Encounters between Security and the Earth System Sciences: Planetary Boundaries and Hothouse Earth (chapter in "International Relations in the Anthropocene: New Actors, New Agencies and New Approaches")
Publisher: Palgrave
Author(s): Judith Nora Hardt
Date: 2021
Topics: Assessment, Conflict Prevention, Peace and Security Operations
The acknowledgement of the Anthropocene as a new geological era challenges our basic understanding of the meaning of security in socio-ecological terms. This chapter engages in a search for a security definition that breaks with International Relation's (IR's) traditional and limited focus on nation states, maintenance of a human-nature separation. As a consequence, the author analyzes how the research community in Earth System Sciences (ESS) describes the existence, the forms, and the prospects of environmental destruction and the risks related to this in a distinctive security logic. By analyzing central concepts outlined by ESS, such as "Planetary Boundaries" and "Hothouse Earth", the author will show how the key values and assumptions regarding security, existential threat, and emergency response can enable new approaches in the field of IR and Security Studies. Earth System Sciences and IR, seemingly so different - one reliant on the natural sciences, the other on the social sciences - are, in the Anthropocene, increasingly focussing on understanding and responding to similar processes and interactive efforts. The author concludes the chapter with the proposition of some common research directions that could enable ESS, IR, and Security Studies scholars to jointly engage in an effort to address the so-called hard sciences as well as hard Realpolitik of IR in the Anthropocene.