that Norman Myers (1993) referred to environmental security as the “ultimate security.”

Overshoot directly threatens human security through biological control mechanisms. In the case of the human species the major control mechanisms are epidemics, malnutrition, and violent conflict. To varying extents those threats will be triggered by essential resources becoming scarce and eventually disappearing (Homer-Dixon, 1999; Meadows et al., 2004), and by the deterioration of key ecosystems (McMichael et al., 2003; Dobkowski & Walliman, 2002; Steffen et al., 2004). The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have been caused by the latter plus the trade in wildlife. If the event is serious enough, the prospect of secondary effects, such as the erosion of the rule of law and of civil society (Myers, 1993), economic failures, and more widespread armed conflict over diminishing resources (Homer-Dixon, 1999; Mach et al., 2019), contributes further urgency. Historical precedents of the collapse of regional cultures, and of the survival of others, illustrate the validity of that model (Diamond, 2005). Those consequences are certain to compromise human security across a broad range of aspects, extending over all four pillars of sociopolitical, health-related, economic, and environmental security.

To summarise numerous reports and analyses—the Anthropocene is teaching human security analysts four basic messages:

1. Challenges to human security increasingly tend to cross borders and affect regional groups of countries or even most of the globe. Major issues, discussed in various chapters of this text, include mass migration, intercultural conflict, lack of global governance, pollution and other new health hazards, resource depletion, economic instability and crimes against humanity. Success for small countries in drawing international attention to their problems depends on making enough noise and on their luck of being heard (e.g. Poland).
2. Most of the sources of insecurity are raised to critical status as a result of high population numbers and their impacts on the environment; the chances of success with most strategic solutions depend on how they address those impacts and the underlying population issues.
3. Among the four pillars it is environmental security that often supports the other three; likewise, environmental insecurity tends to jeopardise economic, socio-political and health security. More than in past centuries, in the Anthropocene it is often environmental causes that are ultimately responsible for the displacement of populations, for the lack of resources to meet their basic needs, for the deaths and suffering caused by natural disasters and for the destabilization of social order. (See Chapter 9 for an illustrative case example.)
4. Those overarching environmental causes are part of a complex cluster of global environmental change processes that is itself largely caused by human activities (= anthropogenic) and that exceeded the capacity of the biosphere for resource production and waste recycling. Those transgressions are summarized as ‘ecological overshoot’ (Catton, 1980; McMichael, 2001; Meadows et al., 2004). As discussed by various chapter authors, overshoot can be modelled as excessive environmental impact according to the I=PAT relationship^[9] (Grossman, 2012), the transgression of global environmental boundaries (Rockström et al., 2009), and also of sociopolitical boundaries (Raworth, 2017), or as our collective ecological footprint exceeding the biosphere’s biocapacity (Wackernagel & Rees, 1996; Chambers et al,. 2000). The latter amounted to 170% in 2019.^[10]

There are, of course, numerous challenges to human security and sources of insecurity that are only indirectly connected to the global environmental changes of the Anthropocene, although they equal them in novelty. Those challenges include threats to cybersecurity and AI, nuclear armaments and wastes, the failure of governments in many places, the failure of entire states, the rise of corporate hegemonies and hypercapitalism, ongoing violations of human rights in many jurisdictions, and more. Particular attention is beginning to be paid to the culturally sanctioned ritual mutilation of children, often under religious pretences. Most of those challenges are also addressed in this textbook.

Considering all those issues in the context of the Anthropocene, one cannot help wondering what the future holds in store for human security, and to what extents those challenges might prove manageable. We encourage readers to keep the following general considerations in mind as you read through the chapters, and apply what you learn to construct your own reasoned opinion about which futures turn out most likely. A synthesis is offered in Chapter 21.