Addressing how nature impacts security, and how security choices impact nature, will require new knowledge and new spaces.
As governments turn their attention to the intersections between nature, peace and security, civil society needs to speak up if we’re to avoid the dead-end securitisation of the climate crisis; to do so, argues Doug Weir, many of us will need to learn a new language.
Global. Ecosystem. Collapse.
The message is clear, the UK’s spooks have consulted with experts and concluded that global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse are a serious threat to UK national security. From food shortages and migration, to armed conflicts and nuclear exchanges, the collapse of six critical ecosystems poses a clear and present danger. The government didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news, slipping the assessment out under a Freedom of Information release, after a little sanitisation, and as Trump was mulling an invasion of Greenland; nevertheless, it did acknowledge that ‘nature is a foundation of national security’. Environmentalists mostly welcomed the analysis but harrumphed that the message wasn’t anything new, even if the messenger was.
Urgent Malthusian framings like those in the UK’s new nature and security assessment are nothing new to environmental security discourse. The more catastrophic they are, so the theory goes, the more attention the issues at hand will receive, and from audiences that might not otherwise be reached. Important audiences. Audiences in suits, and audiences in uniforms. Audiences that matter, with influence and agency. The problem is, it doesn’t necessarily follow that these framings and these audiences will identify the correct solutions to the identified risks. Our response to bad news is first to protect ourselves from the threat, it’s not to tackle the cause of the threat. And so it was that when the UK’s upper chamber of parliament debated the assessment one lord proposed that: “…we really need to get some haste in building the new frigates and getting a rolling programme going to ensure that we have security of our food supply.” Many participants refused to look further than lobbying for more support for UK farmers; a little off message given that industrial agriculture is a global driver of biodiversity loss.
In fairness to the peers, this largely unilluminating debate did not come as a great surprise. Our governments and policymakers are not used to articulating the often complex relationships between nature, peace and security. The same is true for many civil society actors, that much is evident in the way that the nature and security assessment has since been co-opted by climate security advocates as a climate risk assessment, as if we didn’t have enough of those already. But perhaps most troubling is the other parallel with climate security, that the sensationalist messaging will be adopted superficially and uncritically, baking in the view that future social conflict and catastrophe are inevitable, while signposting maladaptive solutions instead of tackling root causes.
Effective. Nature. Action.
So, how should we approach nature, peace and security? In two ways. The first, as the UK has done, is to interrogate the impact of biodiversity loss on national security. All countries should be encouraged to do this, because we can be pretty certain that perceptions and priorities will vary. It’s also a way of creating much needed space for conversations between biodiversity experts and governments. Critically, and in contrast to earlier climate security debates, we must avoid presenting one single nature security vision, whether it’s that of a single state, or one vocal bloc. For every Global North government anxious about food insecurity and migrants, there will be several Global South states struggling to contain wildlife crime and corruption. The more countries that speak up, the easier it will be for these themes to make it onto agendas, and the harder it will be for spoilers to obstruct. Once done, there then comes the difficult task of examining the drivers behind the issues identified, and of developing policies to address them.
The other way that we need to approach nature, peace and security is to examine and address the impact of security choices on nature. This extends from the direct and indirect impact of armed conflicts and insecurity on species and ecosystems, to the confluence of geopolitics and global biodiversity governance, to the diversion of the resources needed to protect nature to military spending. While IPBES — the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services — identifies armed conflicts as an indirect driver of biodiversity loss, far more work is needed by the policy panel, and by our community, to evidence and articulate how conflicts interact with nature. Not only do we need this knowledge to protect nature during conflicts, we need it in the governance vacuums that follow them, and we need it to inform environmental peacebuilding. Critically, these framings are an important counterweight to the worst excesses of those fetishising the risks to national security.
These two approaches are not mutually exclusive, and nor should they be. When Russia blocks Ukrainian agricultural exports it not only affects global food security, commodity price spikes also encourage higher rates of land conversion for agriculture, impacting nature globally. The more we explore these relationships, the more we can articulate them, and the more likely we are to be able to identify policies to address or mitigate them.
Joining the biodiversity mainstream
There is no international forum dedicated to nature, peace and security. Some, like the Convention on the Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), or the Nairobi Protocol, consider aspects of it: wildlife crime, and small arms and poaching, respectively. However, the majority of multilateral biodiversity agreements are largely silent on the topic, a few, like the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, have recently experienced difficulties navigating conflict politics.
There are numerous reasons for this silence. States negotiating agreements are rarely in a rush to introduce topics that are perceived as contentious. Nature-security relationships remain fairly low profile and, with a few notable exceptions, the conservation movement has long been conflict-averse, although this is now changing. And of course, nature-security relationships aren’t a priority, until they are.
When Colombia hosted COP16 of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), there was hope that this might create an opening for engagement on nature, peace and security. After all, Colombia is a megadiverse country and has experienced decades of conflict. By necessity, Colombian conservationists had developed globally relevant experience in working with communities to protect nature amidst insecurity. While the Green Zone saw numerous events on the theme, the Blue Zone saw just a handful. As for the negotiations themselves, nada, although a decision was agreed on mainstreaming biodiversity across different sectors, which could be drawn on for our purposes. The silence in the negotiations was somewhat inevitable as the CBD is also silent on conflicts. This really matters because it’s the CBD and its state parties that set the world’s decadal global biodiversity goals, and monitor progress towards them.
CBD COP17 takes place in Yerevan this October. While Armenia is also no stranger to conflict and its impact on biodiversity, the main focus will be a midterm review of the current set of global goals: the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF). Conservation experts and states worked hard for years to thrash out a suite of goals and progress indicators for the KMGBF…none of which directly address peace and security. Perhaps that’s not a problem? After all we could look at targets like those on access to domestic or international conservation funding, or to the number of protected areas and their governance, and cross reference these with other data on fragility and conflict from beyond the CBD. But the fact that these metrics aren’t already integrated is symptomatic of how much mainstreaming work needs to be done to ensure that we can understand nature, peace and security relationships, and design informed policies to address them. Ironically, many of the KMGBF goals are contingent on effective domestic biodiversity governance, something that we know suffers in fragile and conflict-affected contexts.
Learning a new language
We need to make progress on nature, peace and security to help mitigate the impacts of war on biodiversity and ecosystems, to ensure that nature recovery can contribute to peace, and to help reduce risks to the security of communities and countries. Biodiversity loss is a global crisis and it is increasingly untenable that conversations around addressing one of the indirect drivers of that crisis remain outside the mainstream. We need new knowledge, tools, collaborations and spaces to progress work on these intersections but above all we need to learn how to articulate these relationships in ways that don’t automatically lead to securitised responses.
Last October, states, civil society and Indigenous Peoples adopted a motion on conflict-sensitive conservation at the World Conservation Congress. Instead of being framed by catastrophism, it focused on practical actions that could help explore important components of a nature, peace and security agenda. There are plenty of other actions out there too, not least figuring out whether and how the next global biodiversity framework could integrate these themes. It’s probably time we did something about that.
Doug Weir is the Director of CEOBS. If you find our work useful, please consider a donation so that we can continue it.
