Published a few months before the Stockholm+50 conference (June 2–3, 2022), Anthropocene (In)securities assembles a diverse group of researchers from Australia, Europe, North America, and South America in a volume that is thoughtful, provocative, and timely. While recognizing the importance of the 1972 Stockholm Conference, which dramatically raised the profile of global environmental change, the authors believe “that the development trajectory carved out 50 years ago has reached a dead end” (p. 132). Convinced of the need for a new vision to guide behavior and policy in the years ahead, they “make the case for a holistic, lived and plural sense of security, oriented towards solidarity and kinship across species, cultures, generations and worlds” (p. 136).

The volume begins with a context-setting chapter by the editors (Eva Lövbrand and Malin Mobjörk) and Rickard Söder. The challenge that animated the Stockholm Conference, carefully articulated by Barbara Ward and René Dubos in Only One Earth (1972), was to protect the natural environment and facilitate development in the Global South while working in the tense security context of the Cold War. The participants’ hope was that shared recognition of the scientific basis for environmental protection might catalyze cooperation in a deeply divided world. But that effort largely failed and we now inhabit the world that the nations gathered at Stockholm sought to avoid. “The proposition that we now live on a radically transformed planet is uncomfortable and troubling. It suggests a dangerous rupture in the earth’s trajectory that calls for new ways of thinking about safety, protection and collective survival” (p. 10).

Part I of the volume consists of four chapters that examine the developments of the last five decades. Björn-Ola Linnér and Henrik Selin provide an excellent overview of the geopolitical context within which the Stockholm Conference took place, and an assessment of its achievements and its legacy. Shared environmental concerns solidified as a bridge between East and West; the South mobilized around the narrative of a colonial legacy of acute vulnerability to environmental change and a widespread distrust of the motives of the North; and a framework of principles and institutions emerged in support of the shared sentiment that people have a “fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being” (Stockholm Declaration, 1972).

Lucile Maertens and Judith Nora Hardt then examine efforts in UNEP and the UNSC to securitize climate change (e.g., position military and intelligence as critical to climate policy) and climatize security (e.g., link climate change impacts to war). While their overview of the expanding engagement between security and climate change is compelling, I found myself wanting further elaboration of the analytical and prescriptive value of organizing real world behavior around these two processes that might be two sides of the same coin.

Marcus King, Caitlin Werrell, and Francesco Femia then use a liberal institutionalist approach to argue that the security apparatus of the Global North has a responsibility to “address climate security risks humanely and systematically at the national, regional and international levels” (p. 51). The argument is rooted in the claim that “[c]limate change can now be modelled with a relatively high degree of certainty, especially when compared to other drivers of international security like economic crises or territorial disputes” (pp. 52–53). For example, “climate models can help project the implications of … low-probability events, which means there is the capacity to prepare for and prevent them” (p. 53). A compelling case can be made for the responsibility of the Global North, which continues to emit, pollute, and consume at many times the rate of the Global South. But there are challenges in tying this responsibility to our ability to model climate change. In a complex world (many variables, multiple feedback loops, emergent properties, and so on), predicting probabilities and impacts is very difficult. Imagine a very high-impact compound flood event that would overwhelm existing flood defense systems, displace large numbers of people, and cause extensive direct and indirect damage. Based on excellent fluvial, pluvial, and ocean surge data going back decades, we might feel confident that under a given climate future the return period currently used for insurance or project approval purposes should contract dramatically (maybe from 200 years to 50 years). Holding development constant, we will still have multiple possible climate futures to consider; if we also model different development futures we will have a large range of possibility for both the flood event and its impacts. Because there will be many places vulnerable to highly destructive compound flood events (or droughts or fires and so on), we can predict that the world will experience many more of these in the future than in the past—but this information is likely to be too coarse to inform investments that need to be precise to be effective. Increasing mitigation efforts and deepening resilience make sense, but we have to be cautious about assigning more predictive capacity to current models than is warranted, appreciative of extensive data gaps throughout the Global South that constrain models, and alert to the blind spots current models embody.

This section concludes with a very innovative chapter in which Dan Smith uses Kate Raworth’s doughnut model (Doughnut Economics, 2017). Smith asks us to reimagine security in a way that brings human and national security together and links them to the Sustainable Development Goals.

Part II leverages the concept of the Anthropocene to rethink security. Simon Dalby provides a brilliant argument that climate change is an economic problem and the solution is clear—decarbonize the global economy. As clean hydrogen energy appears increasingly within reach, the opportunity to mobilize around Dalby’s analysis seems greater than ever. Anthony Burke and Stefanie Fishel offer a clear step beyond the very anthropocentric aspirations of Stockholm: “push on with legal, institutional and ethical innovations that can secure all the beings and worlds that share the earth” (pp. 115–16). Beatriz Rodrigues Bessa Mattos and Sebastián Granda Henao argue eloquently for expanding our purview beyond the “material evidence of climate change” to explore how it “puts modes of living on earth in jeopardy” (p. 130). These three arguments neatly set up the afterword, in which the authors lay out a post-Stockholm era agenda focused on overcoming the limits of global institutions, foregrounding those who are at greatest risk, decarbonizing the global economy, expanding perspectives on environmental security, and embracing a “holistic, lived and plural sense of security” (p. 136).

In June 2022, the governments of Sweden and Kenya, cohosts of Stockholm+50, published 10 recommendations summarizing the conclusions of that conference. Although the Stockholm+50 language tends to be generic and vague, it seems there is much overlap and agreement between the two visions. Both stress the need to transform the global economy, strengthen institutions, and take responsibility for the earth of future generations. But Stockholm+50 endorses an explicitly human-centered view, does not challenge the primacy of state and international institutions, avoids the issue of unequal vulnerabilities, and does not mention the moral standing of the nonhuman world.

I strongly recommend those concerned with the future of our shared planet read this excellent volume, review the outputs of Stockholm+50, and join the critical debate at the intersection of these two worldviews.