Resource Scarcity: National Security Issue or World Issue?

Alec Stewart

GVPT 306

11/11/14

Resource Scarcity: National Security Issue or World Issue?

Throughout class we have debated whether resource scarcity is a national security issue, with most people siding with the resource scarcity and environmental degradation being matters of national security. However, I posit that by making environmental degradation a national security issue stagnation occurs regarding the world’s ability to find suitable ways to deal with the issue. According to the vast majority of the scientific world, the Earth needs 2.5 Earths to sustain itself at the current rate. This is an alarming statistic, so why is nothing major being done?

            By making environmental degradation and resource scarcity a national security issue, the ability for international cooperation is lost. This is evident in the many failed international treaties that aim to curb environmental degradation like the Kyoto Proposal. Countries are worried that if they are the first one to bite the bullet, and cut emissions for example, they will be at a competitive disadvantage with the rest of the world, compromising their national security, and for good reason. As it stands now, the economic power and the national security of a state go hand in hand, so for a country to give up some substantial amount of economic prosperity in the name of environmental protection is unheard of because this would also jeopardize the security of the state as a whole. Until the problem of environmental degradation is seen as a problem the world has to conquer together, with unilateral cooperation, the problem will not be solved because countries simply do not trust one another enough to cut back on their use of environmental resources/GHG’s.

Now, someone might say that through a good regime design like one created through the Montreal Protocol the problem of environmental degradation can be stopped on an international scale. However, environmental degradation is a much vaster problem than just one GHG, like CFC’s for example. Because of this, a much larger international effort must be embarked upon, one that demands full cooperation between the entire world. I think it is unrealistic for a regime to be designed in this way because countries would have to be willing to give up substantial amounts of power for such a regime to be created which would in turn compromise state security.

Countries (esp. developed), and by extension the citizens of these countries, simply value the national security of their state and the status quo of economic prosperity (which inevitably involves the continued degradation of the environment) much more than they value curbing climate change or conserving resources. The average person lives in the now, not the future, and for most people the disastrous repercussions of environmental degradation are far in the future, whether this is true or not. I don’t think any broad sweeping international policies aimed at stopping environmental degradation will occur until the citizens of the world see environmental degradation as a problem we have to solve together, and as a problem we have to solve now.