Environmental Security can prevent Social Instability

A recent conference at the Tata Energy Research Institute in Delhi debated several crucial questions. One of them was: can environmental degradation be responsible for civil disorder and social unrest? The answer is yes, if you consider what happened in Rwanda

by Parshuram Ray

Can ecological insecurity lead to social instability and political unrest? Is environmental degradation a recipe for economic decline and cultural decay? Can we really conserve biological diversity without protecting cultural plurality? What are the vital connections which link ecological safety with social stability, political order, economic progress and cultural advancement? These were the questions discussed at the Conference on Environmental Security, Stable Social Order and Culture. It was part of a series of seven conferences on Global Sustainable Development held in New Delhi from February 18-20, 2000 to mark the silver jubilee of the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI).

The participants at this high-profile event included a virtual who's who of the environmental world -- Klaus Topfer, executive director, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Mohamed T El-Ashry, chief executive officer and chairman, Global Environment Facility, James Gustave Speth, former administrator, UNDP, Nitin Desai, under-secretary general, Economic and Social Affairs, United Nations, Robert S McNamara, former president, World Bank. The event which was inaugurated by President K R Narayanan was also attended by some Nobel laureates and political personalities like Hashimoto, former prime minister of Japan, Ola Ullsten, former prime minister of Sweden and India's former prime minister I K Gujral.

The main theme paper for the conference, `Environmental Security, Stable Social Order and Culture' was presented by El-Ashry. In a very interesting, instructive and insightful paper he defined environmental security as "the state of dynamic equilibrium between the appetite of mankind and resources of nature". But environmental security is not a construct any single community or country can assure for itself by itself. It depends "on millions of actions and interactions in hundreds of thousands of jurisdictions no single authority can single-handedly control". These are environmental forces that transcend borders and oceans to threaten the health and welfare of people thousands of miles apart. Winds that carry acid rain do not respect political boundaries. Pollution that the Danube and the Dnieper carry into the Black Sea affects fishing and recreation on the coastline of six nations. And the greenhouse gases that rise from the United States or Brazil or China or India affect more than their country or region of origin. They are changing the climate of the entire globe.

Brief shifts in weather patterns have caused enormous disruption in Sudan, in Somalia, in Ethiopia and across the Sahel in Sub-Saharan Africa. The severe drought in the 1980s coupled with unsound environmental practices, turned millions of subsistence farmers and herders into refugees. It overturned civil order. "It is possible that these were purely vagaries of nature. But a much broader phenomenon, the global climate change now underway, is almost certainly a product of human activity. And its powers of disruption are all too easy to imagine. The melting of 40 per cent of Arctic ice in the 20th century and the projection of a further rise in sea levels during the 21st century, for instance, could translate into the inundation of 17 per cent of the territory of Bangladesh and the homelessness of some 10 million people there. It was only a quarter-century ago that civil war sent another 10 million refugees from Bangladesh into India. Where will the flood of victims of the future find refuge?" asked El-Ashry.

Exploring further the deeper connections between ecological safety and civil order, El-Ashry said that where poverty and population pressure intersect, humans and their environment suffer, which in turn can disrupt civil order. The heart-rending and mind-numbing images of mass killings in Rwanda in 1994 were reported to be the consequence of fierce tribal rivalries. But few of us were told by the media that these took place in a country where population densities of some 700 per square mile are due to reach 1,800 per square mile in less than 30 years. In the 1980s half of all Rwandan agriculture was carried out on the steep slopes of hills, and the resulting erosion reduced food production by one-fifth in the decade before the genocide. The main background for the genocide was prepared by ecological degradation. Tribal rivalries only provided the spark.

According to a recent UNEP assessment, two-thirds of the farmland of Africa is degraded to some degree. Overgrazing alone has seriously damaged half a billion hectares of land in Africa and mismanaged or unmanaged forestry has left that continent with only 30 per cent of its historical stands of timber. In Haiti, deforestation and overcrowding perpetuate a grinding poverty. A similar explanation could be given for the episodes of guerrilla war in Mexico's Chiapas province, where more than half the farmers -- like those in Rwanda -- cultivate steep hillsides. Seventy per cent of Mexico's agricultural land is affected by erosion, a statistic which goes a long way toward explaining the steady northward migration into the US.

If population growth continues to outpace the creation of new jobs and new food supplies, if pressures on natural resources continue to mount and economic growth proves to be unsustainable, if social and ethnic tensions increase, the impact is bound to be felt in many spheres -- from the collapse of government to the adoption of authoritarian measures, to waves of ecological and other refugees, to civil unrest and regional conflict. Claus Topfer says that there are 25 million ecological refugees, while the number of traditional refugees in the world is only 20 million.

Stability eludes many countries because the root cause of peoples' suffering is not only being ignored, it is not even recognized. Says El-Ashry, "Environmental degradation, poor economic policies, and the population explosion have pushed millions of people into cities that are unprepared for them. A lack of education, training and job opportunities for young people -- in short, little hope for the future -- ignites their discontent, resulting in extremism, crime and even terrorism. Developing countries require a comprehensive programme of economic development and environmental protection and rehabilitation, offering hope for all their citizens and not just certain segments of society. Throughout history, nations have identified security threats as military and political challenges coming from a sovereign power. More recently, we have come to see the civil unrest that is the most common form of political violence in our world today as a source of wider instability. But we need to move beyond these familiar definitions to a new understanding of the global, social and environmental situation as a very real threat to the security of nations and of the international order."

Therefore, environmental destruction can only lead to social instability, political unrest, economic decline and cultural decay. El-Ashry concluded his presentation by saying, "The 21st century can provide answers to many of the questions that plagued humanity in the 20th century. Global environmental security is not a matter of overcoming a marketplace rival or restraining an armed neighbour. What counts is the will and ingenuity to create and preserve a setting in which material well-being increases without exhausting the natural wealth on which it rests. Attaining global environmental security would indeed lead to social stability and shield us from shared dangers, but the shield must be designed in a cooperative manner, built with sensitivity to cultural diversity and maintained by common effort."

Parshuram Ray is an environmental activist, researcher and writer based in New Delhi.

Published in Humanscape, May-2000.