Competition over resources
In the environmentally constrained but more populous world that can be expected over the course of this century, there will be greater scarcity of three key resources: food, water and energy. Demand for all three resources is already beyond that which can be sustained at current levels. Once population growth and the effects of climate change are factored in, it is clear that greater competition for such resources should be expected, both within and between countries, potentially leading in extreme cases to conflict.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) defines food security as “all people at all times having both physical and economic access to the basic food they need”. However, due to a complex range of interconnected issues from climate change to misguided economic policies, political failure and social marginalisation, over 2 billion people across the world live in constant food Insecurity. It is important to take a sustainable security approach to look at the importance of “physical and economic access to basic food” by exploring the links between food insecurity and violence.
The transition away from a centralised global economy built around conventional energy sources to a decentralised global economy mostly fuelled by renewable resources is one we must make for the sake of our children’s futures and that of our planet. Writing for sustainablesecurity.org, Phillip Bruner asks if national security is at present, deeply concerned with preserving access to conventional energy, then how would national security for a decentralised renewable energy Internet be managed? Who would manage it? And what role, if any, could the public play in helping to alleviate some of the burdens of 21st century threat mitigation? 
Writing exclusively for SustainablseSecurity.ORG, Michael Kugelman of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, argues that the factors that first sparked many of the land acquisitions during the global food crisis of 2007-08 — population growth, high food prices, unpredictable commodities markets, water shortages, and above all a plummeting supply of arable land — remain firmly in place today. He writes that land-lusting nations and investors are driven by immediate needs, and they have neither the incentive nor the obligation to slow down and adjust their investments in response to the wishes of distant international bureaucrats. This, he argues, has serious consequences for global security.
In a piece for the International Movement for a Just World, William Rees maps out a vision for what he calls ‘Survival 2100.’ The goal of such a strategy would be “to engineer the creation of a dynamic, more equitable steady-state economy that can satisfy at least the basic needs of the entire human family within the means of nature.” The alternative, Rees argues is to “succumb to more primitive emotions and survival instincts abetted by cognitive dissonance, collective denial, and global political inertia.”
The post-Rio +20 discussion has focused a great deal on trade-offs between the global environment and the global economy. This sort of thinking obscures the extent to which global trends like increasing competition over scarce resources not only threatens both national and human security but actually threatens long-term economic stability as well. In an interview for the Woodrow Wilson Center, explorer and a co-founder of Earth Eco International, Alexandra Cousteau explains how this relates to the global use of water.
