The global ecological crisis profoundly challenges conventional meanings of environmental security and raises questions about how states and other institutions face the future.
In this lecture, Simon Dalby will provide insights into the traditional search for security in terms of using firepower to dominate states and environments, and how this is now endangering people across the globe.
Photo: Reid Naaykens / Unsplash
The current great power rivalries, accelerating climate related calamities and technological innovations reprise many of the themes first clearly articulated at the 1972 Stockholm United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. Half a century later, the urgency of grappling with our environmental security predicament of only having one earth, requires redoubled efforts to link across disciplines, and in particular across the divide between natural and social sciences.
Innovative formulations, such as the Anthropocene, are needed more than ever because perpetuating the modern social order based on firepower in its multiple forms can no longer provide security. Strategies to facilitate adaptation and remove institutional blockages to rapid energy innovation are instead a key theme for policy makers, and likewise for researchers in different geosciences. Therefore, linking geopolitics to global ecology in innovative ways offers intellectual and policy pathways forward.
During the lecture, Simon Dalby will provide insights into the traditional search for security in terms of using firepower to dominate states and environments, and how this is now endangering people across the globe.
Audience photo: Getty Images.
Simon Dalby is a member of Mistra Geopolitics’ Science Advisory Board and a Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. His published research deals with climate change, environmental security and geopolitics.
He is the author of: Rethinking Environmental Security (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022), Anthropocene Geopolitics: Globalization, Security, Sustainability, (University of Ottawa Press, 2020) and Security and Environmental Change (Polity, 2009), and co-editor of Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (Routledge, 2019), and Reframing Climate Change: Constructing Ecological Geopolitics (Routledge, 2016).
Project / This project aims to critically examine how the dynamics of geopolitics, human security and global environmental change interrelate.
Feature / Watch SEI York researchers introduce different citizen science concepts and methods and explain how we are using them in our projects.
Event on 12 May / In this third CHILI seminar, Sarah West will talk about citizen science and its growing role in understanding the environments we live in.
Feature / SEI and partners created a climate village at a historic arts festival in Hungary to bring youth views and artistic expression into climate policy discussions.
