Monthly archive for October 2007. Show all posts
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Thirsty for Change
›October 11, 2007 // By Rachel WeisshaarEgyptians took to the streets to protest water shortages this summer, reports Inter Press Service (IPS), but despite widespread domestic press coverage of the groundbreaking protests and repeated assurances from Egyptian government officials, Egypt seems to have made little progress in resolving its water shortage problems. Even after President Hosni Mubarak and his cabinet announced a plan to invest $180 million in the construction of small water purification centers in areas susceptible to shortages, popular protests began or continued in multiple provinces. Mohamed Nagi, head of the Habi Centre for Environmental Rights in Cairo, told IPS, “The recent demonstrations show that citizens have lost faith in longstanding government promises to provide them with adequate drinking water.”
Indeed, as the University of Maryland’s Ken Conca points out in “The New Face of Water Conflict,” “Amid the talk of looming ‘water wars,’ a less dramatic—but more immediate—link between water and violence is often ignored: the violence engendered by poor governance of water resources.” The IPS article seems to confirm Conca’s assertion that how well water is managed can be as important as how much water is available. According to Nagi, Egypt’s water infrastructure is chronically underfunded and mismanaged. The article also notes that a study by Egypt’s state-run National Research Centre found that 85 percent of Egypt’s total potable water was wasted due to the poor condition of water distribution systems.
Egypt faces persistent water shortages despite the fact that it and Sudan hold absolute rights to use 100 percent of the Nile’s water under agreements signed in 1929 and 1959. The other countries that depend on the Nile—Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—are poorer and less powerful than Egypt, so their access to water is even more precarious than Egypt’s. For one scholar’s vision of how the 10 countries of the Nile River basin could cooperate around shared water management, see Patricia Kameri-Mbote’s “Water, Conflict, and Cooperation: Lessons from the Nile River Basin.” Kameri-Mbote believes that the combined efforts of local and national civil society groups and the Nile Basin Initiative, a high-level forum that brings together ministers from the Nile basin countries, could lead to more stable, sustainable, and equitable use of the Nile’s water. -
Capitol Hill Considers National Security Implications of Climate Change
›October 5, 2007 // By Thomas Renard“The possibility of a world transformed by climate change is not a science fiction image of a post-apocalyptic society; it is not a road warrior movie. It is happening now. There is another holocaust now in Darfur.” Brad Miller (D-NC), chairman of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology, chose strong words to open the subcommittee’s September 26, 2007, hearing “The National Security Implications of Climate Change.”
The first witness was General Gordon R. Sullivan (USA Ret.), chairman of the CNA Corporation’s Military Advisory Board, which wrote the groundbreaking report National Security and the Threat of Climate Change. Sullivan reminded the congressmen of the potential destabilizing impacts of climate change—reduced access to freshwater, impaired food production, the spread of diseases, land loss due to flooding, and population displacement, among others—and their potential security consequences, which include an elevated risk of state failure, the growth of terrorism, mass migrations leading to regional and global tensions, and conflicts over resources.
China’s geopolitical importance should make it of particular concern to policymakers, said Alexander Lennon, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. According to Lennon, two-thirds of China’s cities are currently experiencing water and food shortages. These environmental issues already cause unrest among the population, and the combined effects of climate change and rapid urbanization could increase tensions. A destabilized China, however, is only one of the various climate-related problems the United States could face in the future. Climate change could also foster terrorism, Lennon said. Rampant poverty, growing economic inequality, state failure, and ethnic tensions form a fertile substrate for terrorist groups.
James Woolsey, vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton and former director of the CIA, argued that the threats posed by climate change and terrorism should not be isolated from one another. Indeed, “terrorists may exploit vulnerabilities in our energy production and distribution or other weaknesses in our infrastructure,” he said. Fuel convoys in Iraq, for instance, are a primary target for insurgents. Woolsey encouraged policymakers to opt for a plan that would reduce both threats simultaneously. His solution: improving U.S. energy efficiency.
As the nation’s largest single consumer of oil (1.8 percent of the U.S. total), the Department of Defense (DoD) is already working on improving energy efficiency, said Kent Butts, director of National Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership. More generally, he continued, DoD is devoting considerable attention to the destabilizing impacts of climate change, although there is no overarching directive that guides these efforts. The Navy, for instance, is currently analyzing the security implications of shrinking ice sheets in the Arctic.
U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) shared his concerns regarding the military’s efforts to increase vehicles’ efficiency. Focusing too much on climate change, he argued, could be harmful to U.S. troops’ security. “If we decide to produce lighter vehicles in order to consume less oil, soldiers will be less protected. Aren’t our troops more important than climate change?” he asked. Sullivan responded that if lighter vehicles were produced, they would be designed so they protected soldiers as well as today’s heavier vehicles do.
Andrew Price-Smith, a professor of political science at Colorado College, emphasized another potential area of impact: global health. He explained that an increase in temperatures and precipitation could favor the proliferation and geographical expansion of infectious diseases such as cholera and malaria. The spread of deadly diseases to new areas could in turn undermine the economy (through absenteeism, increased medical costs, and premature deaths) and foster political instability.
Finally, several representatives shared their skepticism concerning climate change. Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), who said they did not believe human activities have contributed to climate change, argued that the United States should not try to mitigate climate change, but instead try to adapt to it. “Fostering a more robust economy is our strongest defense against climate change,” said Sensenbrenner. “Because it is too late to prevent rising temperatures, the best response is to ensure that our economy is strong enough to adequately respond.” In other words, he was suggesting that we should not try to reduce carbon emissions, because doing so would slow economic growth. He concluded on an optimistic note: “Everyone agrees that the wealthiest countries and individuals will be the least affected by global warming. Putting more people in a position to afford air conditioning will actually save lives.” Needless to say, not everyone in the room shared his view. -
Quantitative Study Reveals Link Between Climate Change and Conflict in China
›October 2, 2007 // By Thomas RenardClimate change could be to blame for many of the wars in China during the past millennium, says an article published recently in Human Ecology. The study, the first quantitative examination of the link between conflict and temperature changes, is a milestone in climate change research.
David Zhang and co-authors compared the 899 wars that occurred in eastern China between A.D. 1000 and 1911 with climatic data for the same period. They found that warfare frequency in eastern China—particularly in that region’s southern part—correlated strongly with temperature oscillations. Warfare ratios in the cold phases were twice as high as in the warm phases. Furthermore, almost all dynastic changes and warfare peaks coincided with cold phases.
“In general, rebellion was the dominant category of war,” write the authors. “The rebellions were predominantly peasant uprisings induced by famine and heavy taxation, since farmers were always the first to suffer from declining agricultural production.”
The authors surmise that by affecting agriculture, cooler temperatures disrupted food supply, especially in the ecologically vulnerable northern part of eastern China. Food scarcity could have triggered rebellions or forced people to migrate, further exacerbating food shortages in certain areas. Migration could also have generated tension between groups, producing local conflicts—especially when China was populated by nomadic tribes that could move freely. The authors also hypothesize that food scarcity may have encouraged opposing Chinese armies to conduct cross-border raids on each other’s crops. However, additional, more detailed analysis of the pathways leading from cooler temperatures to conflict in eastern China is needed.
It is unclear whether the correlation observed by Zhang in eastern China will hold true for other parts of the world. We should also be careful not to use this one study to draw premature connections to today’s unprecedented climate change. However, we hope additional quantitative studies will be carried out; they would be solid contributions to the research on climate and security, which currently suffers from a scarcity of empirical data.