Contents

 Introduction

 Environmental Security

 Human Security

 Sustainable Security

 Sustainable Development

 Sustainable Security and Development

 SDGs

 What sustainable security ensure?

 Conclusion
Introduction

The relationships between the environment and human security are certainly
close and complex. A great deal of human security is tied to peoples’ access to
natural resources and vulnerabilities to environmental change and a great deal of
environmental change is directly and indirectly related with sustainable security
and sustainable development.

On the ‘environment’ side, we argue that work in the field of ‘sustainable

development’ has been fundamental in capturing the emergent scientific and
social understandings of the intimate coupling of nature and society. Although
controversies abound, the fundamental insights that launched the idea of
‘sustainable development’ two decades ago are even more firmly established
today: efforts to protect nature will fail unless they simultaneously advance the
cause of human betterment; efforts to better the lives of people will fail if they fail
to conserve, if not enhance, essential resources and life support system.

More recently, it has become increasingly clear that much of the interaction
between nature and society most significant for sustainable development occurs
in what we call the ‘missing middles’. Risks — threats to and opportunities for
sustainable development — do not emerge primarily at global or local levels, but
at intermediate scales, where both broader trends and the particularities of place
come together. Similarly, sustainability is most often achieved by actions that
address immediate challenges while focusing on longer-term goals through a
series of intermediate range ‘sustainability’ transitions. Human security offers
much to this vibrant field of sustainable development. Most notably, human
security — like human development — highlights the social dimension of
sustainable development’s ‘three pillars’ (environment, economy, society.

Environmental security

Two other fields — environmental security and sustainable development —

emerged and grew during roughly the same time period as human security and
human development. Of course, the clear link between the internally diverse
perspectives and communities focusing on environmental security and
sustainable development is a much greater emphasis on nature. The relative lack
of exchange and high level of misunderstanding among the former and latter
fields remains highly problematic in our view.

Environmental threats, violent conflict and state security

Different conceptions of environmental security emerged over the past two

decades.The
first used environmental security as a rhetorical device.The environment was
couched in the language of security to imbue a sense of urgency and priority to
nature. Greater political importance and larger resource allocations were to be
generated for environmental issues and concerns.A second approach mostly
focused on the relationship between environmental change (with particular
emphasis on resource scarcity) and violent conflict. This type of analysis is only a
partial broadening of the security agenda.

State security, violent conflict and the environment.Efforts to examine the

environmental effects of war and violent conflict, as well as the impact of conflict
refugees on the environment, reversed the causal arrows of explanation. Cases
investigated included the misuse of natural resources, migration to and over-use
of fragile lands, and other adverse environmental effects that occur as a result of
violent conflict and militarization. Also investigations to determine the
environmental impact of military organizations and activities fall under this
category, including the role of the military in non-combative roles, such as
environmental clean-up (Butts, 1994).

Human Security

Human security means simple expression , all those things that man and women
anywhere in the world cherish most;

-enough food for all,

-adequate shelter

-good health

-schooling for children

-protection from violence

The 1994 HDR was more specific, listing seven essential dimensions of human
security:

• Economic Security

• Food Security

• Health Security

• Environmental Security

• Personal Security

• Community Security

• Political Security

Environmental threats to human security

A fourth conception of environmental security, which has been adopted widely

over the past decade, is one in which the environment is connected to human
security. In this case, the inputs and outputs of the equation are broadened.6
Environmental threats are linked to their overall impact on human survival, well-
being and productivity — in other words, aspects of human security. Human
beings and social relationships become the objects, or preferably subjects, that
are to be secured from environmental threats — not states. Environmental
change can have direct and immediate effects on wellbeing and livelihoods. For
example, water scarcity may not cause war but still engender insecurity by
contributing to dehydration-related death, reducing food production, and
undermining livelihood opportunities. The environment impacts human survival,
well-being and dignity — all aspects of human security. But this is only one of five
pathways by which the environment impacts people. The other four are multi-
impact, multi-subject, multi-scale, and multi-temporal effects. Environmental
change can have a variety of impacts ranging from health to economic
productivity to political instability, and so on. Environmental threats can also
affect a diversity of subjects ranging from individuals,
families, communities, social organizations, various identity groups
(women,children, ethnic, etc.), diasporas not geographically concentrated,
governments and biological species of various kinds. Fourth, a single
environmental threat can potentially have adverse effects at multiple scales from
the household to the planetary. While many environmental problems are
localized, others are widespread and trans-scale in nature (i.e. climate
change).Finally, all these types of impacts also have a temporal dimension.
Environmental change can have a significant impact on the lives of people
today.These changes may also extend into the future to impact the lives of
generations .Water resources, again, provide an illustrative example of these
different types of effects and their complex interactions. Over two billion people
live in water-stressed river basins and that figure is likely to rise to 3.5 billion or
one-half of the world’s population, by 2025. Water scarcities have multi-scale
effects, for example when river basins are trans-boundary, multi-subject
effects(from families without access to safe drinking water to corporations who
must pay higher costs for water use), and multiple impacts (such as by under
mining sectoral production in agriculture and industry, as well as contributing to
desertification in vast ecological areas). Moreover, these various effects combine
and relate in complex and non-linear ways. It would thus be a grave mistake to
focus on solely the direct effects of water scarcity on human security.

Sustainable Security
Sustainable security is a paradigm that recognizes we must work to tackle the
causes of insecurity, not respond to it with attempts to control, often by military
means.Four aspects of sustainable security..

- marginalization of the majority world (the global South);

- climate change;
- competition over resources;
- global militarization

Sustainable development

Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present,

without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

The genius of ‘sustainability’ lies in its ability to provide ‘space’ for serious
attempts to grapple with the real, dynamic and complex relationships among
societies, economies and natural environments, as well as between past, present
and the future. The Brundtland Commission was aware of the value of providing
such space for debate and deliberation, experimentation
and learning, and defined sustainable development broadly as the ability of
humanity ‘‘. . . to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without
compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs ’’World
Commission on Environment and Development, 1987, p. 8).Within this broad
space, a range of perspectives that differ on what is to be sustained, what is to be
developed, the linkage between such differing views, and the extent of the future
envisioned have emerged (see Table 1).What is to be sustained? The most
common answer to this question is ‘life support systems’, where the life to be
supported is first and foremost human life. The initial form of this answer
emphasized the need for sustainable use..
of ‘natural resources’ — resources found in nature and useful for people.More
recently, the focus on natural resources has expanded to include the need to
sustain a healthy environment for people. A recent variant of this
anthropocentric, utilitarian thinking has emphasized the need to protect essential
‘ecosystem services’ — functions of natural environments such as
water purification.

Expanding and improving the links between security and development

In this section, we first establish key aspects of human security in relation to the
more conventional state security field.Second, we review the ‘environmental
security’ literature, which focuses predominantly on environmental threats to
state and human security. A still better view adds nature as posing risks (threats
and opportunities) to state and human security. We argue that human generated
risks to the natural environment are also central to environmental security. We
then offer an overview of the field of sustainable development that is centered on
the interconnectivities among societies, economies, and natural environments.
Attending to one of these at the expense of the others is bound to lead to
unsustainable dynamics and outcomes. We identify some emerging lessons from
accumulating knowledge on sustainability and infer important implications for
security and development.
What are the links between? Essentially all visions of sustainable development are
characterized by the joint consideration of what is to be sustained and what is to
be developed. Much of the planning for the 2002 World Summit, for example,
invoked the ‘three pillars’ of sustainability: economical, environmental and social.
These goals were seen as equal in importance and linked together. Indeed, the
social dimension was to be given priority attention, given that the 1992 Rio
Conference on Environment and Development, at least symbolically if not in
practice, undervalued this pillar.
Sustainable Development Goals

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the Global Goals,
were adopted by all United Nations Member States in 2015 as a universal call
to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy
peace and prosperity by 2030.

The 17 SDGs are integrated—that is, they recognize that action in one area will
affect outcomes in others, and that development must balance social,
economic and environmental sustainability.

Through the pledge to Leave No One Behind, countries have committed to fast-
track progress for those furthest behind first. That is why the SDGs are
designed to bring the world to several life-changing ‘zeros’, including zero
poverty, hunger, AIDS and discrimination against women and girls.

Everyone is needed to reach these ambitious targets. The creativity, knowhow,

technology and financial resources from all of society is necessary to achieve
the SDGs in every context.
What does sustainable security offer sustainable development

Human security offers much to the field of sustainable development some that
reinforces and some that adds to the contributions of human development.

1. Highly aggregated economies and environments have received significant

attention in academic debates, policy agendas and action programs. Human
security and human development, by emphasizing people strengthen the social
pillar of sustainable development, and may have important implications for future
sustainable development goals, priorities
and action plans.

2. In addition to emphasizing the social pillar, human security and human

development disaggregate it, moving to the ‘inescapably pluralistic’. This
encourages the sustainable development field away from a ‘‘standard of living’’
towards a ‘‘sustainable livelihoods’’ approach that prioritizes certain freedoms,
the absence of which may not result in an ‘‘identifiable diminution in the overall
standard of living’’ .

3. Human security and human development move the sustainable development

field from a primarily needs-based focus to a rights-based focus in the quest of
improving opportunities and capabilities. The practical implication of this
broadening is that civil and political rights along with economic, social and cultural
rights become an integral component of the social pillar of sustainable
development. It therefore provides a most basic, practical tool for individual
empowerment through universally setout entitlements and obligations.

4. Human security more than human development prioritizes achieving freedom

from want and freedom from fear urgently. Sustainable development corrected
the insufficient attention paid to inter-generational equity in the past, but some
versions forgot intra-generational equity altogether.Even the more human
development-centered versions of sustainability focused on promoting ‘freedom
tos’ and thus underplayed the protections that are necessary to ensure ‘freedom
froms’.

What does sustainable development offer human security?

Conversely, the field of sustainable development offers much to human

security.

1. Nature and society are interdependent: what happens within one affects the
other in significant ways. This is not a normative statement, but rather an
empirical finding about how the world works. Goals, policies, and activities based
on this understanding are likely to be more successful that those that dis-embed
people from nature.

2. The interdependencies of nature and society generate not only threats to both,
but also opportunities for positive change. The potential for mutually destructive
degradation and for mutually supportive nurture exists.Research and action that
focus largely on threats posed by appropriately disaggregated nature and society
to one another will miss important opportunities for joint improvement and
mutual benefit.
3. Threats and opportunities (or risks) exist at all time and space scales, from the
acute and local to the chronic and global. It is at intermediate regional spatial
scales and decadal time scales that some of the most critical contemporary
threats arise, and some of the best opportunities
for helpful initiatives exist. Popular efforts to establish agreement at the global
level on ‘the’ most important challenges for human security are therefore likely to
be much less effective than suitably contextualized efforts. Likewise, an exclusive
focus on either immediate or very long term interactions is less likely to promote
progress than a dynamic focus on intermediate temporal transitions.
4. Communities and people must be able to articulate their own aspirations,have
the appropriate means to make their voices heard and to participate effectively in
decision-making about their security and development. Top-down, technocratic
efforts, regardless of how well planned or well intentioned, have little chance of
durability or success.11 Human security
proponents would do well to empower people to identify what they see as the
critical insecurities and best means for promoting security.

5. Finally, there is a strong case to see nature as valuable in its own right, in
addition to its instrumental value for human beings. Taking this last principle, and
following the broader model of integration and linkages offered by sustainable
development, perhaps it is ‘sustainable security’. Sustainable security offers a
more open space for deliberation, analysis,
and action could help connect analysts and practitioners of human and
environmental security in common purpose to expand the narrow and
problematic field of state security.

Conclusion

In conclusion we offer one final thought. To the extent that political advocacy
networks and action learning coalitions are built among those concerned with
making security and development more human and more sustainable, what is
considered impossible today may be possible in a short time, probable in the
medium term, and one day natural and unquestioned. The point is that while calls
for greater amounts of political will and practical openness on the part of those
individuals and organizations that uphold and promote the more traditional fields
of state security and economic development is fine, it is only when the
sustainable human security and development communities forge common
agendas, alter relations of power
and practically demonstrate that their goals are achievable will positive
change be engendered.