African Wildlife & Environment Issue 79

CONSERVATION

Emerging from this period of deep introspection, came masses of intellectual endeavour, mostly classified and thus invisible to the man in the street, was a new national security framework. Central to that framework was the emergence of so-called non-state actors. On that new landscape of as yet unmapped strategic issues was that of the environment. Within that general category of emerging national security risk, was climate change, and directly related to that were two notions of direct importance – refugee flows and water (Turton, 2020). Until that moment, no intelligence service in the world had begun thinking of exogenous factors, such as changes to the weather, as a legitimate national security risk. Suddenly a new consensus emerged, first within certain services, WATER AS A NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUE

The Cold War ended in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, without a shot being fired. Prior to that, the last hot battle of that Cold War was fought between tanks and artillery in the upper reaches of the Okavango River Basin, at a place called Cuito Cuanavale. After the guns fell silent, negotiations began, and South Africa eventually transitioned to a democracy in 1994. But what few realize is what was happening during those turbulent times, within the secret halls of the various intelligence services of the world. Rumbling through the corridors of power, like a growing tsunami, was one burning question. What will the national security landscape look like in a post-Cold War era?

Prof Anthony Turton

but ultimately between cooperating services, because these institutions are tightly bound together in a perpetual dance of enmity and amity. Intelligence services work against one another as

potential foes, but also cooperate with one another as friends when areas of common interest emerge. The Environment as a National Security Risk The environment emerged as a common interest, at least among the progressive Services of the world, and thus began the quest for a new model of national security risk that enables their clients – the national decision-makers – to select policy from a range of options. At that time, the author was a senior intelligence officer, tasked with the responsibility of making sense of these global trends, to build a South African position aligned with global best practice. In executing that task, the author reached out to various specialists, and reviewed masses of literature. Liaison was also had with other Services as ideas were exchanged. One of the most useful models that the author discovered, while executing this task,

Figure 1. An adaptation of Falkenmark’s (1994) model applicable to the South African national security debate.

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