The aim of this essay is to assess whether ecological problems are increasingly affecting the international security. My supporting argument is that it is true that the environmental problems are becoming a dominant security threat. The logic of my thesis is that ecological problems such as climate change and environmental calamities deeply affect the economic growth of a country as well as its political and social development. Considering how the climate change and the environmental issues are nowadays one of the principle topics in international organizations' and State's meetings' agendas, the objective of this paper is to show how this issue is becoming a dominant threat to international security.
In this paper, I will examine three aspects involving international security. First, evaluating the notion of "international security ", in order to understand how ecological problems can affect it. Next, I will take into account the effects of climate change, providing examples of how the issues connected to the environment can be source of conflicts and wars; and finally giving a brief description of the existing enforcement mechanisms to address the environmental degradation, to see which kind of institutions are working in order to address this threat to international security.
The concept of international security changed trough the years according to how the society changed and evolved. The Oxford Companion to the Politics of the World (2012) defines it as "an ambiguous concept and that a state (or its leaders and citizens) believes itself secure when it fears that nothing adverse can be done to it by other states or by other foreign non-state actors."".
According to this definition, after the Second World War the main threat to international security was identified with the interstate-armed conflicts in the traditional military sense. This concept was underlined also by the Charter of the United Nations, created in 1945 as the main objective to maintain international peace and security.