Narrate the various ways in which rapid environmental degradation is posing a serious threat to human security. Illustrate your answer with suitable examples. (2023, 15 Marks)
Human security, set out by Mahbub ul Haq in the UNDP Human Development Report (1994), moves the referent object of security from the state to the individual: freedom from fear and freedom from want. Environmental security is one of its seven components, but degradation (warming, biodiversity loss and pollution, the “triple planetary crisis”) acts on all the others at once, through several channels.
Channels through which degradation threatens people
- Personal security: 2024 was the warmest year on record, about 1.55°C above pre-industrial levels (WMO). Extreme events kill directly, as in the Wayanad landslides (July 2024) and the Sikkim glacial-lake outburst flood (October 2023).
- Food and livelihood security: heat and erratic monsoons cut yields and make marginal farming unviable; price spikes carry local shocks to food-importing states.
- Health security: the WHO attributes about 6.7 million premature deaths a year to outdoor and household air pollution, with north Indian cities among the worst affected. Warming widens the range of vector-borne disease, and habitat loss raises the risk of zoonotic spillover.
- Water security: aquifer depletion in north-west India and Himalayan glacial retreat threaten the supply of hundreds of millions downstream.
- Displacement and community security: in most years disasters cause more new internal displacement than conflict. Yet there is no legal “climate refugee”: in Teitiota v New Zealand (2020) the UN Human Rights Committee rejected a Kiribati man’s claim, while accepting that climate harm can engage the right to life.
- Existence of states: rising seas threaten Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Maldives. The Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union (2023) offers a planned migration pathway, an admission that the land may not last.
Degradation as a threat multiplier
The mechanism is a chain: drought cuts yields, prices rise, people migrate, grievances harden, and weak states cannot absorb the next shock. Thomas Homer-Dixon traced violent conflict to such environmental scarcity; the shrinking of Lake Chad has fed recruitment by Boko Haram, and Ban Ki-moon described Darfur (2007) as partly an ecological crisis. The burden is asymmetric. Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain (Global Warming in an Unequal World, 1991) distinguished the “survival emissions” of the poor from the “luxury emissions” of the rich, who emit most and suffer least.
Limits of the security framing
Daniel Deudney (1990) warned that calling environmental harm a “security” issue militarises a problem that has no enemy. India voted against the 2021 Security Council draft on climate and security on this ground: climate belongs in the UNFCCC, under common but differentiated responsibilities. The International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion of 23 July 2025 offers a legal route instead: failure to act on climate may be an internationally wrongful act.
Conclusion
Environmental degradation is the clearest case for human security: it endangers life, livelihood and dignity with no enemy army in sight. The response lies in mitigation, adaptation and fair burden-sharing: meeting the COP30 call to triple adaptation finance by 2035, making the loss and damage fund pay out, and building local early warning, not in militarising the problem.