The Security Threat That Binds Us: The Unraveling of Ecological and Natural Security and What the United States Can Do about It
Publisher: Council on Strategic Risks
Author(s): Rod Schoonover, Christine Cavallo, and Isabella Caltabiano
Date: 2021
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Prevention, Governance, Peace and Security Operations, Programming, Public Health, Renewable Resources
Countries: United States
Global ecological disruption is arguably the 21st Century’s most underappreciated security threat. Human societies are producing rapid, novel, and foundational changes across multiple Earth systems with concomitant—and sometimes severe—consequences for people, societies, and security worldwide. These changes are significant and globally consequential, and include the transformation of the atmosphere’s composition, overloaded and depleted soils, toxified and acidified oceans, and reconfigured freshwater systems. Due to human activities, the biosphere—the Earth system that encompasses all living entities—is destabilizing rapidly and fraying the ecological fabric on which human society depends. Many scientists warn that Earth is entering a sixth mass extinction, a period of rapid loss of biodiversity so consequential that it affects the fate of the majority of multicellular organisms on the planet.