An analysis of past projections and current trends in population and the environment, with suggestions for future policies that will help ensure ecological security.

Economic development, population growth and poor resource management have combined to alter the planet's natural environment in dramatic and alarming ways. The field of environmental security has matured in response to improved scientific understanding of the causes and trends of global environmental change. Research conducted in the past two decades has grappled with this core set of questions in a variety of ways, generating findings and hypotheses that have stimulated considerable intellectual and policy activity. This volume takes stock of the research, and organizes it into a framework, described in the first chapter of the volume, that clarifies its achievements as well as identifies its weaknesses and gaps. This is followed by seven chapters representing the various ways in which environmental change and security have been linked, and including the principal critiques of this linkage. A third section explores six key issue areas: water, population, development, food, energy and climate change. The book concludes with a chapter on the future of environmental security.

Over the past 20 years scholars, policymakers, and the media have increasingly recognized the links between both traditional and non-traditional security issues and the changing condition of the global environment. Concepts such as 'environmental security' and 'resource conflict' have been used to hint at these significant linkages. While there has been a good deal of scholarly work conducted that seeks to identify the ways that actors link these concepts, there has been little examination of the intersection between approaches to environmental security and gender. This book explores this intersection to provide an insight into the gendered nature of both global environmental politics and security studies. It examines how the issues of security and the environment are linked to theory and practice, and the extent to which gender informs these discussions. By adopting a feminist environmental security discourse, this book provides crucial redefinitions of key concepts and offers new insights into the ways we understand security-environment connections. Case studies evaluate if, and how, environment and security discourses are being used to understand a range of environmental issues, and how a feminist environmental security discourse contributes to our understanding of security-environment connections. This multidisciplinary volume draws on literature from the environmental sciences, security studies and sociology to highlight the complex human insecurities that often accompany environmental change. As conceptualizations of security continue to shift and broaden to include environmental issues and concerns, it is imperative that gender informs the debate.

Climate change is increasingly recognised as a security issue. Yet this recognition belies contestation over what security means and whose security is viewed as threatened. Different accounts – here defined as discourses – of security range from those focused on national sovereignty to those emphasising the vulnerability of human populations. This book examines the ethical assumptions and implications of these 'climate security' discourses, ultimately making a case for moving beyond the protection of human institutions and collectives. Drawing on insights from political ecology, feminism and critical theory, Matt McDonald suggests the need to focus on the resilience of ecosystems themselves when approaching the climate-security relationship, orienting towards the most vulnerable across time, space and species. The book outlines the ethical assumptions and contours of ecological security before exploring how it might find purchase in contemporary political contexts. A shift in this direction could not be more urgent, given the current climate crisis.

The work is an authentic and comprehensive one on environmental security. Some important topics discussed are Environmental security a theoretical quest, politics of environment security and problems of widening, environmental scarcity of resources, global climate change etc. Useful for environmentalists, researchers.

Does a connection exist between environmental degradation, resource scarcity and violent conflicts? Global environmental changes, such as climate change and sea level rise, shortage of fresh water and rapid soil degradation increasingly highlight the dimensions of environmental change in foreign and security policy. To reverse these negative environmental consequences over the long term, comprehensive and preventive policy approaches are urgently required. This state-of-the-art book contains numerous articles by renown German-speaking experts from different scientific disciplines as well as international and European political advisors and diplomats. Together they discuss the complex causes of environmentally induced conflicts and the political and societal mechanisms for conflict prevention.

Ecoviolence explores links between environmental scarcities of key renewable resources_such as cropland, fresh water, and forests_and violent rebellions, insurgencies, and ethnic clashes in developing countries. Detailed contemporary studies of civil violence in Chiapas, Gaza, South Africa, Pakistan, and Rwanda show how environmental scarcity has played a limited to significant role in causing social instability in each of these contexts. Drawing upon theory and key findings from the case studies, the authors suggest that environmental scarcity will worsen in many poor countries in coming decades and will become an increasingly important cause of major civil violence.

Jon Barnett takes on the military-industrial interests of those in the establishment to reveal how ordinary human beings must have a safe environment in which security is subordinate to care of the planet and its delicate ecosystems.

An argument that resource scarcity and environmental degradation can provide an impetus for cooperation among countries.