The Human Security Index: Pushing the Perceptiveness Envelope on Security Situations?

submitted by David Hastings

The Human Security Index: Pushing the Perceptiveness Envelope on Security Situations?

How do we look at security?  With respect to American vs. other country interests, stability, terrorism?  Gathering intelligence on adversaries? Do we use GDP per capita, the Freedom in the World Index, Failed States Index, Happy Planet Index, Human Development Index, Global Competitiveness Index, Country Comparisons in the CIA World Factbook and other data/indicators to help with background?

But aren't those admirable approaches just subsets of our potential capabilities?  Would they have helped us to forecast and respond wisely to events of, say, 1848?  The Russian or Iranian Revolutions?  Did they help us respond wisely to Katrina or Deepwater Horizon?  Are they helping us with our many-year-evolving US Dollar, competitiveness, sustainability and social vulnerabilities?  To many, the answer is no.

Can we now innovate something with (1) more geographic completeness across and within nations, (2) more thematic comprehensiveness to perceive a complex diversity of situations such as fiscal crises, social unrest, impact of environmental hazards, (3) more awareness of diverse social sensitivities which our actions (and words of actors) might befriend or inflame?  Can we make fully transparent the base input data and formulation methodology – aiming for greater credibility, and facilitating the efforts of innovators to enhance our indicator?  (We might still have additional internal data for sensitive applications.)

Yes, we can now improve in such arenas.  Remarkable progress in reporting data across 200+ countries, and within many countries enables greater geographic completeness than is available in most current indicators.  A growing list of subjects is available.  Leveraging global multi-cultural awareness can overcome blind spots – by enabling deep perceptiveness of community and global situations.

Following such a strategy, the Human Security Index is making progress - in global and community level manifestations.  Covering 230+ countries, evolving on 3100+ USA counties and other countries, the HSI has a structure which facilitates compiling a superset of data useful for a variety of outputs.  It then views security situations from economic, environmental, and social fabric of countries and counties.

The HSI sees relative strengths and weaknesses in almost every country & county, some of which may surprise us.  Though the USA is a leading GDP and military power, and our common indicators tend to rate us highly, the HSI perceives many vulnerabilities.  Our fiscal/economic (including endemic trade imbalance) situation, environmental (including energy) sustainability, and several social situations (1) make us viewed as outliers in the global community and (2) put us at global and local risk.  These vulnerabilities place us closer to the middle of the pack (even well below the middle in some views) of the 230+ countries of the global HSI.  The HSI USA can help us to view endemic strengths and disparities/challenges at the county level.  We have county/ethnicity functional literacy as low as 35%, life expectancy under ~60 years and over ~90 years, decreasing life expectancy for women in ~30% of our counties, highly unequal achieved opportunity levels, and a globally leading (and highly racially and gender-biased) incarceration rate, with greater urban-suburban-rural disparity than fits a highly developed country.  How can we better formulate (and assess) data and indicators to support strategy development and other decision-making? And can we craft a data/indicator database to foster broader, as well as specialized internal, innovative applications?

The Human Security Index is an attempt to make progress in such arenas.  With an improved HSI providing background context, updated by harvesting of spontaneous and facilitated social media, might we have the framework for a 21st-century strategy and decision-support system?

Background - Global HSI: http://www.humansecurityindex.org/?page_id=28

Background – HSI USA: http://www.earthzine.org/2011/05/04/the-human-security-index-potential-roles-for-the-environmental-and-earth-observation-communities/