The importance of human perception in environmental security

When the battle is not against armies, but against the creeping threats of nature’s making, we need to talk about environmental security and how much of it is based on our subjectivity. Our planet’s future hinges not just on what is happening, but on how we perceive and react to these silent, yet profound, environmental challenges.  

The future of environmental security – and the world – will depend on our capacity to integrate the study of the environment and the threats to it with the study of how humans perceive them.

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Our planet’s future hinges on what is happening and how we perceive and react to these silent, yet profound, environmental challenges.  

In recent years the concept of “environmental security” has become ever more present in the collective international discourse, yet not any clearer. To clarify what it means: environmental security has to do with non-traditional security threats – threats arising primarily out of non-military means, not having the State as their sole target – consisting of transnational political challenges caused by natural processes. Such threats erode the environmental security of a given place, degrading the quality of life and often leading to violent conflict. The degradation of environmental security (in its many facets) thus works as a “threat multiplier”, by negatively impacting other types of security like food or health security. 

The increasing desertification in the African region of Sahel is not caused by military means and it does not have the State as its target (because the ones affected the most are the common people who are no longer able to cultivate the land), it is transnational, as it affects an entire region comprising several countries, and it is caused by a natural process (fertile land turning into the desert). Furthermore, desertification leads to scarcer harvests – thereby impacting food security – which in turn leads to malnutrition – affecting health security. Desertification is therefore a threat to environmental security.  

Environmental security can be divided into two categories: objective security and subjective security. The former is based on the objective presence of risks measured through scientific means; the latter consists of the (human) perception of such risks, and it’s – therefore – more complex to analyse, in that it requires the intersection between the hard sciences (measuring the objective risk) and the soft sciences (psychology, cognitive science, sociology, philosophy, and so forth) investigating the human mental (ri)elaboration of the data. Nonetheless, it is exactly how humans perceive and understand a phenomenon that determines their reaction to it. 

There are a few examples. Years of study by earth scientists, such as chemists, biologists, geologists, and others similar, show that a certain territory is particularly prone to floods, and in the next two or three decades the situation will worsen as a result of climate change – this is an objective threat to environmental security. Nonetheless, the drastic nature of the situation is not perceived as such by the local population, which continues to build properties in the area, causing a great loss of lives in the following flood. This example summarizes in a very simplistic way a phenomenon that has been repeating itself for the past 40 years: the warning of scientists about the increasing environmental degradation of planet Earth, and the consequent – partial or total – underestimation of the threat by the population and consequently the ruling class. The critical state in which international environmental security finds itself is first and foremost a perception problem. One could argue that perception is not the only thing determining human action and that other “realistic” factors – economic in primis – play a fundamental role in the equation. Surely, but at the very moment in which one is aware of an environmental threat and decides to favour economic considerations, one indirectly affirms his/her perception of environmental security as less important. 

Environmental subjective security therefore plays a role as important as that of objective environmental security: the human perception of an environmental threat matters as much as the actual threat itself – a famous dilemma comes to my mind: “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” In this case, the “sound” is the human perception of environmental security – Yet, environmental security is to this day to the largest extent studied within the hard sciences, with catastrophic results well visible in the daily headlines of newspapers all over the world. 

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