Human Security

The rapid and intensive progress in science and technology in the world, despite its abundant advantages and gifts of welfare and comfort for the mankind, in many ways, it has pushed human security to face grave tragic events. To give an example, the progress in chemistry before the Great War, made it possible to produce and use toxic gases including Phosgene gas causing enormous deaths of both military personnel and civilians. Another example in man’s progress in nuclear physics led to innovating nuclear bomb with no precedent and unheard of in terms of mass destruction and ruins. In turn, the international humanitarian law, despite its progress in recent decades, has had been slower than the development of aforementioned scientific progresses. Nonetheless, one should consider the point that those disciplines of human sciences have more essential and fundamental principles that provide it with the ability to prevail with new conditions and situations. To elaborate the subject, although the international humanitarian law lacks explicit rules, regulations and treaties in addressing many of the modern armaments and warfare, it still possesses the principle of distinction, principle of unnecessary pain and suffering, principle of preventing vast and long-term damages that could be enforced on new arms by assessing its legality in order to boost human security. The present paper aims at studying various aspects of this issue.

Environmental security is one of the most important aspects of human security, which puts emphasis on sustainability of the developmental policies and that they should adjust with the environment as well as rights of future generations. Since threats to the human security mainly occur within environmental issues, this research- highlighting the relationship between human security and environmental security and pointing out the threatening causes and factors to the human security - has replied to the question that how has the environmental degradation endangered human security in Iran? This study shows adoption of policies like 1- Expansion of urbanization, 2- Population growth, 3- Consumerism and stressing the production increase, disregarding its consequences, and 4- Development of environmentally incompatible technologies have led to further utilization of fossil fuels as well as uncontrollable use of various environmental resources, increased pollution, and extensively damaged the environment which consequently endangered human security due to the severe dependence of human being to the environment.

In December 2019, some people in China were diagnosed with pneumonia which was found in the first studies to be related to the animal and food market in Wuhan, China. The newly identified virus which was named "Coronavirus 2019” spread all around the world, influencing different economic, political, and cultural fields. Since one of the most important sectors affected by the virus was the environment, the present study aimed to investigate the effect of COVID-19 pandemic on the realization of the right to a healthy environment. The findings showed that the virus reduced fossil fuels-related activities, especially in the world's oil companies and fashion and textile industries with high water consumption and water pollution, Decreasing air air pollution due to reduced domestic and foreign travel, And increasing the consumption of household safe drinking water and a decrease in the production of waste, especially toxic kinds. Also, the virus partially altered consumerism and international macro-behavioral patterns inconsistent with sustainable development, so that at the individual level, the purchase of unnecessary clothing and consumables was not done solely change the mood and on a global level, it strengthened the hope of living without fossil fuels and replacing them with renewable energy.