Environmental Challenges and National Security: An Indian Perspective

By Dr Arvind Kumar, President, India Water Foundation, New Delhi.

**This is an abridged version of the paper prsented by the author at the International Seminar on “Disaster and Environmental Management: A Global Perspective” held at Kashi Vidyapeeth Varanasi on 17-18 March 2012. 

Environmental challenges in the form of climate change are regarded by many people as a slow process that takes place in a predominantly linear manner. However, the experts see a paradigm shift concerning the understanding of the climate system. Thus, it is now commonly held that the processes of a changing climate within the Earth’s system are largely non-linear and often involve positive feedback and threshold effects. The scientific research suggests that once the global average temperature rises above certain thresholds, the plausibility of severe and abrupt changes within the Earth’s system increases due to positive feedback loops. Human induced global warming and other human alterations of the Earth system may trigger radical environmental changes, increase the possibility of abrupt climatic shifts and threaten to change the climate in an unprecedented manner on a regional or even a global scale.

Currently, the available evidence shows that the risk of abrupt and dangerous climate change phenomena will increase significantly with temperature rising between 1.5 and 3 °C above pre-industrial times. Scientists argue that the average global temperature rise should stay below 2 °C. Although the threshold for future abrupt climate changes cannot be predicted precisely, policy makers need to recognize that these scenarios are possible as the current temperature rise of 0.7 °C (and the world is already committed to another 0.7 °C) has already reduced the window of opportunity and leaves only little room to prevent the unmanageable.

Rising temperatures in most cases have adverse effects on the entire globe. Global warming is happening already. Due to historical and current greenhouse gas emissions the world is exposed to future warming with all its consequences. In a business as usual scenario, a future and further warming of the Earth by 2 – 4.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century is predicted with great certainty. Global warming knows neither borders nor fairness. Future impacts will not be equally spread over the planet but are likely to be most severe in the world’s tropical regions.

The developing countries are generally considered to be most vulnerable to the consequences of climate change, mainly because of the lack of coping capacities for a changing environment. The Least Developed Countries (LDCs) produce only a very small amount of global greenhouse gases, but they are most vulnerable to climatic changes – this is mainly a consequence of the poverty in these countries.

Regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia, which already have naturally high climatic variability and frequent climate extremes, are already exposed to multiple risks.

Climate change threatens to increase the vulnerability and add burdens for about 2 billion people living in regions that have contributed the least to global warming. Therefore the future impacts of a changing climate are to be understood as a global moral challenge that has to be addressed by all of us in all seriousness. Moreover, as former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has pointed climate change is also a threat to peace and security.

Climate Change-Security Linkages

Scholars and policymakers, along with the media, have increasingly been making connections between climate change impacts and security at multiple levels. In some ways, this trend can be viewed as part of the tendency since the late 1990s of “securitizing” non-traditional threats such as health, human rights, transnational crime, and the environment (Buzan, et al 1998). Framing such issues as security concerns is often presented as a way of gaining attention from high-level decision-makers and mobilizing resources (Dabelko, 2008).

In order to understand relationship between security and the environment, it is essential to briefly overview two notions – environmental conflict and environmental security.   The notion of ‘environmental conflict’links the environment and environmental problems to traditional security concerns, including a general concern for state security. Most authors who use an environmental conflict discourse focus on the possibility that groups within society will engage in violent conflict over natural resources. These conflicts can be the product of scarcity (Homer-Dixon 1999), abundance (Collier 2007), or dependence (Le Billon 2004) on natural resources and are typically understood to threaten the stability of the state.

The key challenge is to identify those most immediately at risk of conflict and design policy interventions to avoid conflict and ensure state stability. This is largely understood to be the responsibility of state institutions. Due to the sense of urgency embedded in this discourse, policies are likely to be aimed at short-term adaptation strategies as a means of avoiding violent conflict.

The notion of environmental securityis concerned with the negative impacts of environmental degradation for human beings. While the notion of environmental conflict is largely state-centric and can still directly be linked to military security, environmental securityis much more closely linked to notions of security at an individual level, or human security (O‟Brien 2006).

It is worth noting here that the concerns embedded in environmental securityare more specific than the general concept of human security, which can refer to anything that negatively impacts the safety and survival of humans. In this discourse, the threat is located in negative consequences of environmental damage and those who are vulnerable are all human beings (Dalby 2002).

This concept of human vulnerability is widely used in general discussions of global environmental change, and climate change in particular (Gaillard 2010). According to Gaillard, much of the literature on vulnerability focuses on “the susceptibility to suffer damage in a potentially dangerous event, either natural or economic or political” (Gaillard 2010, 224). In the context of these debates, vulnerability stresses the condition of humans being susceptible to individual and collective harm because of environmental change.

Viewed in a broad spectrum, the notion of environmental securityis broader than the notion of environmental conflict because of the former‟s interest in issues concerning all of humanity and the latter‟s more focused concern with those susceptible to resource conflict. While there is overlap between these two notions, each focuses on particular elements of security and its relationship to the environment. In other words, each notion or discourse has its own set of storylines for discussing security and environment connections. These storylines determine how broadly or narrowly key ideas and terms are conceptualized. Additionally, each produces distinct understandings of the security implications of environmental degradation, and yields unique policy recommendations.

The Indian Perspective

Climate change impacts upon India’s security in a big way. The Indian economy is heavily dependent on climate-sensitive sectors like forestry and agriculture and is, therefore, highly vulnerable to the impacts of global warming. In a ‘business as usual’ scenario, sea level rise, extreme weather events and changing rainfall patterns are expected to increase with temperatures rising up to almost 5 degrees by the end of the century. Thus, climate change could imply additional stress on India’s national ecological and socio-economic systems which are already facing enormous pressures due to the fast pace of industrialization (IPCC 2001). Scourging floods and long lasting droughts as well as intensified variations between these two extremes are already creating enormous challenges for the society and ecosystems in India. However, some recent studies seem to confirm the assumption that these challenges could just be forerunners of even worse threats in the future. Deglaciation of the Himalayan region and the increasing variability of the Indian summer monsoon could destabilize the ecological equilibrium in India in the near future.

Security-related impacts of Climate Change in India

The impact of the changing climate is likely to significantly increase environmental stress and in turn the tensions in a number of regions that are already affected by unfavourable natural and social conditions. So far, much attention has been directed towards the consequences of rising sea levels. A number of the world’s largest metropolitan areas are located on coastlines; accordingly the social and economic impacts of the displacement of peoples are likely to be enormous. However, the scenarios for regions like Asia and India in particular outline the increasing risks of changes in rainfall patterns which are likely to increase the spread of land degradation and desertification. In this light, increasing competition over water resources is very likely linked to increased risks of human suffering, social unrest and also transboundary political tension.

The questions as to what extent societies are able to deal with changing natural conditions and avoid the outbreak of violent conflicts in the future pose serious assessment challenges. The manifestation of these conflicts is diverse because ‘Environmental Conflicts’ manifest themselves as political, social, economic, ethnic, religious or territorial conflicts, or conflicts over resources or national interests. They are traditional conflicts induced by an environmental degradation.

Current Conflict Configurations in India

Water stress on an unprecedented scale will be the most serious consequence of the climate changes in India. India has already faced a number of conflicts on water allocation. Tensions have occurred during regional as well as transboundary water disputes. To a certain degree these tensions are attributed to the lack of a clear legal framework for water permits, provision for water sharing, and effectively binding arbitration (Saleth ,2004). As a result, there are numerous conflict constellations – water disputes are a persistent event in India. It is worth mentioning, that in addition to these conflict constellations, there are also tremendous effects of climate change or variations on a regional and local level below the level of intra or inter-state violent conflict. According to the disaster database EM-Dat there were 35 extreme weather events (droughts, flooding and storms) with more than 500 casualties respectively during that period. As a result of Tropical Cyclone “05B” in 1999 nearly 10.000 people died mainly in the Jagatsinghpur district. The tsunami tragedy of December 2004 also claimed a heavy toll of human lives and loss of property.

Conclusion

In the case of India, it is more than unclear if the existing cooperative approaches of national resource management are stable and flexible enough to adapt to the upcoming challenges. Aaron Wolf has opined that research on ‘environment, conflict, and cooperation’ has – especially with regard to water scarcity – argued that environmental interdependence among parties can form the basis for proactive confidence building and cooperative behaviour across lines of tension (Wolf, 2004). However, the research findings from climate science suggest severe and abrupt changes on an unprecedented scale. As a result, new dimensions of environmental stress, resource scarcity, and conflicts are likely if no far-reaching GHG mitigation actions are taken. There is a need for perspective on assessment of climate change-induced environmental conflicts. Several approaches exist to map possible conflict hot spots. However, there is a need to go beyond a solely quantitative assessment of such potential conflict spots. This implies that quantitative analyses on climate change impacts must be combined with case study oriented qualitative analyses. It is equally necessary to take account of a combination of factors that are relevant to assess the susceptibility of societies towards abrupt future climate changes.

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