Environmental Security: A Look at Current Issues Around the World

Recent concerns about potential security issues surrounding the impacts of global climate change have sparked a renewed interest in the area of Environmental Security. Environmental Security (ES) touches many areas of concern to policy makers: water resources, food production and consumption, population dynamics, energy production and consumption, and vulnerability to natural hazards such as those produced by extreme weather events or climatic anomalies. Environmental degradation can contribute to security problems such as resource competition and conflict, potential for failed states, population radicalization, and mass population migrations to more developed regions. As connections among these areas are explored and dependencies discovered, policy formulation needs to be informed by these discoveries, and strategies for dealing with these problems must be developed using the appropriate instruments of national power within existing resources. The paper will discuss the most significant ES events throughout the last year from different regions of the world. The goals are to describe the extent to which ES permeates a lot of regional problems around the globe, and illustrate the similarities and differences between the ES issues in various regions.