Environmental Security is the need to protect humans from natural disasters and extreme weather events (such as tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods) that threaten human life. 

Since World War II, especially, states have formed political and military organizations to secure their people and their political values. Universal international organizations such as the United Nations and its many specialized agencies as well as alliances such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact have created guidelines and methods of deterrence for governments when facing invasion or the imposition of sanctions to maintain peace and security.

Roughly extending from 1947 through 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was known as the Cold War as there was not a heated war between the two factions, but instead a series of threats, diplomatic maneuvering and espionage. The Cold War was a series of event that demonstrated how nations engaged with and against each other to secure the country and the safety of its citizens.

The global focus on security strives to eliminate these harmful acts, which hurt individuals, countries and economies. Attacks generate unanticipated consequences:

• They cause spiraling problems in the economy and, thus, a sense of insecurity when families who once relied on tourism are now unemployed and face the potential loss of food, shelter, and safety in their personal lives.
• Insecurity reinforces the idea that humans cannot trust each other but must always be on guard or prepared for attack or assault.
• When the risk is perceived as being too high, people will avoid possibly insecure places altogether.

International security measures are the actions and strategies that countries, states, and alliances take to make the world safe for all. International security is an opportunity to build peace through global cooperation and to protect all from harm and terror. Such protection can be achieved through diplomacy, treaties, negotiations, alliances, sanctions, conventions, and military action.

The use of force under the United Nations rules is lawful only under two circumstances:

1. Through an alliance of countries which join to maintain international peace, and
2. Based on the right of individuals, states or a collection of states to respond in an act of self-defense.

An alliance is an agreement between two or more states to work together on mutual security issues. States enter into such cooperative security arrangements in order to protect themselves against a common (or perceived) threat. By pooling their resources and acting in concert, the alliance partners believe that they can improve their overall power position within the international system and their security relative to states outside the alliance. Alliances can be either formal or informal arrangements.

In our modern era, the human security approach to international security stresses the good for all people. It assumes that a basic human right is the right to freedom. Put differently, human security privileges individuals and the community, beyond the boundaries of the state. Such protections are more likely to be in place when there are preventative and systematic approaches.

When one considers the increasing rate of natural disasters, with the death, damage, and number of displaced, it becomes clear that natural disasters across the globe pose a major security threat. Floods, tsunamis, earthquakes and hurricanes can create threats to human security and have long-lasting effects on individuals, communities, and countries. Though a natural disaster is not an act of war, nor is it one state invading another, the devastation in the aftermath of an earthquake can destroy security for hundreds of thousands of people.

Decentralized, often inchoate, entities, based on ideology and independent of formal governments, rise to protest a cause, an issue, or how the global powers have treated them. As the nature of war has changed, and the players have changed, the strategies for subduing these threats to security also need to change.

Cybercrime affects people on an individual level but cyber-espionage can affect military applications, national banking systems, currency, and governments. For example, North Korea’s cyber-attack on South Korea has an impact on that country’s ability to mobilize and potentially enhances North Korea’s nuclear advancement.

Cybercrime includes a relatively new form of the Internet called the dark net. Criminal behavior occurs anonymously without the same risk of detection. Activities such as illegal arms sales, human trafficking, illegal drug trafficking, child pornography and other illicit behavior all may occur in this space. Cyber criminals also use tools such as malware to dispatch viruses that interfere with operation systems. Ransom ware, another tool, locks computers, and then the criminals demand money to unlock the files.

Ransomware is a type of malware that prevents or limits users from accessing their system, either by locking the systems screen or by locking the files of the users until ransom is paid. More recent types of ransomware, collectively categorized as crypto ransomware, encrypt certain file types on infected systems and force users to pay the ransom through certain online payment methods to get a decrypt key.

When aggression, war, and other types of force are utilized, forming alliances and adopting overarching documents that include language which will secure the international system and protect global citizenry.

The need to protect humans from natural disasters and extreme weather events (such as tsunamis, earthquakes, tornadoes, and floods) that threaten human life is called environmental security.

Security has many elements, such as economic security, food, security, health security, environmental security, personal security, community security and political security.

The “War on Terror” is a global effort to secure the safety of global citizens
against terrorism. It was launched just after the 9/11 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City. The “War on Terror” included the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies joined to defeat Al-Qaeda.

The United Nations was formed to prevent war and to consider when the use of force is permissible, or when peaceful attempts to make change appropriate. There have been continuing attempts among the members of the United Nations to clarify the proper use of force.

Attacks generate unanticipated consequences:

• They cause spiraling problems in the economy and, thus, a sense of insecurity
  when families who once relied on tourism are now unemployed and face the potential loss of food, shelter, and safety in their personal lives.
• Insecurity reinforces the idea that humans cannot trust each other but must always be on guard or prepared for attack or assault.
• When the risk is perceived as being too high, people will avoid possibly insecure places altogether.

In its simplest form, deterrence consists of the following threat, intended to dissuade a state from aggression: ‘Do not attack me because if you do, something unacceptably horrible will happen to you.’ In other words, deterrence is a form of persuasion in military strategy. To convey such a threat, the deterrer must decide what constitutes an attack, and must then decide what level of response would be adequate to deter it. This in turn depends on the deterrer’s estimation of the adversary’s intentions and the values it places on them. For deterrence to succeed, the threat must also be credible.