III. Thematic Overview: The Nexus
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In reality, it is becoming increasingly difficult to treat environment, population and other themes as stand-alone, separate issues. The scientific debate around the connection between the environment and security goes back several decades. The core of this debate focuses on conflicts and the use of natural resources and land. As a result, these initially solely scientific debates evolved into a series of instruments for crisis prevention applying nature protection and resource management. In the classic debates centered on the relevance of the connection between the environment and security, the main focus of attention was on conflict and cooperation in the areas of energy and water management. Today, however, nature protection, sustainable use, and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits have moved into the foreground as can also be seen in the UN Convention on Biodiversity.
The concern for the possibility of wars fought over access to natural resources was evoked for the first time at the beginning of the 1970s as an effect of the first oil crisis. The 1972 report of the Club of Rome on the limits to growth mentioned such fears and the first UN Environmental Summit in Stockholm in the same year also addressed resource-based conflicts. It was Boutros Boutros Ghali, then Egyptian Foreign Minister and later UN General Secretary, who predicted the next war in the Middle East would not be fought over oil but rather over water.
At the same time, the Malthusian assumption that overpopulation and hunger would lead to crisis and insurgency in the near future was gaining ground. The example presented was the famine in the Sahel region with its ramifications in terms of the downfall and ultimate failure of states in the Horn of Africa, as well as the growing domestic conflicts within states regarding land use and land rights in West Africa.
Until the end of the 1980s, the debate developed further along these lines describing the explosive connection between poverty and environmental degradation as a risk to stability and security. Shortly thereafter, the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992 addressed both environment AND development.
Population and Environment issues typically fall under broader labels such as ‘population, health and environment’ or ‘population and development’ or simply “poverty alleviation.” At the community level, population interventions cannot be separated from broader health needs, and natural resource management strategies are linked and indeed are often synonymous with economic development and livelihoods efforts.
Generally, the Population and Environment nexus is particularly complicated because the fields themselves are so complex. On the population side, funders’ mandates have expanded considerably over the past decade. While demographers maintain that population officially encompasses the three processes of fertility, mortality, and migration, donors have historically directed the majority of their funding toward lowering fertility rates, particularly in the parts of the world with the most rapid rates of population growth. However, the 1994 ICPD shed light on the importance for both social development and women’s empowerment of stabilizing world population growth, and donors have responded accordingly.
The environmental arena is equally expansive. The field has evolved from a focus on single issues such as water pollution and species extinctions to a more holistic approach that emphasizes the importance of maintaining ecological processes and global ecosystem integrity. The environmental community’s early emphasis on direct protection through parks, reserves, and protected areas was supplanted during the 1990s by a social-development push, illustrated by the proliferation of integrated conservation and development projects. Habitat fragmentation, human domination of natural systems, and an ambitious trend toward larger landscape-scale interventions have led the environmental community straight into the same social-development challenges as the population field. It is at this nexus that the young field of population-environment is emerging.
