RECIEL 9 (1) 2000. ISSN 0962 8797 Theorizing the Link Between Environmental Change and Security Edward Page INTRODUCTION The issue of environmental change (that is, of natural and human induced changes in the Earth’s environ- ment, affecting land use and land cover, bio-diversity, atmospheric composition, and climate) raises questions of great importance for the international community. Some of the most intriguing questions relate to the way in which states should co-operate in order to mitigate, or adapt to, environmental change. Other questions relate to the way in which global environmental change may exacerbate existing inequalities within, or between, states. Still further, and seemingly more intractable, questions concern the legal and moral prin- ciples (such as the concept of sustainable development, the ‘polluter-pays’ principle, and the ‘precautionary’ principle) that might provide a context for the equitable inter-temporal distribution of environmental costs and benefits. The issue that will be addressed in this article, however, is the extent to which the issue of environ- mental change can be pursued within the rubric of either human or national security. On the face of it, the prospect of securing a full rec- onciliation between the notions of environmental change and security are not encouraging. Consider Wolfers’ influential definition of security, according to which security ‘in an objective sense, measures the absence of threats to acquired values, in a subjective sense, the absence of fear that such values must be attacked’. 1 It is true that this, and other similar defi- nitions, are consistent with the notion of environmen- tal security, that is, the view that there is a distinct class of threats which arise from environmental changes and stresses. 2 However, the traditional focus of work on security has been on the investigation of military threats to the territorial integrity of a given state which arise either externally (from the military 1 Arnold Wolfers, Discord and Collaboration (Baltimore, Johns Hop- kins University Press, 1962), at 150; and quoted in Trevor C. Scanlon, ‘The Nature of International Security’, in Roger Carey and Trevor C. Salmon (eds), International Security in the Modern World (Basingstoke, Macmillan Press, 1996), at 13. 2 It is worth mentioning that there are at least three accounts of the nature of environmental security. What we might refer to as Environ- mental Security 1 focuses on the way in which environmental stress causes violent conflict (and thereby insecurity); Environmental Secur- ity 2 focuses on the way in which violent conflict exacerbates environ-  Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 33 activities of other states) or internally (from the sub- versive, and generally violent, activities of terrorist groups). The security studies literature usually, though not exclusively, views individual states as sovereign entities which pursue their own advantage in a context where other states do the same. That is, this literature is on the whole shaped by neo-liberal and neo-realist assumptions, such as the assumption that the behav- iour of states is determined by the structure of power relations in the international environment. The notion of security which flows from this view of state behav- iour, as Dabelko and Dabelko have put it, holds that security equates to ‘the effort to protect a population and territory against organized force while advancing state interests through competitive behaviour’. 3 The problem is that it is not easy to see how any non- military phenomena, scarcely those arising from highly complex and unpredictable biological and physical sys- tems associated with environmental change, might threaten a state’s security when security is viewed in this rather restricted sense. Traditional accounts of security during the cold war period held that the para- digmatic threat to national security was the capacity of another state to mount a decisive nuclear attack. This reflected the fact that cold war security theorists were preoccupied with the thought that a decisive strike against the people and institutions of any state could be translated from threat to reality in a matter of minutes. The consequence of this preoccupation was that the politics of nuclear confrontation, and nuclear weapons proliferation, became the key focus of security scholarship during this period. Threats to national security which did not have the special characteristics of nuclear attack – in short, immediacy and decis- iveness – were neglected. Several considerations have combined in recent years to undermine the view that security studies should be restricted to considering military threats, such as mental stress; and Environmental Security 3 encompasses both the way in which environmental stress causes violent conflict and the way in which violent conflict exacerbates environmental stress. The focus of this article is the first of these accounts. 3 G. Dabelko and D. Dabelko, ‘Environmental Security: Issues of Con- flict and Redefinition’, Environmental Change and Security Project Report, Spring 1995, at 3.