Climate Change Is Linked to Security, But Don’t Overplay It

Climate Change Is Linked to Security, But Don’t Overplay It

August 31, 2009 By Wilson Center Staff
As the impacts of climate change on national security are beginning to receive attention at the highest levels of government, climate-security experts must avoid oversimplifying these complex connections, said Geoff Dabelko, director of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.
“Today, with climate change high on the political agenda, powerful actors in the security community are assessing its potentially dangerous effects on conflict and military readiness,” Dabelko said. In “Planning for Climate Change: The Security Community’s Precautionary Principle” in the journal Climatic Change, Dabelko views the defense community’s interest in climate change as an understandable development. “Climate change poses threats and opportunities that any risk analysis calculation should take seriously—including the military’s planning efforts, such as the Quadrennial Defense Review,” he says.

“However, it is important to remember that in the mid-1990s, advocates oversold our understanding of environmental links to security, creating a backlash that ultimately undermined policymakers’ support for meeting the very real connections between environment and conflict head-on. Today, ‘climate security’ is in danger of becoming merely a political argument that understates the complexity of climate’s security challenges.”

In a new op-ed in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Dabelko offers some advice to scientists, politicians, and the media:
- Don’t oversimplify the links between climate change and violent conflict or terrorism.
- Don’t neglect ongoing natural resource and conflict problems.
- Don’t assume we know the precise scale and location of climate-induced migration.
- Don’t forget that climate mitigation efforts can introduce social conflict and needs to be factored into both mitigation and adaptation efforts.
“There is a new opportunity to use increased public attention to highlight the relationship between natural resources, climate, and security,” Dabelko writes. “But redressing the climate-security link requires avoiding some of the pitfalls that impeded progress the last time environment and security shared the spotlight.”
Topics: climate change, conflict, environmental security, migration, military, natural resources
- Anonymous
  
  With the increased scarcity of natural resources and the affects of climate on those resources, how do you propose to handle the sometimes violent reactions to the scarcities? Although mitigation efforts can introduce more problems, is it better to sit idle by or prepare for the worst and hope for the best?
- Anonymous
  
  http://www.cdi.org/adm/1143/…this link provides an article highlight some of the threats. Neither of them are military, all of them have something to do with the environment. My question to you is, in a time when instability and weak centralized governments are prone to coups and terrorist activity, is the time for careful deliberation over? I think many national security experts would agree with me when I say that, after 9/11 anything that contributes to the instability should be considered a viable security risks.
- USMA EV CDT
  
  People often times choose to act in a manner that benefits themselves without regard for the implications of those actions on other individuals, this can occur no more.
  
  There needs to be an understanding of the impacts that human beings have on one another and the environment, and furthermore there needs to be an understanding of the importance of climate change on both the environment and humans affected by it. This understanding cannot create a panic though, once a panic is created then the potential for conflict grows even greater.
  
  Civil strife is not inevitable. We must take certain measures to guarantee that it is prevented as often as possible. If the global community unites to mitigate the issues that created by climate change, we can work together, making sure that the negative impacts of such a change are not too harsh. Hopefully, lowering the amount of conflicts regarding climate change.
- http://www.blogger.com/profile/18337694112852162181 Geoff Dabelko
  
  Thanks for these excellent comments. I agree with the sense of urgency they convey. I share that sense of urgency in the face of climate challenges, some of which pose security issues. Therefore I would say the time for deliberation is over and a precautionary principle approach from a security perspective dictates taking action. The nature of that action, who takes it etc are critical questions but the problems are big enough that all actors have roles to play. To pretend any major player, govt or nongovernment; military or civilian can sit on the sideline is a luxury we don't have. So in this way my call for caution in approaching the issue is not advocating do nothing. It is saying the problems we face are bad enough without exaggerating them beyond what we have evidence or risk analysis to support. There is a real danger that exaggeration (ie arm waving about chaos, chaos, war, war as some advocates are doing) leads to a policy backlash that sets back efforts. Climate and security links can't just be an advocacy argument deployed in the latest debates on Capitol Hill. It must be founded on analysis of known and predicted impacts and knock on effects that do suggest a plan for the worst, hope for the best.

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