Arctic environmental security and abrupt climate change - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 98

Arctic environmental security
and abrupt climate change
Chad Michael Briggs
Introduction
The past two decades have witnessed increasing concern over new security
threats and risks, from environmental issues to terrorism and economic insta-
bility. The traditional definitions of national and international security,
based upon narrowly defined and easily measured metrics of violent inter-
state conflict, have proven inadequate for describing the spectrum of risks
that the international community now faces. The shifts in security discourse
and policy since the end of the Cold War have affected academic, policy and
intelligence communities, while increasingly engaging certain scientific
communities that had previously little contact with or interest in issues of
international security. Policy interest in environmental security since 1989
has rested upon both a need to define new operational missions for existing
security forces and growing realization that environmental changes may bring
overwhelming pressures to bear upon critical systems and vulnerable regions.
Arctic security had long been defined by the Cold War as the naval and
aerial proving ground between NATO and Warsaw Pact forces. Yet even dur-
ing those times, concerns about the environment persisted and grew. Sweden
was the host of the first Earth Summit in 1972, and the Nordic contributions
to environmental policy (both at the European and international levels) have
long been recognized (Hey 1998). Security and the environment has also long
been intertwined, whether in the work of Belonna and its concerns regarding
nuclear waste in Arctic waters, to Sweden's detection of radiation from the
1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Soviet Union. The continued focus
of Nordic states on environmental questions related to human well-being and
international development concerns have resulted in perspectives distinct from
traditional American definitions, as exemplified by the 2008 Swedish report
on climate and security (SIDA 2008). Definitions may have shifted since the
1980s, but still the Arctic remains a key region of interest for environmental
security. Much attention has been paid lately to the geopolitical ramifications of
Arctic sea ice melt, particularly in light of record sea ice melt in 2012 and accel-
erated prospects of an ice-free Arctic (Borgerson 2008; Zhang et al . 2013). Yet