Vito De Lucia, Professor and Director, Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea (NCLOS), Faculty of Law, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

CIL/NCLOS Dialogue Symposium

Introduction

Arctic ecosystem governance can be fruitfully understood as a security concern, given the complex interplay between climate change, resource development, and geopolitical interests. As the Arctic ecosystem transforms and becomes increasingly accessible, a range of overlapping pressures is intensifying security challenges across the board. These include the opening of arctic routes to commercial shipping (see e.g. here and here), the prospect of mineral and extractive activities on the continental shelf, heightened military presence driven by geopolitical tensions among Arctic and non-Arctic states alike, and the proliferation of dual-use technologies — from smart undersea cables to marine scientific research platforms to proposed climate interventions such as sea ice engineering.

This situation generates both traditional and non-traditional security concerns. New vulnerabilities are emerging: environmental and food security risks, threats to critical infrastructure from grey zones tactics as well as permafrost thaw, and the economic and human security consequences of rapid ecological change. Effective governance — and ecosystem governance in particular — is therefore crucial for managing resources, regulating shipping, and preventing disputes from escalating into open conflict.

These issues commonly fall under the broader label of maritime security, which involves protecting vessels, ports, trade routes, and marine infrastructure from threats ranging from piracy and terrorism to hybrid and cyber attacks. Yet the focus here is narrower and more specific: the intersection between ecosystem integrity and security. This raises a foundational question — what is environmental or ecosystem security, and what does it mean to think in these terms?

Environmental Security: Definitions and Theoretical Frameworks

Environmental security has been described as “something of a mystery” (Selby et al., 2024) — a concept that resists stable definition and sits uneasily across disciplinary and political boundaries. The relaunch in 2023 of the scholarly journal Environment and Security reflected a renewed recognition that security in a globalized world can no longer be localized. As its founding editorial observed, the post-Cold War era brought a broadening and deepening of the security concept:

“Security is almost impossible to localize in a globalized world. The new complex and diffuse threats to security have made the world mutually vulnerable, irrespective of big or small, rich or poor, East or West, North or South. The increasingly ambiguous and inclusive nature of security is now unavoidable. Recognizing this changing reality, the post-Cold War academic and political discourse emphasized the further broadening and deepening of the definition of security to include climate change, natural resources, human development, the environment, and demographic issues” (Swain et al., 2023, p. 4)

As Selby et al. suggest (p. 398ff.), additional complications derive from the fact that theoretical approaches to environmental security vary considerably. Early research was predominantly Malthusian, treating resource scarcity as the crucial driver of conflict. Liberal and neoliberal scholars pushed back, arguing that technological innovation and market efficiencies can mitigate such pressures (and this led to the famous Erlich-Simon bet). Political ecologists situated environmental change within structures of capitalist accumulation and state-building, viewing these as inherently extractive and violent. Discourse analysits have warned against the securitization of the environment, as securitization may incite spiraling dynamics leading to continuously increasing securitization. Postcolonial scholars have critiqued the Eurocentrism of mainstream environmental security research, while feminist scholarship has drawn attention to the gendered dimensions of environmental insecurity.

The distinction between hard and soft security is also relevant here. Hard security refers to military and coercive measures; soft security relies on diplomacy, economic cooperation, and multilateral frameworks to address non-military threats such as environmental degradation, energy crises, or resource depletion. Yet a strict delineation between the two is arguably difficult to sustain: environmental issues such as pollution, shared water resources, and climate change can rapidly acquire national security dimensions and touch on traditional hard security interests.

This point was made forcefully by Richard Ullman’s influential 1983 attempt to redefine security as encompassing any action or sequence of events that threatens to degrade the quality of life for a state’s inhabitants or significantly narrows the policy choices available to its government and non-governmental actors. A subsequent US government definition from 2001 elaborated on this, describing environmental security as encompassing the mitigation of energy threats, environmental risks, and related stresses that contribute to political and economic instability in regions of strategic importance — even where these threats do not directly harm US territory.

The Risks of Securitization

Any treatment of environmental security must engage with the concept of securitization as developed by the Copenhagen School — most notably Barry Buzan, Ole Wæver, and Jaap de Wilde in their 1998 work Security: A New Framework for Analysis. Securitization refers to the process by which powerful actors — governments, military establishments, political elites — construct a particular phenomenon as an existential threat, thereby legitimating the use of extraordinary measures that fall outside normal legal and political constraints.

The concept challenges the notion that security is something objectively given. Instead, it highlights how specific issues are socially and politically constructed as urgent threats, and how this construction can generate responses that are disproportionate, difficult to reverse, and potentially more destabilizing than the original threat. Issues can be classified as non-political, political, or securitized. Their salience, however, can shift and oscillate over time through processes of securitization de-securitization and re-securitization.

Securitization normally requires the relevant audience accepts it to consolidate it as a legitimate policy, yet States can push securitization agendas precisely prior to, and independent of, broad social acceptance. This has direct implications for Arctic governance. The securitization of Arctic environmental concerns risks triggering a spiral of competitive state behavior — military buildups, resource claims, restricted access — that may foreclose the cooperative approaches on which effective ecosystem governance depends. Norway’s 2025 Arctic Strategy leans for example toward a more comprehensive national security posture in the Arctic (“total defense”), reflecting a shift away from the earlier emphasis on science and knowledge-sharing toward a harder securitization of Arctic interests.

From Environmental to Ecosystem Security

The Arctic Council represents one institutional attempt to manage the uneasy relationship between soft and hard security. Its foundational decision to bracket hard security questions while addressing environmental, scientific, and human development concerns has created a productive, if inherently unstable, space for governance. This bracketing is now under considerable strain, as geopolitical tensions — following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and made more acute by the recent US claims about Greenland  — have disrupted the consensus-based working methods on which the Council’s effectiveness depended.

A more useful framing in this respect may be found in the distinction between a restricted and an expansive understanding of environmental security (Brunée and Toope, 1997). In its restricted sense, environmental security refers to the prevention or management of conflict over scarce or degraded resources — a state-centric concept concerned with national interests. In its expansive sense, however, it calls for consideration of the environment as such, assessing the consequences of policy decisions in terms of ecological balance and sustainability. This expansive view, with its emphasis on regime-building and common concerns, can serve as a counterweight to the competitive logic of traditional security frameworks.

Crucially, as Brunée and Toope have argued, environmental security in this expansive sense can only be achieved through an ecosystem orientation in international norms and regimes. This does not require a “naïve commitment to cooperation as the exclusive model for state behavior” (p. 27). Rather, it acknowledges the “continuing interplay” between competitive and strategic behavior and the recognition that concerns for ecological integrity and human welfare might nudge States in a cooperative direction through regime building. The goal, suggest Brunée and Toope (p. 27-8), is to move “normative evolution along a path from preoccupation with the allocation of resources toward ecosystem integrity, without ignoring the continuing power of states to shape international legal regimes”.

This perspective has concrete implications for the Arctic. The complexities and political sensitivities of the North-East Atlantic mackerel fisheries management illustrate precisely how environmental degradation becomes a security problem through the logic of competitive resource exploitation, and simultaneously illustrate the misalignment between scientific advice and policy and management considerations. By contrast, the Norwegian-Russian Fisheries cooperation, despite the significant political tensions, remains in place and agreement was reached to manage fisheries cooperatively precisely based on ecosystem dynamics considerations. An ecosystem-oriented governance framework, thus, can downplay tensive political dynamics before they escalate, and reconcile security concerns strategic competition and ecosystem cooperation.

Toward Comprehensive Arctic Security Governance

Addressing Arctic ecosystem governance as a security concern ultimately requires reconceptualizing security itself — moving beyond narrow military frameworks to embrace environmental, economic, human, and cooperative dimensions. It also, however, requires avoiding the pitfalls of securitization. To that purpose, this last section offers some suggestions that acknowledge that arctic ecosystem governance is a security concern, but at the same time frame and delimit security considerations in a cooperative context of regime building.

First, strengthening the mandates of existing multilateral institutions to explicitly address the security implications of environmental change would create forums for managing competition before it escalates into conflict. The principle of common concern of humankind, as developed in international environmental law, could play a useful role here: it expands the legitimate interests of non-Arctic states in the region’s governance, and provides a legal and normative basis for the Arctic policies of actors such as China and India that have stressed their stake in Arctic environmental stability. Yet it recognizes the sovereign jurisdiction and stewardship role of Arctic coastal states.

Second, strengthening existing (as well as developing novel) binding environmental protection standards that apply to both commercial and (as appropriate) military activities — including potentially irreversible interventions such as sea ice engineering — would help prevent ecosystem damage that no governance arrangement can subsequently repair. It is obvious here to think of the Polar Code, or the Central Arctic Fisheries Agreement.

Finally, ensuring meaningful – as opposed to tokenistic – participation by Arctic indigenous peoples in all relevant governance mechanisms, while respecting human rights obligations, also crucially mobilizes the irreplaceable knowledge these communities hold about Arctic ecosystems, and create an important link between environmental protection, human welfare and a broad understanding of Arctic security.

As the ice continues to melt, the window for effective governance narrows. The Arctic’s transformation from frozen periphery to contested space makes ecosystem governance not merely an environmental concern, but a defining security challenge that requires understanding law and legal institutions in their broader geopolitical, ecological and historical context.

This article is part of a series: CIL/NCLOS Dialogue Symposium

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