The Impact of Environmental Factors on National Security: Post-2003 Iraq as a Case Study

Abstract

This paper, entitled “The Impact of Environmental Factors on National Security: Post-2003 Iraq as a Case Study,” deals with how, after 2003, environmental problems play a crucial role as non-traditional threats to Iraq's national security. The study's key goal is to evaluate how Iraq's social, economic, and public health sectors, along with national unity and stability, have been influenced by environmental factors like pollution, water scarcity, land degradation, climate change, and poor environmental governance. Further, the study employs a qualitative method and utilizes scholarly literature, official documents, and secondary sources. The Copenhagen School of securitization, by Barry Buzan, Ole Waever, and Jaap de Wilde (1998), is employed for analyzing the collected data. That is, it is used to clarify how environmental factors might be viewed as security risks that demand instant institutional and political responses. It is concluded that the environmental deprivation has amplified social strains and destabilized national cohesion by placing important expenditures on Iraq, taxing rare resources, postponing the retrieval of efforts, and depressing people's way of life. Thus, Iraq’s security weaknesses become worse by disregarding environmental elements. Hence, it sheds light on how vital it is to integrate environmental factors into national security planning and policies to obtain long-term security and sustainable stability in Iraq.