The Security Diagram: An Approach to Quantifying Global Environmental Security

This paper presents a method called “security diagrams” for quantifying global environmental security. These diagrams integrate three concepts “environmental stress”, “state susceptibility”, and “crisis”. Environmental stress refers to a undesirable short-term departure from “normal” conditions, while state susceptibility is the degree to which a state can resist and recover from crisis brought on by environmental stress, and a crisis is an unstable time that requires extraordinary emergency measures to counteract. A security diagram is constructed for climate-related food crises and used to estimate where the high potential for food crises occurred in the world from 1901 to 1995. The diagram was then applied to the period 2001–2050 to investigate the effect of increased national income and climate change on the future occurrence of crisis. The percentage of countries facing high potential of food crisis decreased from 46% to 34% under the scenario of increasing national income, and increased to 65% when changes in precipitation and temperature due to climate change were included.