A report issued jointly today by the Atlantic Council and the Stimson Center, “The Security of Cities: Ecology and Conflict on an Urbanizing Planet,“ argues that the environmental security field has yet to incorporate global urbanization, the 21st century’s central demographic trend, fully into its purview.

Environmental security, which focuses mainly on conflict arising from resource scarcity, control over natural resources, and environmental degradation, historically has focused much attention on the rural poor in the developing world. Yet the rural poor are neither the primary cause of rising global demand for natural resources nor of environmental degradation, the report finds.

Instead, the report says the culprits are people who live in cities. The study concludes that the collective behavior of billions of urbanites is the main reason why fossil fuels are mined from the ground, coastal mangroves are turned into fish farms and the Earth’s atmosphere is changing.

Report author Peter Engelke, senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative and former visiting fellow of the Stimson Center’s Environmental Security Program, contends that because the environmental security field historically has treated cities as little more than an afterthought, their significance has been both poorly understood and badly transmitted to policymakers.

The report’s central conclusion is that overcoming the 21st century’s sustainability challenges will require placing cities at the center rather than the periphery of both our understanding and our policymaking. It says that only by doing so can we avoid the worst-case security implications of global ecosystem decline. 

“Given the swift pace and enormous scale of urbanization, cities must become an increasingly important part of the foreign and security policy discussion,” writes Engelke. “Urbanization intersects with multiple issues within the environmental security arena, including food security, energy security, climate change, fresh water use, public health and disease, and natural disaster planning and relief. It also intersects with more traditional foreign and security issues.”

The Strategic Foresight Initiative (SFI) at the Atlantic Council develops actionable foresight by identifying and assessing long-term, emerging global trends; connecting them to current challenges to inform policy and draw implications for strategy; and designing innovative strategies to reach desired future scenarios. For more information, please visit www.AtlanticCouncil.org.

The Stimson Center is a nonprofit and nonpartisan think tank that seeks pragmatic solutions for some of the most important peace and security challenges around the world. Stimson was recently honored with a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.