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A 168 VOLUME 112 | NUMBER 3 | March 2004 • Environmental Health Perspectives

Environews Focus

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Focus | Global Resources

Environmental Health Perspectives • VVOLUME 112 | NUMBER 3 | March 2004 A 169

Central America has always beenprone to earthquakes and hurri-

canes, but when Hurricane Mitchstruck in October 1998, the countriesof the region were para-lyzed by a scale ofdestruction that seemed,to many, unbelievable.The storm caused morethan 10,000 deaths;according to Conservingthe Peace: Resources,Livelihoods and Security,a 2003 collection of casestudies published by theInternational Institutefor Sustainable Develop-ment, the subsequentflooding and landslides wiped outmore than 2,000 potable water systemsin Honduras and Nicaragua alone, leftmillions without dependable drinkingwater, and forced 2 million peoplefrom their homes. Crowded shelterscreated unsanitary conditions andfueled the spread of diseases such asdengue. The disaster stretched nationalgovernments to the brink of failure.

Analysts found that the natural dis-aster was vaulted to the status of

unprecedented catastrophe by decadesof conflict involving deforestation, ero-sive farming, and land use changes, andthe resettlement of hundreds of thou-

sands of people in thewake of civil wars inGuatemala and El Salvadorplaced large populations inrural areas that were proneto flooding. All of thesefactors together weakenedthe region’s mountainouslandscapes and made themvulnerable to landslidesand exceptionally destruc-tive flooding.

Until recently, littleconsideration has gone

into the link between environmentalpolicy and security, despite the factthat the stakes for both are often simi-lar. As Tulane University law professorEric Dannenmaier noted in the 2001policy paper Environmental Securityand Governance in the Americas, if aforeign plot threatened to poison acity’s water supply or pollute an entireriver, that nation’s security forceswould react quickly—but when a slow-er-moving but more predictable

ABUSE, SCARCITY,AND INSECURITY

Wages of war? Decades of conflictplus one natural disaster spells chaos.

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threat to environmental security is at work,governments are unlikely to bring the sameforce to bear.

In the past decade, however, a conceptu-al framework has emerged for consideringthe goals of sustainable environmental man-agement together with concerns for nationalsecurity. The real question, according toDannenmaier, is how planners can considerlong-term environmental interventionsstrategically to avert security threats. In thepast, he says, the defense communitybecame concerned with environmental stres-sors only when their consequences reachedthe level where they led to violent conflict.But as the damage wrought by Hurricane

Mitch suggests, by addressing tensionsrelated to resource management earlier,governments may avoid more expensiveand drastic responses later.

Today, a new kind of natural resourceanalysis has assumed priority in quarters thatmight once have surprised environmentalmanagers. A growing body of literature sug-gests that rights to use resources such as landand water can sometimes be central tounderstanding the dynamics of national andregional security. In a variation on the dic-tum “follow the money,” development plan-ners are saying “follow the cracks in thelandscape”—and they are finding that whatappear at first glance to be strictly political

tensions are often, in fact, rooted in envi-ronmental strains.

Shift in ThinkingWhen the Cold War ended and the dynam-ics of superpower geopolitics began shifting,officials grappled with identifying the newforces that shaped global and regional sta-bility. Intelligence officials found that manyyoung democracies relied relatively heavilyon rural economies, and in those placesnational security was particularly vulnerableto instability caused by conflicts over natu-ral resources. “It was like unraveling a ball ofyarn,” recalls Darci Glass-Royal, cofounderof the Foundation for EnvironmentalSecurity & Sustainability (FESS), a privatenonprofit organization outside Washington,D.C. “It’s all connected.”

Water issues in the former Soviet Uniongained new prominence, for example. Insupport of an ill-conceived idea of growingwater-hungry cotton in the arid high-desertclimate of Central Asia, the Cold War gianthad built an elaborate irrigation infrastruc-ture linking the arid Central Asianrepublics. But the system was not main-tained; with the dissolution of the SovietUnion, there was no longer any centralcoordination at all. Water distribution fal-tered, while sources became salinized.Today, access to water remains a key factorin Central Asian security.

The 1997 establishment of the CentralIntelligence Agency (CIA) Director ofCentral Intelligence Environment Center(whose duties have since been folded backinto the agency’s Office of TransnationalIssues) signaled a growing concern amongU.S. security officials with issues such asland use, water rights, and the impact of theenvironment on the spread of infectious


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Setting the stage for disaster. Decades of conflict weakened Central American landsto the point that when Hurricane Mitch hit in 1998, the infrastructural and human healtheffects were apocalyptic.

Change in an uncertain world. Today, children play on an abandoned ship at what was once theedge of the Aral Sea. Unsustainable environmental manipulation and mismanagement of resourceshas left many former Soviet republics pressed for water.

Environmental Health Perspectives • VOLUME 112 | NUMBER 3 | March 2004 A 171

diseases. The center’s intelligence expertsset out to look at regional security relation-ships in a new way: In a given region, whatare the ongoing environmental stresses?What is a country’s capacity for coping withthose stresses—how will its health infra-structure, for example, respond to a diseaseepidemic? Could field clinics report out-breaks to a central office quickly, howwould vaccine stocks be mobilized, andwhat factors might hamper accurate report-ing (such as economic pressures to notreport outbreaks in popular tourist areas)?What might happen if the population pres-sures of that society overwhelmed its envi-ronmental capacity?

By the same token, environmental sci-entists have begun to realize that informa-tion held as classified by security officialscan be useful in understanding naturalresource dynamics. Satellite images gath-ered by intelligence agencies are often ofhigher resolution than images in the publicdomain. In some cases, such informationmight be made publicly available withoutcompromising national security.

Early in the Clinton administration,through an agreement with the CIA director,

a program called MEDEA began to makeavailable classified material for screening byU.S. environmental scientists with appro-priate security clearances, so that they couldidentify potentially useful data. Accordingto Michael McElroy, Gilbert ButlerProfessor of Environmental Studies atHarvard and former chair of MEDEA, theprogram scored accomplishments thatincluded the release of temperature data forthe Arctic Ocean, which is important inglobal climate change studies and which fordecades, had been held only by the U.S. andSoviet navies. (The program eventually wasshut down after the 2000 presidential elec-tion because it was seen as a pet project offormer vice president Al Gore.)

Environmental planners have alsofound methodologies from intelligence tobe useful for identifying resource stresspoints. At FESS, Glass-Royal and col-leagues have conducted environmentalsecurity assessments for various governmentagencies. Such an assessment starts with asnapshot of a region’s environmental base-line and overlays more in-depth analysis ofkey economic and security factors. InNepal, such a study included problems that

environmental managers have long knownabout (such as deforestation, populationpressures as available land holdings areincreasingly divided among successive gen-erations, and disputes between Nepal andneighboring India over water rights), butalso activities that many environmentalagencies might consider beyond theirsphere. Nepal’s Maoist insurgent move-ment, for instance, has apparently fundedrebel activities with profits from productssuch as marijuana and medicinal herbs har-vested in forest lands.

The Nature of the ThreatExperts confess that they have few statisticsthat adequately characterize the complexrelationships between security concerns andmanagement of natural resources, but somefigures hint at the dimensions. One naturalresource that is increasingly scarce and like-ly to trigger tensions worldwide is freshwater. Less than 3% of the world’s water isfresh, and most of that is frozen in ice capsand glaciers. Humankind already uses near-ly half of the accessible runoff from lakes,rivers, and aquifers, according to the WorldResources Institute, and growing demand

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Exploitation to fund the fight. Military, police, and rebel forces such as these Maoist insurgents often fund their activities by exploiting natural resources,such as timber and other salables grown on forest lands.

for water is expected to exceed supply wellbefore 2025.

Other telling figures lie in the interre-lated factors of the environment, refugees,and conflict. The Washington, D.C.–basedWorldwatch Institute estimates in its book-let Vital Signs 2003 that environmental dis-asters are responsible for nearly 60% of theworld’s 43 million refugees. During famine,drought, or flooding, whole populationsare forced from their homes to seek refugeelsewhere. Once in a new place, theirimmediate concerns for survival—food,water, and shelter—override concernsabout wise environmental management.This can spur a cycle of resource degrada-tion and conflict.

In late 1996, for example, when morethan 600,000 refugees from Rwanda andBurundi arrived in northwest Tanzania,they consumed more than 200 metric tonsof firewood every day, according to theUnited Nations Environment Programme(UNEP). The resulting deforestationaffected an area of 570 square kilometers.UNEP has estimated that environmentalrehabilitation of refugee camps in Africaalone, which has roughly one-sixth of theworld’s refugees, could cost up to US$150million each year.

Although much is still unknown aboutthe relationships between scarcity and con-flict, experts are beginning to elucidatesome patterns. Richard Matthew, an associ-ate professor of international and environ-mental politics at the University ofCalifornia, Irvine, performed a series of casestudies for Conserving the Peace in which heenvironmental security issues from variousperspectives. Within those case studies, hedistills the relationships down to a few basicscenarios: unsustainable use of resources,inequitable access to resources, use ofresources to finance conflict, and incompat-ible uses leading to conflict.

Scenarios of DesperationForests are one resource that figures in to atleast two of the scenarios described byMatthew. Consider the problem ofinequitable access. According to the WorldBank, forests worldwide contribute direct-ly to the livelihood of 90% of the world’spoorest 1.2 billion people, and where rulesgoverning these people’s access to nearbyforests are unclear—for example, whenpeople who have for generations collectedfirewood or fruit from a nearby forest areconfronted with new laws that ignore thattraditional access—researchers have foundserious threats to health and stability.

For example, in 1997–1998, Indonesianofficials estimate, fires scorched more than300,000 hectares of forest and plantations



Resources on Conflict and the Environment

Beyond the International Year of Mountains: Conflict International Partnership for Sustainable Development in Mountain Regionshttp://www.mountains2002.org/issues/i-conflict.htmlExplains why most wars and armed conflicts take place in the world’s highlands, andhow conflict affects mountainous regions.

Bishkek Global Mountain Summit: Conflicts and Peace in Mountain Areas Mountain Forumhttp://www.mtnforum.org/bgms/paperc2.htmE-conference debate explores examples of and specific issues related to conflict inmountainous regions.

East Asia and Pacific Environmental Initiative: Conflict and the EnvironmentU.S. Agency for International Development/U.S. State Departmenthttp://eapei.home.att.net/Links/conflictlinks.htmSummarizes and links to a wealth of online resources related to conflict and the envi-ronment.

Environmental Change and Security ProjectWoodrow Wilson International Center for Scholarshttp://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=topics.home&topic_id=1413Explores the connections among natural resource scarcity, conflict, human insecurity,and foreign policy.

Forest and Poverty Mapping in South AsiaWorld Conservation Monitoring Centre/United Nations Environment Programmehttp://www.wcmc.org.uk/forest/poverty/index.htmLets users customize maps showing forest cover and indicators of poverty and popula-tion pressure in South Asian countries.

Global Atlas of Infectious DiseasesWorld Health Organizationhttp://globalatlas.who.int/Combines standardized data and statistics for infectious diseases at the country,regional, and global level, allowing for analysis and comparison.

Global Environmental Change and Human Security ProjectUniversity of California, Irvinehttp://www.gechs.uci.edu/Explores how environmental change affects the lives and welfare of individuals andgroups around the world, especially in developing countries.

Inventory of Conflict and EnvironmentAmerican Universityhttp://www.american.edu/TED/ice/ice.htmCategorizes narrative case studies by topic, region, and period of history, allowing pol-icy makers to review case studies that might be comparable to emerging problems andglean guidance for performing initial assessments.

ReliefWeb MapCentreUnited Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairshttp://www.reliefweb.int/w/map.nsf/home?openFormOffers maps of disaster sites, with links to relevant reports.

United Nations Environment NetworkUnited Nations Environment Programmehttp://www.unep.net/Categorizes authoritative environmental information by theme and region.


on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra. Inhealth terms, the fires destroyed delicateecosystems, forfeited unknown treasures ofbiodiversity, and blanketed much ofSoutheast Asia with a thick haze. The WorldWide Fund for Nature estimates that thehaze affected the health of as many as 75million people in six countries, with perhaps40,000 people hospitalized for respiratoryand other pollution-related ailments such asasthma, bronchitis, pneumonia, and eyeand skin problems.

The Center for International ForestryResearch (CIFOR), an intergovernmental

research organization in Indonesia, foundthat inequitable tenure and access to landwas a major underlying cause of the fires.Yet the motive behind the fires was notsimply revenge of the disenfranchised.“Reasons are often more pragmatic thanjust to vent feelings of injustice,” notesUnna Chokkalingam, coauthor of the2000 CIFOR report The Underlying Causesand Impacts of Fires in South-east Asia.Under Indonesian law, communities andfarm families can gain use of cleared landor farmland much more easily than landthat is covered by natural forests. Other

countries have similar policies that effec-tively discourage responsible stewardship,says Chokkalingam, yet governments oftenresist changing the policies, due either tovested interests in the existing claims onresources or to political inertia.

Forest products also can be used tofund conflict. Forests are often claimed bypowerful interests because the global tradein forest products is an estimated US$150billion per year, according to ConflictTimber: Dimensions of the Problem in Asiaand Africa, a 2003 report commissioned bythe U.S. Agency for International Devel-opment (USAID). The authors observethat timber can be harvested and convert-ed to cash more cheaply than oil (whichrequires more expensive technology forrefining and infrastructure for transport),producing high returns on little invest-ment. Control over timber resources canthus shift the balance of power in a conflictand affect its duration. As it is, accordingto Conflict Timber, an underfunded armyoften has tacit approval to abuse its powersin order to finance itself. As WorldwatchInstitute senior researcher Michael Rennernotes in the 2002 report The Anatomy ofResource Wars, illegally cut timber has beenused to fund conflicts in countries includ-ing Cambodia, Burma, and Liberia. Ineach of those three countries, Rennerstates, such timber sales in the 1990s wereestimated at more than US$100 millionper year.

Other scenarios play out around theworld, with other resources. Paul Barker,country director for Afghanistan for thehumanitarian group CARE International,finds that in that country’s current unstableC

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Aiding and abetting—but at what cost? The cultivation of opium poppies to fund private war-lord activities in Afghanistan is a destabilizing force for local farmers.

Far-reaching effects of unsustainability. National policies sometimes encourage poor stewardship of natural resources. For example, land use laws inIndonesia helped spur the 1997–1998 burning of thousands of hectares of forest land. The resulting pollution ultimately affected millions of people, manybeyond Indonesia’s own borders.

atmosphere, unregulated drilling of deepwells defies coherent resource management.The wealthy can afford to drill deeper wells,and when they draw water, it lowers theaquifer level below the reach of shallowerwells dug by poor communities. Unreg-ulated drilling also compounds a multiyeardrought. But in Barker’s view, the farmlandproduction of opium poppies, which inturn funds the private armies of warlords,poses an even greater threat to security [formore details on the state of Afghanistan’spostconflict environment, see “Environ-mental Triage in Afghanistan,” EHP111:A470–A473].

Development workers are still learninghow the security framework correspondsto their own experiences. Elizabeth Byersand her husband, Alton, were working ondevelopment projects near a mountainpark in Rwanda just before violence firsterupted there in mid-1988. “We felt theundercurrents,” says Byers, now a seniorprogram officer with the nonprofitMountain Institute. She saw poor groupsbeing forced onto marginal soils and thecycle of inequality and poverty that was

degrading the land. Farm households inRwanda’s mountains were often resettledfrom flatter areas onto small plots of lessthan 1 hectare of steeply sloping land.Imbalanced gender rights compoundedthe poverty cycle—at that time, Rwandanwomen were pressured to marry early andhad an incredibly high average of 14 livebirths. Byers calls the plight of womenwith very few rights, combined with a fast-growing population and conflict overfarmland, “a formula for disaster.”

Ultimately, this formula for disastermade good on its promise. Between Apriland August 1994, an estimated 1 millionRwandans were massacred, and 2 millionmore fled as refugees. At the time, thegenocide was often presented by themedia in the simplified terms of ethnicconflict between the Hutu majority andTutsi minority. However, recent analysesby James Gasana, who served as Rwanda’sminister of agriculture and environmentbefore the 1994 genocide and authored astudy in Conserving the Peace, show thatinequitable access to farmland based onethnicity and resulting erosion in that

mountainous country played a crucialrole in the struggle. The ethnic tensionwas the fuse, not the explosive.

Paths To StabilityIn October 2003, ministers of defense andforeign affairs representing the 34 membercountries of the Organization of AmericanStates acknowledged the importance ofwise environmental management forimproved security throughout theAmericas. They adopted the jointDeclaration on Security in the Americas,which repeatedly identified environmentaldegradation as a potential threat to thesecurity of member states. According toGlass-Royal, such high-profile declara-tions can give donor organizations such asUNEP and the UN DevelopmentProgramme a mandate for funding region-al activities in environmental security.

The CIA and the Defense Depart-ment continue to look for ways to reduceor anticipate environment-related ten-sions. In their normal training of borderpatrols that monitor territorial waters, forexample, they are adding instructions on


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The burden of refugees. When whole peoples are turned out of their homes, their first priority, understandably, is finding enough food, shelter, water,and fuel to survive. As a result of the scramble to secure the necessities of life, remediation of refugee camps can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.


how to watch for trawlers that are over-fishing piscine stocks and how to be alertto illegal waste dumping.

USAID has incorporated environmen-tal security into its framework for under-standing the dynamics that affect humanwell-being. According to Tim Resch, man-ager of USAID’s East Asia and PacificEnvironmental Initiative, the agency isbeginning to look at how to protect biodi-versity in times of crisis, including bothnatural and anthropogenic disasters. Someof the agency’s considerations reflect awidening scope of thinking. The authorsof Conflict Timber recommended, amongother things, that the Indonesian nationalbudget contain allocations for theIndonesian military and police forces thathave in the past logged forests to fundtheir activities. The authors argued thatthis would reduce the Indonesian mili-tary’s pressure on forests and relieve mili-tary and police forces of the need to raisetwo-thirds of their operating budget fromtheir own economic enterprises.

Resch confirms that USAID and otheragencies have discussed how the militaryis funded and the need for training formilitary and police forces in betterresource management. “Part of it,” hesays, “is ‘daylighting’—making informa-tion publicly available.” Despite tacitapproval of such tactics, governments andrevolutionaries may lose credibility if theyare seen as plundering natural resources tofuel their cause.

Matthew says that each case has to beaddressed on its own conditions. He doessuggest that giving soldiers a stake in betterenvironmental management can makethem more careful stewards of the resource.

Matthew also notes that environmentalinterventions planned without an aware-ness of security factors can be counterpro-ductive. One thing he discovered duringhis Conserving the Peace case studies thatsurprised and disturbed him was that “cer-tain types of conservation strategies canactually intensify the conditions for con-flict.” Creating a national park under thewrong conditions—for example, siting itdirectly in the path of growing populationsand farmland expansion—could remove abuffer zone that might otherwise defusetensions between groups. Strategicallylocated “peace parks,” on the other hand,could give groups strategic breathingroom. With the right structural incentives,such peace parks could also give thegroups involved common cause for pre-serving the ecosystem.

Processes for so-called alternative dis-pute resolution (ADR) offer further hopefor defusing resource-related tensions.

Jeffrey Senger, who is senior counsel in theDepartment of Justice Office of DisputeResolution and author of the 2003 bookFederal Dispute Resolution: Using ADRwith the United States Government, notesthat resource-related disputes are goodcandidates for ADR, which refers to waysof resolving disputes without resorting tolitigation, usually with the help of a neu-tral mediator. This is partly becauseresource disputes can be so complex andexpensive to litigate, and partly becausethey often involve parties who will have todeal with each other long after the case issettled. Where litigation can destroy long-term relationships, mediation can build abasis for collaboration. With support fromthe State Department, Senger has traveledto conduct courses for judges and politicalleaders in India, Turkey, the Middle East,and Argentina [for more information onADR, see “Finding Middle Ground:Environmental Conflict Resolution,”EHP 111:A650–A652].

Early anticipation of resource-relatedhot spots has become a priority for envi-ronment and development planners at theWorld Bank and the UN. These profes-sionals are using field-based research,satellite imagery, and other tools to iden-tify areas where scarce or unstable naturalresources can fuel instability. Map-basedapplications already used in UN programsinclude a database of coastal border infor-mation, an early warning system on foodand agricultural crises, the World HealthOrganization’s online Global Atlas ofInfectious Diseases, and the ReliefWebMapCentre (see the table on p. A172 formore information on these and otherresources).

Matthew says that a second phase ofcase studies supported by the WorldConservation Union and the InternationalInstitute for Sustainable Deveopment isexamining global hot spots of environ-mental security, including western andsouthern Africa and South Asia (India,Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, andNepal). Besides having two nuclear pow-ers, looming problems of environmentalcapacity, and sustained populationgrowth, South Asia is also likely to bedirectly affected by global climate change.

World Bank chief scientist RobertWatson concurs, saying that sea level risealone will force huge population displace-ments in Bangladesh, and cause crucialfarmland and fresh water to become scarce.If the ocean level rises by one meter, as pre-dicted for this century, Watson warns that“half of the rice produced in the deltaicarea of Bangladesh could be lost.” Otherregions can expect similar scarcities.

Regional cooperation on environmen-tal security can help defuse conflicts andtheir impact on scarce resources. DorisCapistrano, head of CIFOR’s Forests andGovernance Program, notes that forest-related conflicts, for example, tend tooccur in remote, frontier areas where gov-ernment control is weak. She says,“Cooperative efforts of neighboring coun-tries to deal with illegal traffic of forestproducts—which tends to be associatedwith traffic of other illegal products such asarms, drugs, and valuable minerals—willhelp stem this flow.”

Building awareness among stakeholdersand pinning down the links between con-flict and the environment is a priority forother groups. In January 2004, UNEPannounced a new study to examine thelinks between the environment and humanconflict. A 14 January 2004 Reuters newsrelease quotes UNEP Division of EarlyWarning and Assessment director SteveLonergan as saying the agency may estab-lish a new secretariat on environmentalpeace and conflict.

Nongovernmental organizations have arole to play, as well. For example, CAREInternational is responding to the ongoingcrisis in Afghanistan by promoting smallenterprise loans, funding water and sanita-tion projects, and awarding grants for edu-cation and building of schools. Barker hopesthese efforts will contribute to helping con-serve nearby natural resources. Other groupsin Afghanistan have conducted a nationalassessment of health care facilities andhelped rebuild local clinics with provisionsfor potable water and wells.

Glass-Royal and her colleagues at FESSare optimistic about the world’s prospectsfor reducing environment-spawned con-flict. In the November 2003 draft reportEnvironmental Stress and Instability: Crit-ical Perspectives for Conflict Assessment, theydeclare that “it is possible to understandenvironmental issues in the political andsocial context of specific regions,” and thatidentifying scenarios can help “formulateassistance strategies that can mitigate prob-lems before they become intractable tointervention.” Glass-Royal further suggeststhat in some situations, environmentalconcerns can actually provide a catalyst fornational or regional talks. Shared concernsover the environmental impact of moun-taineering ecotourism in Kashmir, forexample, could bring the two sides of thatdispute into dialog on topics that are lesssensitive than national boundaries, leadingto cooperation that extends beyond justthe environment.

David A. Taylor


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