The global ecological crisis profoundly challenges conventional meanings of environmental security and raises questions about how states and other institutions face the future. 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.

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.

About Simon Dalby

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).