Trajectories for Anthropocene security
By Eva Lövbrand, Malin Mobjörk and friends*
In November 2019 a group of environmental politics and security scholars came together in a cold and rainy Stockholm, Sweden, to reflect upon the years that had passed since the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment was held in the same city in June 1972. We gathered in the old prison building, Långholmen, now a museum and conference venue, to think through what ‘security’ means in a time when fossil-fuelled modes of economic development are dangerously disrupting the earth’s life support systems upon which all human societies depend. Our conversations were shaped by the ravaging wildfires that had spread across Australia at the time. Horrifying scenes of burning forests, fleeing wildlife and urban centres dimmed by smoke offered vivid examples of the global landscapes of climate insecurity that are now confronting people and ecologies across the world.
*This text is the jointly composed Afterword to the new volume, Anthropocene (In)securities, Eva Lövbrand and Malin Mobjörk eds. (SIPRI and Oxford University Press, 2021), by Anthony Burke, Sanjay Chaturvedi, Simon Dalby, Francesco Femia, Stefanie Fishel, Sebastián Granda Henao, Judith Nora Hardt, Marcus King, Björn-Ola Linnér, Eva Lövbrand, Lucile Maertens, Beatriz Rodrigues Bessa Mattos, Malin Mobjörk, Henrik Selin, Dan Smith, Rickard Söder and Caitlin Werrell. The full book is available here.
Joined in a mounting sense of crisis, we revisited the international principles and institutions envisioned in the 1972 Declaration of the UN Conference on the Human Environment to ‘inspire and guide the peoples of the world in the preservation and enhancement of the human environment’. While recognizing the significant efforts made over the past half century to chart a sustainable path for human development, we also debated the limitations and failures of international environmental diplomacy and governance. Despite the adoption of prolific environmental treaties such as the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, the global mean temperature continues to rise and the loss of critical habitats is accelerating at alarming rates.
We concluded that the development trajectory carved out 50 years ago has reached a dead end. Over the past five decades, modern societies have pursued economic development and material security at the expense of a healthy and living biosphere. The resource-intensive ways of social and economic life that are spreading across the globe have degraded the earth’s ecological systems. They are also fuelling mounting social inequalities. As highlighted in the 2020 Human Development Report, ‘the carbon and material footprint of the people who have more is choking the opportunities of the people who have less.’ Today, the world’s wealthiest 1 per cent account for more than twice the combined greenhouse gas emissions of the poorest 50 per cent. Yet, it is those who have contributed the least to the accumulation of atmospheric carbon dioxide who bear the brunt of our rapidly warming world.
We lived through exceptional socio-economic and environmental turmoil during the period that this book was written. Covid-19 quickly spread across the world in 2020, causing immense social suffering and economic disruption. Throughout the same year we also experienced: alarming heat and wildfires in Australia, California and Siberia; heavy rain and extensive flooding over large parts of Africa and Asia; severe drought in inner South America; the most intense storm season in North American history; and record-low summer sea ice in the Arctic region. These unprecedented environmental disruptions effectively illustrate the dangerous planetary condition that the Anthropocene concept seeks to capture. By burning fossil fuels, cutting down forests, rearranging landscapes, degrading soils, commodifying and trading wildlife, and driving millions of species to extinction, high-carbon societies have set in motion forces that we can neither fully foresee nor control.
On 2 December 2020 UN Secretary-General António Guterres declared the state of the planet broken. In his landmark speech at Colombia University, Guterres pointed to the dangers of our rapidly warming world and the urgent need to change course:
This is a moment of truth for people and planet alike. COVID and climate have brought us to a threshold. We cannot go back to the old normal of inequality, injustice and heedless dominion over the Earth. Instead we must step towards a safer, more sustainable and equitable path. The door is open; the solutions are there. Now is the time to transform humankind’s relationship with the natural world – and with each other. And we must do so together. Solidarity is humanity. Solidarity is survival. That is the lesson of 2020.
In line with the UN secretary-general’s call for action, we here offer a joint statement of alarm in view of mounting environmental insecurities. Although the Anthropocene binds social and ecological worlds together in complex chains of risk and vulnerability, we recognize that any search for security needs to respond to the large asymmetries in causation and suffering. If the Stockholm Declaration invited governments to insert environmental protection into dominant conceptions of international order, law and governance, the Anthropocene prompts us to rethink these conceptions and seek security in contestation with the very institutions that are tearing up the biological fabric of the earth. Honouring the spirit of the Stockholm Conference, we thus end this volume with a list of actions we think are required to change course and safely navigate the global landscape of Anthropocene insecurities. We hope these trajectories for Anthropocene security will inspire those in power to think beyond existing blueprints and to craft new forms of cooperation that bring the communities, generations and species most exposed to the dangers of a transformed global biosphere to the forefront of global affairs.
Trajectories for Anthropocene security
Confront the limits of global institutions
· Global environmental change has outpaced institutional capacity. Despite the proliferation of international law and global governance regimes, ecological destruction and human suffering is accelerating across the planet.
· Environmental regulation based on pollution control cannot effectively address the systematic disruption of the global biosphere. Pollution control mechanisms can limit specific forms of ecological damage but neglect how production and consumption decisions are rearranging ecologies on a global scale.
· Current institutions and modes of environmental regulation fail to grapple with the historical legacy of exploitation of indigenous peoples and their lands.
· As long as our global institutions value nature as a resource—and not as a home to diverse species, communities and generations—environmental degradation and harm will continue.
Bring those most at risk to the forefront of global governance
· The international community has the responsibility to prepare and protect all living beings from the dangers of a rapidly warming world. This will require global governance mechanisms that channel scientific knowledge on climate risks and vulnerability, but also listen to and learn from communities most at risk.
· Ecosystems and non-human beings have the right to flourish independently of human needs and uses. We therefore need legal, institutional and ethical innovations that secure the integrity and survival of all earth’s beings.
· Future generations have the right to healthy and flourishing lives. Children and future generations therefore need to be adequately represented in decision-making processes that affect their lives.
Rapidly decarbonize economies and lifestyles
· Climate change is a crisis of a fossil-fuelled economic system that drives high-carbon production and consumption. As climate change or biodiversity loss cannot be reversed, later clean-up is not an option. A rapid decarbonization of the global economy is therefore key to Anthropocene security.
· Security policy requires redirecting the wealth that fossil-fuelled economic growth has created to the making of low-carbon and just societies for all. This will entail accelerated investments in renewable energy technologies and the abandonment of fossil fuel subsidies.
· States, communities and individuals with large material and carbon footprints have a particular responsibility to advance a new trajectory towards low-carbon and just futures.
Pluralize and politicize knowledge on environmental insecurity
· To understand the novel landscape of Anthropocene insecurity, security scholars and analysts need to reach beyond established frameworks and ground their knowledge in the complex environmental realities of our times.
· The complex social, economic and political drivers of environmental destruction prompt us to extend beyond singular problem framings and solutions, and be attentive to multiple ways of knowing, acting and being in the world.
· Security scholars have much to learn from the experiences of communities whose security is jeopardized.
· Environmental problems are essentially political and raise critical questions about the kinds of societies and environments that we want to live in. These questions need to be subject to open scholarly and public debate.
Promote a lived and plural sense of security
· When responding to entangled systems of environmental harm and insecurity, it is important to not simply conform to existing institutional structures and policy frameworks. The monumental risks of the Anthropocene require openness to new ideas, polices and institutions.
· In a world bound together by complex chains of environmental risk and vulnerability, territorial conceptions of security premised on the protection from external threats are misleading. In a tightly interlinked world, security requires cooperative relations of care and peaceful coexistence.
· We make the case for a holistic, lived and plural sense of security, oriented towards solidarity and kinship across species, cultures, generations and worlds.
