Journal article published in Global Security: Health Science and Policy, July 2024.
Note by the PSI Editorial Team: While this article dates back to 2024, the concepts and theoretical considerations it presents are timely and directly relevant to ongoing policy debates in the context of contemporary climate, food and energy security challenges, and how to adequately respond to these - across levels of government, NATO and wider civil society.
The article posits that Western states face a deep security contradiction. They rely completely on stable ecosystems for food, water, health, and economic activity, yet their policies damage those same systems at times. Current debates split into two camps: scientists describe environmental decline in physical terms, while national security institutions focus on how climate change may trigger instability elsewhere.
The author argues that environmental decline is not only an external risk but a direct outcome of everyday state behaviour. She introduces the concepts of “organic national security” and “SEDCOV” to redefine environmental damage as a core security issue.
"Organic national security" means a country’s security depends on the health of the natural systems that support it. "SEDCOV" stands for "severe anthropogenic environmental degradation, contamination, and vanishing", which refers to large-scale human-caused damage to nature that is built into normal state policies.
Main Takeaways
- Western states depend on nature for survival while driving large-scale environmental damage, creating a self-inflicted security problem.
- Environmental security debates are divided: scientists stress ecological breakdown, while security institutions focus on future instability abroad, often ignoring domestic responsibility.
- Traditional national security thinking protects borders, economies, and military strength, but does not clearly protect the environmental systems that make these possible.
- The author proposes to redefine organic national security as the ability of a state to indefinitely maintain core functions, ensure population survival, and protect the environmental foundations of both.
- Without changing how security is defined and practiced, Western states risk internal weakening caused by environmental decline, not just external threats.
- In order to attain organic national security, Western states need to rethink and question the extent to which they have come to normalise "SEDCOV", i.e. the severe human-driven environmental damage that is built into normal state policy, including ecosystem loss and pollution, in almost all areas of public policy.
Concluding Discussion
In conclusion, the author states that Western security institutions still treat environmental decline mainly as a source of future instability abroad, such as migration or conflict, rather than as a direct internal threat. This approach avoids confronting the fact that many environmental harms result from routine economic and security policies.
By introducing the notion of "organic national security", the author shifts the focus inward: a state cannot claim lasting security if it undermines the environmental systems that support its people and institutions.
According to the author, current policies remove the “indefinite” element from security. States may preserve stability in the short term, but long-term survival is put at risk when environmental damage continues unchecked. Among several possible future paths, the article identifies redefining national security to include environmental protection as the most realistic option within existing state structures.
Without this shift, environmental decline may weaken governance from within, leading to fragility and systemic breakdown rather than traditional military defeat.
This text is based on extracts from an academic research article authored by Katherine C. Snow, which was published in the open-access journal Global Security: Health Science and Policy. To read the full article, follow this link.