Abstract:Our review of the evolving social and scholarly debate on the relationship beteen human security and the environment shows them to be close and complex at all scales. A great deal of human security is tied to peoples' access to resources and vulnerability to environmental change; a great deal of environmental change is tied up with how people use their resources and environments. We argue, however, for a broader framing of the human security - environment debate, to incorporate insights from the empirical, scientific and normative debate on sustainable development; and to widen the scope of the discourse to a notion of "comprehensive security" that combines an understanding of state, human and environmnetal security. We argue that such reframing would almost certainly lead to both deeper understanding of what is actually going on in the world, and to more effective interventions in pursuit of social goals. |