Human Security Analysis

Than we have analyzed the second component of sustainable development – security of people’s life. This component in our research is presented by index Isec, which has two statuses: a) Conflict status: j = imaginary unit; Isec = 0; b) Regular development status: j = 1; Isec > 0.

First consider case a) – conflict status. The analysis of historical data on the sequence of world conflicts which took place starting from 705 B. C. up to now with the five year quantization interval has shown that in the analysed data six consecutive evolutionary waves of world conflicts – Cn are vividly recognized, as Figure 1.

If the periods T(Cn) of identified waves are divided by the greatest common divisor kc which is equal approximately 85,  then the periods may be presented in the form of a temporal series with coefficients Fs, as Table 2.

Analyzing this series of numbers Fs = {13, 8, 5, 3, 2, 1} we see that it is a sequence of Fibonacci numbers with the “Golden section” equal 1.618. Since six terms of sequence T(C1)..,T(C6) respond to the law of Fibonacci series, we come up with the hypothesis, that occurrence of world conflicts is subordinate to this law. The intensity of conflicts I(Cn) depends on a level of technological evolution of the society and increases in time according to the hyperbolic law.

From the analysis of the revealed regularity we see that the next element of this series will correspond to the seventh wave of world conflicts with the length of the 80-85 years. We call it "the conflict of XXI century". This conflict has the time interval approximately from 2010 to 2092 with the probable phases: 1 – the 10's years of XXI century- origin; 2 – the beginning 20's, the extremity of 40's of XXI century – growth; 3 – 50's - of XXI century - the culmination, I * (C7)> 16; 4 – the beginning of the 60's – the extremity; 70's of XXI century - recession; 5 – 80's of XXI century - attenuation.

Now we pass to the analysis of the security status b): Regular Development (j = 1; Isec > 0). For this status we analyze the risks of "the conflict of XXI century" emergence. Based on the study of the totality of threats generating this conflict we will analyze its nature. We consider the 10 threats defined as the major ones for the XXI-st century by UN, World Health Organization (WHO), Transparency International and the UN Child Fund (UNISEF).

1 the first important threat is Global Reduction of Energy Resources, which is stipulated by a rapid decrease of organic fuels resources, accompanied by an increase of their consumption, first of all, in countries – economic giants. In the beginning of the 20s of this century there will be the intersection of consumption and production curves of energy produced from oil. Similar phenomena will be observed for the balances "production-consumption" of the energy produced from gas - in the beginning of 30s and for uranium — in the beginning of 50s, respectively. Тtherefore, until the mankind have found sources which could fully substitute organic fuels and nuclear power, the energy security both of a separate country, and the world as a whole will decrease.

2 Gap between the Planet Bio capacity and ecological footprint is a second global threat. By the mid of 2008 our planet’s population constitutes 6.65 billion people living in the territory of 510 million square kilometres. Its demand in biosphere, or in the global ecological footprint, is 14.1 Billion global hectares. Therefore, at present the global ecological footprint exceeds the bio capacities of the Earth by 5 Billion global hectares. It means that the planet’s resources are being used up quicker than nature can recover them. By 2050 the gap between the people’s needs and the Earth bio capacities will be 14 Billion global hectares. This threat is strongly correlated with the changes of the planet’s population demographic structure. For example, the greatest increase in the population within the next fifty years is expected in the poorest regions of the world: in Africa it will double, in Latin America and the Caribbean basin the population will increase by 1.5 times, while in Europe it will decrease by 0.8 times. 

3 Global warming as a next threat is the process of gradual rise of average annual temperature of the Earth atmosphere and the World Ocean. As a result, natural cataclysms would become more frequent, the harvests would become poorer and many biological species may disappear. The major part of the warming observed in the last 50 years is caused by human activity. First of all, it is due to emissions of the gases causing greenhouse effect, such as carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4).

4 According to World Health Organization and UNICEF, one more global threat is connected with reducing access of people to clean potable water and sanitary means. The fifth part of mankind (more than 1,1 billion people) has no access to potable water, and 2,4 billion person are not provided with minimum sanitary conditions. Especially critical is the situation in urban regions of poor countries.

5 The next global threat is Income Inequality. According to the World Bank in 1973 the gap in profits between the richest and poorest countries was defined as 40:1, and now it is 75:1. This threat is rather serious from the point of view of growing number of conflicts in the world, spreading of corruption, terrorism, crimes, worsening of education, ecology and health care.

6 Among new threats to the mankind, World Health Organization (WHO) points out such global diseases, as cancer, cardio diseases, cerebrovascular disease, HIV, tuberculosis and malaria in connection with their dramatic global spreading. During the following twenty two years they expect a considerable growth of mortality as a result of all global diseases, especially of cancer and HIV.

7 Corruption becomes the next global threat. Now it’s a big obstacle to economic growth and social evolution. It has become the major reason for poverty and pulled up any positive transformations.  Its "explosion" occurred at the end of XX - beginning of XXI centuries in the course of the globalization. In the recent years this phenomenon has been spreading into all countries of the world, and, thus, corruption has gained global, international character. The forecast of “Transparency International” shows the growth of corruption in the next three years.

8 According to UNISEF infant Mortality is the next global threat. 11 million children under five years of age die annually all over the world. The reasons are rooted in poverty resulting in mothers’ poor health, bad sanitary conditions, infectious diseases and conflicts.

9 The next global threat, which we included in our model, is the vulnerability of the countries to the natural disasters. In our study we consider earthquakes, droughts, cyclones and floods as main natural disasters. In the simulation we take into account the UNDP data on the total number of human losses resulting from the four above indicated natural disasters.

10 State Fragility is the last global threat, which we consider in the course of simulation. It looks paradoxically, but after the end of Cold War the new geopolitical system has been expanded by the big totality of unstable, unsuccessful and poor countries. Weakening of restrictive mechanisms of bipolar world stipulated escalation of the new wave of confrontations, terrorism, violence, territorial claims and unequal development. Uncontrollable spreading of nuclear weapons, wide-scale nuclear power production in such unbalanced world increases a threat to sustainability and the global security of mankind. In this study for quantitative estimation of this threat we use the State Fragility Index taken from (Monty G.  Marshall and Jack Goldstone, 2007).

Now we define the summarized impact of the totality of examined ten global threats on different countries grounded on cluster analysis method with the purpose of selecting groups of the countries with "close" performances of summarized threats. To do it, for each country j, we shall put the vector Trj with the coordinates which characterize the corresponding threats.

Where ES – Energy Security; FB – Footprint and Biocapacity Balance; GINI – Inequality; GD – Global Diseases; CM – Child Mortality; CP – Corruption Perception; WA – Water Access; GW – Global Warming; SF – State Fragility; ND – Natural Disasters.

Initial data on each threat are taken from the mention above International organizations data bases. This data are normalized, so that its values vary over the range (0-1).

After such normalization the security index Isec for each country is defined as the Minkovsky norm:

Then relationship of order between clusters of countries has been introduced, as:

Actually the Security Index Isec is the aggregated degree of remoteness of the country j from the totality of ten presented threats. Here the maximum danger for the country corresponds to Isec = 0 in terms of closeness of the totality of threats to a country, and the minimum danger corresponds to 1.

Global simulation with the application of the presented method shows, as “Table 1” (columns 10, 11) that 10 most secure countries also have very high values of the sustainable development index and degree of harmonization. Thanks to their peaceful policy they are minimally involved in international conflicts and controversies.

The positions of G8 countries, except Canada, in their security rating are different.  It is explained by the lower degree of sustainable development harmonization as compared with the first group of countries and their more aggressive economic and political behavior in the world.

Post-socialist and BRIC countries are scattered in the ranking table of security in connection with quite different internal situations and different groups of external factors influencing them.

The most vulnerable countries from the point of view of their security are characterized by low and very low values of the index of sustainable development and degree of harmonization, high values of state fragility, bad ecological indicators, very wide spreading of global diseases, corruption, and drastic inequality of people.

To facilitate the analysis and make it easier we use the method of Principal Compound Analysis (PCA) which allows reduce variables with many properties to several hidden factors. Analysis shows that currently the most considerable threats for most countries are the reduction of energy security, worsening of balance between bio capacity and human demands and the growth of corruption.

Now, when we have the computed values of the quality of life index (Iql) and security index (Isec), it is possible to compute the summarized quaternary of sustainable development, as “Table 1”, columns 2,3.

We see that leaders are countries with high degree of sustainable development harmonization, good ecological indicators, high energy security, low values of state fragility, low level of corruption. And vice versa, worsening of this group of indicators lowers the ranking of countries in regard to quality and security of life.

From the presented results of simulation and from the revealed regularity of global conflicts occurrence important questions arise: why the seventh element of Fibonacci series degenerates? What will happen with the world civilization in the course of “the conflict of XXI century” and after it’s over? Maybe here is a closing cycle of some evolutionary chain C1->C2->… ->C7?

The answer to these questions can be found in the works of two outstanding scientists of the past century.  In particular Vladimir Vernadsky wrote (Vernadsky, 1944): «In the geological history of biosphere human beings will have great future, if they do not use their mind and labor for self-destruction». The other Russian scientist Nikita Moiseyev, the creator of the computer program for global climate simulation “Nuclear winter” noted (Moiseyev, 2000): «If the mankind is not going to radically change its behavior on the Planetary scale, then in the middle of XXI century there may appear conditions under which people cannot exist».

These conclusions were made for the mankind existence paradigm which can be described by the formula “to meet people’s own interests”. If we assume that the mankind will change the paradigm of its existence for another, for example, for the paradigm of «harmonious coexistence». Then the systemic regularity of world conflicts determined for the previous paradigm, obviously, will lose its validity. Thus, the mankind will find new prospects for prolongation of its mission on the Planet.