Chain Reaction, #91, 2004

Author: Tim Doyle

Environmental Security in the Indian Ocean Region

When people think of security, it is usually about military security. In recent years, the impacts of terrorism, infectious diseases and economic instability have also grown greatly in terms of approaches to security issues. In this article, Tim Doyle argues that it is time to start thinking in terms of how we can achieve a just and sustainable environmental security.

The Indian Ocean region (IOR) has been correctly depicted as the 'Heart of the Third World' or the 'Ocean of the South'. The majority of people (one third of the globe’s population) fight for survival under conditions of chronic poverty, hostile national and transnational economies, and political systems often dominated by concerns of race and religion. Alongside this Ocean sits white Australia, facing the other way. Working from a post-colonial outpost, Australian policy-makers usually perceive the concept of sustainability as a domestic policy concern, making few attempts at crafting common regional environmental agendas. This case is further heightened by Australia’s historic neglect for its IOR partners. When rare links between Australia’s sustainable future are made with the IOR’s general plight, these are cast as environmental security issues, fixed firmly around the traditional and narrow notion of 'security': the security of the nation-state, and the need to defend specific nations against military attack or incursion.

Although there have been conflicts over resources since the earliest human societies, interest in both renewable and non-renewable resources within environmental security frameworks has dramatically increased since the end of the Cold War. After the so-called ‘victory of capitalism’ and the break-up of the communist-inspired USSR in the late 1980s, world orders, which had existed since World War II, were called into question. During this time of uncertainly, there re-emerged a global, almost post-modern, policy-shaping concept embracing a shared plurality of interests which crossed nation-state borders, commonly referred to as multilateralism. The multilateralist decade of the 1990s, which ended as the current phase of US unilateralism emerged in the new millennium, was an era when new boundaries and borders were drawn in the sand, as alternative concepts of identity and collectivity were imagined. One such idea, which evolved at this time, was that of environmental security.

Interest in environmental security emerged forcefully in the Brundtland Report on sustainability in 1987, and increased at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The nexus between environment, development and security was never stronger than at the recent ‘Earth Summit Plus Ten’ in Johannesburg in 2002. The notion of environmental security, however, is hotly contested. Its most common variation is concerned with the impact of environmental stress on societies, which may lead to situations of war within and between societies. In this manner, environmental security agendas are about seeking issues which, if not addressed, may provide the basis for increasing human conflicts. In this sense, environmental security is understood in somewhat negative terms.

We now need a more inclusive definition of green security and sustainability, one that transcends nation-states boundaries, relates to local conditions, which secure individual access to a basic infrastructure for survival in a geopolitical region defined by shared environmental boundaries. Environmental security, in this vein, is reliant on shared understandings of ecological conditions leading to potential and real conflicts, as well as developing a more sustained, peaceful, and resource-secure regional future.

Many western environmental security theorists fail to weigh up the costs of advanced industrialism on a global scale; not just within the boundaries of nation-states. Issues of over consumption in the minority world - and by the minority world - cannot be underestimated. The fact is that the U.S. and Japan together represent 40 per cent of the world's Gross National Product cannot be denied. In the Indian Ocean region, the consumption patterns of Australians far outweigh most of, for example their Indian and South-East African neighbours.

A concept of environmental security which is more inclusive of the interests of the majority of people in the Indian Ocean states is one that moves away ‘from viewing environmental stress as an additional threat within the (traditional) conflictual, statist framework, to placing environmental change at the centre of cooperative models of global security’.

To do this, there must be increased understanding of the environment, not as an external enemy force; but as a diverse nature which is inclusive of people; a nature which has the potential to provide secure access to individual citizens of all countries in the Indian Ocean region to basic nutrition; adequate access to healthy environments; appropriate shelter; and, a security to practice a diverse range of livelihoods which are both culturally and ecologically determined.

The concept of environmental security must be brought to life by reference to some of the most pressing environmental issues confronting the Indian Ocean region. Whilst many parts of the minority world are currently seeking technological solutions to environmental problems, for many researchers in the Indian Ocean region the major task is still documenting the list of environmental problems, attempting to collate base-line data which is sadly missing at the present time.

At its inaugural conference last November, the Indian Ocean Research Group (IORG) identified broad social and ecological problem areas, each one ecologically interlocking with the other, snowballing in magnitude, creating desperate realities for billions of people culminating in abject poverty, both in terms of biodiversity (or lack thereof) and in terms of human existence: land degradation; water; fisheries; climate change; nuclear waste; environmental refugees; and urban explosion and deterioration.

If environmental security issues are not addressed, they will lead to increases in human conflict and, ultimately, wide scale disease, poverty and death. But also, due to these problems’ regionally shared nature, they are also issues, which invite cooperation between nation-states. A shared agenda can emerge, with the potential for promoting a peaceful and extremely necessary dialogue. The long-term outcomes of such multilateral dialogues are immeasurable in positive terms.

Adapted from the paper:

Nature as Terrorist: Environmental Security in the Indian Ocean Region, presented at Ecopolitics XIV, RMIT, August, 2003.

Tim is Reader in Geographical and Environmental Studies at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. He is also Convener of the Environmental Security program for the Indian Ocean Research Group (IORG), which is working to introduce a workable concept of a regionally shared, basic and secure environmental future.

tim.doyle@adelaide.edu.au