Enhancing Security, Sustainability and Resilience in Energy, Food and Water

Our societies build largely on the concept of security and the ultimate justification for our present-day states is to ensure internal and external security of their citizens. While this task has traditionally focused on local and national scales, globalisation and planetary-scale challenges such as climate change mean that security connects also to a variety of sectors and has a stronger global dimension. Security is therefore increasingly connected with sustainability, which seeks to ensure that we as humans are able to live and prosper on this planet now and in the future. The concepts of energy security, food security and water security—as being used separately or together—manifest the burgeoning linkages between security and sustainability. This Special Issue brings together ten scientific articles that look at different aspects of security, sustainability and resilience with an emphasis on energy, food and/or water in the context of Finland and Europe. In this Editorial, we introduce the key concepts of the Special Issue, synthesise the articles’ key findings and discuss their relevance for the on-going deliberations on security and sustainability. We conclude that ensuring sustainable security—or secure sustainability—requires systemic, structured processes that link the policies and actors in these two important but still distant fields.