Monthly archive for April 2007. Show all posts
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Climate, Security Bill Introduced in Senate
›April 1, 2007 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoLast week the Senate’s number two Democrat Dick Durbin and Republican Senator Chuck Hagel dropped a bill calling for a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to assess the threat of climate to the United States and abroad.
Refreshingly, the bill requires a 30-year time horizon. Climate scientists will still find this window painfully small, but security analysts (and the rest of government, frankly) will recognize this as progress in comparison to the normal Washington policy timelines (a few years or until the next election).
Momentum to consider climate and security connections has been growing over the last few years, with the United States lagging behind. The Europeans long ago jumped on these connections. And numerous developing countries—Egypt, Bangladesh, and small island states, to name only a few—view expected sea level rise from global warming as an ultimate security threat to the survival of large swathes of territory and tens of millions of people. Facing the prospect of longer and deeper droughts, countries in the Horn of Africa are also coming to recognize these fundamental threats to the national interest.
In the United States, Hurricane Katrina provided a glimpse of what a warmer world may be like, the experience of which, it could be argued, made its way into the 2006 revision to the U.S. National Security Strategy. The key passage, admittedly at the end of the document, explains that environmental destruction—caused by humans or nature—presents new security challenges:“Problems of this scope may overwhelm the capacity of local authorities to respond, and may even overtax national militaries, requiring a larger international response. These challenges are not traditional national security concerns, such as the conflict of arms or ideologies. But if left unaddressed they can threaten national security.”
If Durbin’s bill is eventually passed, we can expect the resulting assessment to be markedly different from Peter Schwartz’s scenario for the Pentagon in 2003 or the new report for “an unnamed intelligence agency” in 2007. Schwartz imagined all things bad happening at once, highlighting the key prospect for nonlinear abrupt climate change and earning great criticism from scientists. It also became a tempest in the teapot when the British press conspiratorial referred to it as a secret report after being pulled from the Pentagon’s website (more likely it was pulled because it was seen as diverging from White House policy on climate change). The new report “Impacts of Climate Change,” departs from the scientifically conceivable but criticized ice age scenario, one that closely tracked with the plot of the over-the-top film The Day After Tomorrow.
The NIE, coordinated and written by the National Intelligence Council, would carry considerable weight across government, passing the climate change challenges through the lens of U.S. national security. -
The French Connection: Population, Environment, and Development
›April 1, 2007 // By Gib ClarkeFor the past three years, the Parisian NGO Committee for International Cooperation in National Research in Demography (CICRED) has funded programs around the world on the connections among population, environment, and development. Last week, representatives from these research programs—the overwhelming majority of whom are natives of the countries where the work was done—presented the findings of their studies at an international colloquium at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris.
Twenty studies, representing countries throughout sub-Saharan African and Asia, were presented. Although each study produced unique findings, common themes emerged: inter- and intra-national immigration and rapid urbanization are cause for concern. In many of the studies, the rates of urbanization were such that urban planning could not keep up, leading to shortages of basic services like water and sanitation.
While immigration is often looked at in terms of the impact on the country of destination, presenters emphasized the negative impacts in the country of origin. Emigration often creates imbalances in gender and age cohorts (i.e., differing proportions of males and females, and a partially “missing” generations of younger people). The loss of social bonds and relationships—a phenomenon that Harvard’s Allan Hill calls a breakdown in the “moral economy,” as well as the loss of available labor, leads to less labor-intensive agricultural practices which sacrifice the environment and favor short-term gain for long-term need. Finally, although climate change was not the focus of any of these studies, its potential impact on the environment and livelihoods was an ever-present theme.
Background documents, PowerPoint presentations, data sets, and other valuable tools will be available soon from CICRED.