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The Security Threat That Binds Us the Unraveling of Ecological and Natural Security and What the United States Can Do About It

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The Security Threat That Binds Us the Unraveling of Ecological and Natural Security and What the United States Can Do About It THE SECURITY THREAT THAT BINDS US THE UNRAVELING OF ECOLOGICAL AND NATURAL SECURITY AND WHAT THE UNITED STATES CAN DO ABOUT IT FEBRUARY 2021 an institute of AUTHORS EDITED BY Rod Schoonover Francesco Femia Christine Cavallo Andrea Rezzonico Isabella Caltabiano This report was prepared by the Converging Risks Lab, an institute of the Council on Strategic Risks. With generous support from the Natural Security Campaign, funded in part by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. This report should be cited as: R. Schoonover, C. Cavallo, and I. Caltabiano. “The Security Threat That Binds Us: The Unraveling of Ecological and Natural Security and What the United States Can Do About It." Edited by F. Femia and A. Rezzonico. The Converging Risks Lab, an institute of The Council on Strategic Risks. Washington, DC. February 2021. © 2021 The Council on Strategic Risks an institute of THE SECURITY THREAT THAT BINDS US THE UNRAVELING OF ECOLOGICAL AND NATURAL SECURITY AND WHAT THE UNITED STATES CAN DO ABOUT IT February 2021 Cover Photo: Top Row: (1) Heaps of overfished mackerel minnows near Andaman Sea (Tanes Ngamson/ Shutterstock), (2) Demonstrators protest over ongoing drought in La Paz, Bolivia 2017. (David Mercado/Reuters). (3) Dead bee, killed by pesticide. (RHJ Photo and illustration/Shutterstock); Bottom Row: (1) Rhino dehorned to prevent its killing, South Africa (John Michael Vosloo/ Shutterstock); (2) Malaysian and Vietnamese fishing boats destroyed by Indonesia for illegal fishing. (M N Kanwa/Antara Foto, Reuters). Background image: Aerial drone view of tropical rainforest deforestation (Richard Whitcombe/ Shutterstock). Composition by Rod Schoonover. CONTENTS 6 I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 6 KEY FINDINGS 10 POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS 12 II. NATURAL SYSTEMS AND SECURITY 12 OVERVIEW 14 NATIONAL SECURITY MUST ADAPT TO AN ERA OF ECOLOGICAL STRESS 16 III. ECOLOGICAL DISRUPTION IS UNDERWAY 16 MANY ECOSYSTEMS ARE SHIFTING TO NEW BASELINE STATES 18 A BIOSPHERE TRANSFORMED 26 ECOSYSTEM SERVICES ARE DEGRADING 32 PANDEMIC RISK GROWS AS NATURE DEGRADES 34 ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME AMPLIFIES ECOLOGICAL STRESS AND SOCIAL INSTABILITY 37 IV. A CLOSER LOOK AT NATURAL SECURITY 38 WATER 43 CASE STUDY: THE GRAND ETHIOPIAN RENAISSANCE DAM 45 FOOD 48 CASE STUDY: COFFEE AND MIGRATION IN CENTRAL AMERICA 49 WILDLIFE 54 CASE STUDY: WILDLIFE AND COVID-19 56 FORESTS 62 CASE STUDY: THE TIMBER MAFIA OF PAKISTAN 63 FISHERIES 67 CASE STUDY: CHINESE FISHING TRAWLERS OFF THE GALAPAGOS www.councilonstrategicrisks.org 4 69 V. OUTLOOK 69 RECENT RELEVANT U.S. POLICIES AND LAWS 71 INTERNATIONAL CONSERVATION STRENGTHENS NATIONAL SECURITY 72 FUTURE TRAJECTORIES 75 VI. POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS 77 1. PROMOTE INTERNATIONAL MECHANISMS THAT AIM TO REVERSE AND REDUCE THE DRIVERS OF ECOLOGICAL DISRUPTION 79 2. PROMOTE METHODS THAT PROTECT AND EXPAND CRITICAL SYSTEMS AND SERVICES 80 3. BUILD AND STRENGTHEN INTERNATIONAL ALLIANCES 81 4. TREAT ENVIRONMENTAL CRIMES AS SERIOUS CRIMES 82 5. REDUCE PANDEMIC RISK AT POINT OF ORIGIN 83 6. AMPLIFY ECOLOGICAL AND NATURAL SECURITY ISSUES IN THE U.S. GOVERNMENT 85 7. INITIATE AN ECOLOGICAL SECURITY RESEARCH AGENDA 86 8. ENGAGE THE PUBLIC ON ECOLOGICAL AND NATURAL SECURITY ISSUES 88 VII. INSIGHTS FROM THE COMMUNITY 89 TESTIMONIALS 95 ANALYTICAL LINKAGES BETWEEN ECOLOGICAL DISRUPTION AND SECURITY 100 APPENDIX I: ECOLOGICAL SECURITY MATRIX METHODOLOGY AND RESULTS 107 APPENDIX II: THE FIVE MAJOR MASS EXTINCTIONS 109 APPENDIX III: ILLUSTRATIVE OPEN-SOURCE REPORTS 117 REFERENCES www.councilonstrategicrisks.org 5 I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY KEY FINDINGS 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. Humanity’s alteration of the Earth’s climate, driven primarily by the discharge of greenhouse gases into the troposphere, is now receiving well-deserved and long-overdue attention from the media, governments, security institutions, and publics worldwide. Broader activities related to ecological or natural security— ones that more directly alter ecosystems and transform the biosphere—have been no less dramatic or consequential but have been absent from most of these discussions. Further, both climate and broader ecological security risks continue to be under-recognized as issues with tangible and present consequences for safety, security, and U.S. strategic interests. The national security structures and agencies of the United States and many other countries were designed to protect their respective citizens against malign nation-state actors, having shifted over the past few decades to also recognize threats from non-state actors. Actorless security threats, or threats without "proximate" actors or explicit actor intention, such as infectious disease outbreaks, pandemics, and intensified natural disasters that harm people and infrastructure, present threats to which national security structures and agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere must adapt, and restructure where necessary, in order to meet their missions in the coming years and decades. This summary uses the term ecological security to describe the elements of human, national, and global security that arise from ecological destruction and disruption, and the collapse of ecosystems. This term includes water and food security, trafficking and exploitative use of wildlife, protection from natural disasters, and the threats to U.S. economic interests from illegal timber trade and fisheries—the focus of the ongoing Natural Security campaign1—as well as those arising from other forms of ecological disruption such as species and population extinctions, zoonotic disease, and threats to critical ecological processes. www.councilonstrategicrisks.org 6 This report describes our ecological predicament and analyzes the security implications arising from decades of ecological disruption. We take a deep dive into several pillars of natural security, which span water, food, wildlife, forest, and fisheries systems. Finally, we offer recommendations for how the U.S. and other nations and multilateral institutions can proactively mitigate and address both ecological disruption and its impacts on national and human security. ECOLOGICAL DISRUPTION IS UNDERWAY Human activities greatly influence how many and what types of organisms exist, where they live, what they live on, and the nature of their interactions between other organisms and with their habitats. These human activities are driving what some ecologists call an ongoing “biological annihilation,” in which species are becoming extinct at rates far higher than the natural pace, and healthy and functional populations of organisms disappear even more quickly. Habitats are changing, life is redistributing and mixing in new ways, and many ecosystems are shifting to new baseline states. The impacts on health, safety, security and prosperity are manifold, from crop failures and infectious disease outbreaks to conflict, instability, and erosion of livelihoods. ECOSYSTEM SERVICES ARE DEGRADING Ecosystem services—the suite of benefits that natural systems provide to humanity—range from “regulating” services affecting air, water, and soil quality, the severity of the impact of natural disasters and extreme events, pollination, and disease and pest control; to “material” services such as food, water, and fiber production, energy provision, and medicinal resources; and finally to “nonmaterial” services including recreation, tourism, heritage protection, and symbolic, spiritual, and psychological services to people. While economists often employ the concept of ecosystem services to quantify the monetary loss arising from the degradation of natural systems, the impacts of large-scale losses are likely to extend well beyond mere economic valuation. The incipient damage could potentially lead to catastrophic circumstances and outcomes for human life and complex human systems, including the nation-state system and the global order that depends on it. There is growing evidence that the consequences of amassed losses of ecosystem services may compare to those of other better-known global change stressors, such as climate change—itself a major contributor to the losses of ecological services. PANDEMIC RISK GROWS AS NATURE DEGRADES Pandemics and large-scale epidemics are becoming more frequent. The last two decades have seen significant outbreaks of previously identified pathogens such as H5N1 (avian flu), dengue fever, cholera, and Ebola. These outbreaks are part of a broad acceleration of infectious disease emergence, with many of the most damaging cases now caused by the zoonotic “spillover” from animals to humans. SARS, H1N1, MERS, Chikungunya, Zika, and COVID-19 emerged during this same period, three of which were caused by novel coronaviruses. It is
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