Anthropocene

Thoughts about a nuclear-free and ecologically sustainable world order

/ Dan Smith / Leave a comment

This is a difficult time to be talking about disarmament or even arms control. The geopolitical context is about as unhelpful as it could possibly be and it is hard to imagine circumstances in which the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons is ratified by all the world’s states. And yet, talking about disarmament and imagining a nuclear-free world is what I do in an article newly published by the Journal for Peace and Nuclear Disarmament. To make a challenging ask yet more demanding, my argument is that we – humankind – need a new order that will guard not only against the existential nuclear threat but also against the dangers arising from severe ecological disruption.  

What follows is a short version distilled from the first draft of the article. Among other things, it leaves out some of the political philosophy. For the full version, follow the link.

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Five global hinge points

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Among those sayings that encapsulate political wisdom but are either inaccurate or apocryphal (such as the ancient Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’ that is neither Chinese nor ancient, or the misinterpretation of the Chinese character for crisis as fusion of danger and opportunity), I have a soft spot for the one by Harold Macmillan. When asked either what he most feared or what was most troubling when he was UK Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, he may have replied, ‘Events, my dear boy, events.’

If he didn’t say it, he should have. The press of events is the bane of those trying to steer a strategic path in government. Today, it is particularly difficult because there are so many events consuming so much government oxygen while we face five major hinge points in global affairs that complicate everything.

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World order §6: Ecological disruption and cooperation

/ Dan Smith / 2 Comments

Researchers, commentators and policy-makers are increasingly aware of the negative effects of climate change for peace and security. Climate change undermines conditions for peace and security for all, while increased conflict, disputation, instability and disorder add to the difficulties of arriving at agreements to slow down global warming. When we think about peace and security and about world order, climate change – and, by extension, the full spectrum of ecological disruption – should be in the centre of our attention.

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360 degree security

/ Dan Smith / 3 Comments

Global security has been declining for some years now. There are many markers of this persistent deterioration – massive loss of life, rising numbers of displaced people (the estimate for 2024 is 130 million, a larger population than all but 9 countries), deepening crisis and confrontation, and unsolved social and ecological problems.

So how do we think coherently about security in these times when there are so many sources of insecurity ?

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Ecological security: five questions

/ Dan Smith / 2 Comments

Ecological disruption takes many forms and poses many challenges because it leads to a weakening of the foundations in nature on which human communities and societies are based. One of these sets of challenges is in the security sphere, as set out in the recent SIPRI report, Five questions on ecological security, which I co-authored with Rod Schoonover. 

The security challenges of today and tomorrow include some that are unprecedented because they are driven by ecological disruption, the extent and kinds of which are themselves unprecedented. The issues are new and how they combine together is new. It follows that we need some serious thinking and rethinking about security.

I have been pondering and re-pondering what security means in some recent blog posts, and in last week’s post I looked at the policy implications of focussing on ecological disruption. Basically, step one is to find out more about the problems and their likely health, economic, behavioural, social and conflictual knock-on effects.

In this post, I summarise some of the science that lays out the challenge of ecological disruption in the security sphere.

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Ecological insecurity is about more than climate change

/ Dan Smith / 6 Comments

Beyond the climate crisis, other related aspects of ecological disruption are bad news for peace. Too little is known about the links between environmental change and its impact on societies, politics and peace, in part because there are many gaps in scientific knowledge about the dimensions and trajectory of disruption. As a result, not only can we not provide all the answers we need in order to know what is unfolding and how to respond, we also don’t know all or even most of the questions to ask. That said, we know enough to know there’s a problem, enough to understand the urgency of knowing more.

SIPRI has just published a report, Five questions on ecological security, which I co-authored with Rod Schoonover. It outlines the issues and begins the task of figuring out what to do about them. This post is a much-shortened version of the policy parts of the full report; my next post will summarise some of the underlying hard science knowledge and gaps. Or, to get it all in one go, turn to the full report.

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Insecurity, the Anthropocene & nature’s tipping points

/ Dan Smith / 1 Comment

Each February, leaders, policy-makers, thinkers and practitioners in the field of security, broadly defined, get together at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich for a three day international conference. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2019, Germany’s then Chancellor, Angela Merkel, opened her speech by reflecting on the world’s entry into a new geochronological age – the Anthropocene Epoch. 

She explained, “This means that we are living in an age in which humankind’s traces penetrate so deeply into the Earth that future generations will regard it as an entire age created by humans.” She briefly touched on different human impacts on the environment and then said, “All of this has implications for global security and for the issues that are being discussed right here, right now.”

Right here, right now, too right.

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