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Chapter 5 - Environmental Challenges to Human Security
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129 Chapter 5 Environmental Challenges to Human Security Overview The fate of African countries and their citizens is inextricably bound to the natural environment that enables these states and citizens to survive economically through the exploitation and exportation of their natural resources. The natural environment further directly provides for the livelihood of some 80 percent of the region’s population, with the result that environmental degradation directly threatens the existence of the majority of people in the continent. In the past decades there has been an increase in demand for natural resources from Africa, for local consumption as well as for export purposes. This trend, along with an increase in the competition over natural resources between the various classes and sectors within countries, and between neighboring countries, has led to an increase in environmental conflicts in Africa. Introduction Fairness and equity have not always been a part of the process of environmental protection. Environmental improvement is considered by many to be a simple question of using the right technology to clean-up and reduce pollution. It is not instantly obvious that such a clean-up could be the cause of a problem somewhere else. It is therefore important to understand the manner in which society is structured and to track the most socially and economically disempowered social groups. The intention here would be to enable them understand environmental crisis and how to cope with environmental clean-ups. Human existence is caught in a power play of hierarchical social structures. The questions relating to the environment and basic issues of resource usage and resource distribution, as well as the 130 human interdependencies this creates are interlinked. Those who are part of the least socially (and often economically) powerful groups are often also the most vulnerable. If environmental change does not recognize and question the inequity of such hegemony, then, at best, it may effect a pocket of change, while at the same time pushing the problem to another place. Environmental interventions have to be examined not only through their immediate visible impact, but also in the larger context of how they change the lives of those who may not be directly visible. Action needs to be driven by a strong understanding of what is just and fair, not merely serving to transfer risk from one social group to another. At the same time, one must examine the nature of decisionmaking in the environmental change process. Here, the institutions that initiate and deliver change also need to be investigated. Who owns them, and whose interest do they really represent? Equitable change may be most effectively deliverable through institutions that are democratic, such as representative grassroots organizations, and which are made up and controlled by those who have an immediate stake in the local environment. The loss of pasturage and farmland to colonial settlement/private ownership, and insecure land tenure for the native population, has further undermined traditional coping strategies. In Eastern and Southern Africa, in particular, indigenous Africans were confined to marginal, and increasingly degraded and unproductive, lands due to the impacts of settler agriculture, colonialism and subsequent changes in traditional land tenure which exacerbated negative environmental change after independence. In Ethiopia, for example, foreign resource conservation measures introduced by the government between 1971 and 1985 not only eroded indigenous processes of resource conservation, but also led to soil erosion and devastating impact on crop production (Singh 2000). Environmental security therefore considers issues of environmental degradation, deprivation, and resource scarcity. By contrast, human security examines the impact of systems and processes on the individual, while recognizing basic concerns for human life and valuing human dignity. This relationship explains [54.198.108.174] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 13:58 GMT) 131 why complex interactions within various African environments often stress the security of the individual. Thus, environmental and human security often coexists in a complicated interdependence best considered conceptually as extended security. For the specific relevance to Africa, the broadest definition should be, and should remain, that environmental security focuses on seeking the best effective response to changing environmental conditions that have the potential to reduce stability and affect peaceful relationships and, if left unchecked, these destabilizing environmental conditions could contribute to the outbreak of conflict. Perhaps ironically, the best overall definition relevant to the African space is Norman Myers’ argument (1986:251) that “national security is not just about fighting forces and weaponry. It relates to watersheds, croplands, forests, genetic resources, climate and other factors that rarely figure in the minds...