“The climate issue also very clearly illustrates the whole complexity of the security issue,” says Henrik Selin. “Arctic melting is a national security issue in the traditional national security kind of way.” In this podcast from the Environmental Change and Security Program, Selin, assistant professor of international relations at Boston University, and Stacy VanDeveer, associate professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire, sat down with ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko to discuss the resonance of climate change in the U.S. security community.

In the annual threat assessment he presented last week to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, new Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair named the global economic crisis—not terrorism—the primary near-term threat to U.S. national security, prompting accusations of partisanship from the Washington Times. Yet as the U.S. Naval War College’s Derek Reveron notes, “the economic turmoil of the early 20th century fueled global instability and war,” and today’s economic collapse could strengthen extremists and deprive U.S. allies of the funds they need to deploy troops or increase foreign assistance to vulnerable regions.

Further down the list of potential catastrophes—after terrorism, cybersecurity, and the “arc of instability” that stretches from the Middle East to South Asia—the assessment tackles environmental security threats. The four-page section, which likely draws on sections of the recent National Intelligence Council report Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, summarizes the interrelated natural-resource and population challenges—including energy, food, water, demography, climate change, and global health—the U.S. intelligence community is tracking.

The world will face mounting resource scarcity, warns Blair. “Access to relatively secure and clean energy sources and management of chronic food and water shortages will assume increasing importance for a growing number of countries. Adding well over a billion people to the world’s population by 2025 will itself put pressure on these vital resources,” he writes.

Drawing on the conclusions of the 2008 National Intelligence Assessment on the impacts of global climate change to 2030, Blair portrays climate change as a variable that could place additional strain on already-stressed agricultural, energy, and water systems: “We assess climate change alone is unlikely to trigger state failure in any state out to 2030, but the impacts will worsen existing problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions.” Direct impacts to the United States include “warming temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns, and possible increases in the severity of storms in the Gulf, increased demand for energy resources, disruptions in US and Arctic infrastructure, and increases in immigration from resource-scarce regions of the world,” writes Blair.

Africa, as usual, is the last of the world’s regions to be analyzed in the assessment. Blair notes that “a shortage of skilled medical personnel, deteriorating health systems, and inadequate budgets to deal with diseases like HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis” is threatening stability in sub-Saharan Africa, and explains that agriculture, which he rightly calls “the foundation of most African economies,” is not yet self-sufficient, although some countries have made significant improvements in infrastructure and technology. He highlights ongoing conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Sudan, and Somalia as the most serious security challenges in Africa. He fails to note, however, that all four have environmental/natural resource dimensions (see above links for details).

Conflicts among pastoralists over water and land have increased in drought-stricken northeastern Kenya, reports IRIN News.

Country for Sale, a report by Global Witness, alleges that Cambodia’s oil, gas, and mineral industries are highly corrupt.

Foreign Policy features an interview with General William “Kip” Ward, the commander of the new U.S. Africa Command. The New Security Beat covered General Ward’s recent comments on civilian-military cooperation.

Healthy Familes, Healthy Forests: Improving Human Health and Biodiversity Conservation details Conservation International’s integrated population-health-environment projects in Cambodia, Madagascar, and the Philippines.

Double Jeopardy: What the Climate Crisis Means for the Poor, a new report on climate change and poverty alleviation, synthesizes insights from an August 2008 roundtable convened by Richard C. Blum and the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development Program at the Aspen Institute.

“Although the long-term implications of climate change and the retreating ice cap in the Arctic are still unclear, what is very clear is that the High North is going to require even more of the Alliance’s attention in the coming years,” said NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer at a seminar on security prospects in the High North hosted by the Icelandic government in Reykjavik.

“I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It is the ghost at the table. We have all these big issues that everybody is looking at and then you don’t really hear anyone say the “p” word,” says UK Sustainable Development Commission Chair Jonathon Porrit, speaking about population’s impact on the environment. Porrit has drawn criticism for his remarks.

A local priest has warned that a Norwegian company’s proposed nickel mines will threaten food security on the Philippine island of Mindoro.

“Climate change is an important issue that can be addressed by all three elements of the national security equation: defense, diplomacy, and development,” says Kent Butts, in this short expert analysis from the Environmental Change and Security Program. Kent Butts, professor of political-military strategy at the Center for Strategic Leadership, U.S. Army War College, makes the case for considering global climate change a nontraditional threat to security and discusses how the U.S. military is reacting to a changing climate.

“The whole world is aging, and the developed countries are leading the way,” said Neil Howe of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at a January 27, 2009, Wilson Center discussion of his latest report, The Graying of the Great Powers: Demography and Geopolitics in the 21st Century. Demography is as close as social science comes to predicting the future, Howe explained, presenting the geopolitical consequences of demographic trends over the next 50 years. Howe and co-author Richard Jackson, also of CSIS, were joined by Jennifer Sciubba of Rhodes College, who urged them and other demographers to explore how population trends interact with additional variables, such as environmental degradation, economic recession, and conflict.

Danger: Demographic Decline Approaching

“Populations in most developed countries will not only age, but stagnate or decline,” due to falling fertility and rising longevity, said Howe. Without “sizable immigration,” he warned, the populations of countries like the United States, France, Great Britain, Canada, Germany, and Japan will decline. As developed countries’ populations shrink, they will lose military might, savings and investment, entrepreneurship, and cultural influence. “Voltaire once said that God is on the side of biggest battalions,” Howe reminded the audience.

Developing Toward Greater Peace

Jackson explained that the developing world is in the midst of the “demographic transition”—the drops in mortality and fertility that generally accompany economic and social development. Since 1970, the developing world’s overall fertility rate has declined from 5.1 to 2.9 children per woman, and its overall population growth rate has dropped from 2.2 percent to 1.3 percent per year, according to Jackson. Additionally, the median age has risen from 20 to 26 years old, “a cause for hope and optimism about the future,” Jackson argued, as countries with more balanced population age structures tend to be more democratic, prosperous, and peaceful than countries with extremely young ones.

But despite the long-term possibility of a world transitioning toward greater peace and prosperity, the developing world will still experience near-term shocks. The timing and pace of the demographic transition varies widely by country and region, with some countries transitioning too fast or too far, said Jackson. These trends could push developing countries toward social collapse by acting “as a kind of multiplier on all the stresses of development,” explained Jackson—for instance, causing China “to lurch even more toward neo-authoritarianism.”

Crisis of the 2020s

Global demographic trends will converge in the 2020s to make that decade “very challenging,” said Howe. The developed world will undergo hyper-aging, population decline, and flattening GDP growth, along with rising pension and health care costs, Jackson noted. The Muslim world will experience a decade of temporary youth bulges, as the large generation that was born between 1990 and 2000 has children. The populations of Russia and Eastern Europe will implode, and Russia’s geopolitical strength and influence will wane. Meanwhile, China will experience a decade of “premature aging”; due to its one-child policy, it will become “gray” before it achieves the per capita GDP of most aging countries.

Demography and Public Policy

Sciubba praised the report’s comprehensive, policy-friendly approach to demography, but urged the authors to remain true to the nuances of their topic, even in their conclusions and recommendations. “Policymakers like to know what we don’t know and what we do know. And with population aging and national security, often there’s a lot more of what we don’t know than what we do know,” she said. “Going into the future, we need more of an emphasis on places where policymakers can make a difference,” said Sciubba. “Opportunities matter just as much as challenges.”

Photos: Neil Howe, Richard Jackson, and Jennifer Dabbs Sciubba. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.

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The Feeding of the Nine Billion: Global Food Security for the 21st Century, a report from Chatham House, puts forth 10 proposals designed to make the global food system more resilient, sustainable, and equitable.

Strategic Implications of Global Health, a recent report from the National Intelligence Council, builds on a 2000 National Intelligence Estimate analyzing the links between global health and U.S. national security, but places more emphasis on non-infectious issues like maternal mortality, malnutrition, and chronic diseases.

Bill Gates’ first annual letter about his work at the Gates Foundation includes a chart showing that better overall health is linked to smaller families.

“How Much Would You Pay to Save the Planet? The American Press and the Economics of Climate Change,” a discussion paper from Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy, examines coverage of the economic debate over the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act of 2008.

Population Connection’s February 2009 Reporter features stories on Ghana’s slow progress on reproductive health and Thomas Friedman’s book Hot, Flat, and Crowded, among others.

The Economist examines the connections between failed states and conflict, terrorism, poverty, and disease. Failed states were a major concern of the recent U.S. National Defense Strategy.

“Demographics are going to be to the 21st century what class cleavages were to the 19th century,” says Christian Leuprecht in this short expert analysis from the Environmental Change and Security Program. In this video, Leuprecht, an assistant professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, makes the case for the importance of demographic dynamics and their connections to conflict and security.

Critics have warned that the new unified U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) could threaten the sovereignty of African nations and encroach on the portfolios of other U.S. agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). But in an interview with USAID newsletter FrontLines, General William E. “Kip” Ward, head of AFRICOM, went out of his way to dispel these fears. Some of the most interesting parts of the interview:

On AFRICOM’s humanitarian efforts:

“We know that our piece is only a very small part of the totality of humanitarian assistance that’s being performed by USAID and other agencies. We would not look to take those roles over.”

On civilian-military cooperation:

“We are learning to understand one another better and truly, as [USAID] Administrator [Henrietta] Fore and [Defense] Secretary [Robert] Gates said, we are seeing with greater clarity the importance of all these efforts working as cohesively together as they can. Security and development go hand-in-hand to produce stability that we all seek.”

On coordinating with USAID and host countries:

“We would get involved where those development projects complemented the work being done by developmental agencies, USAID, in very close coordination with the country team, the ambassador, and representatives from USAID that are there on the ground. We want to ensure that we don’t do things that conflict with the work being done by others. This might include a school being built so we can complement each other’s efforts. Or, at the request of a country, we might conduct an exercise and we may need to build a road to get to a training area. And if building the road in one place or another could help the population, then we would look to work with the country team and the ambassador so it provides benefits to the population.”

Photo: Comoran Defense Chief of Staff Salimou Mohamed Amiri (left) talks with General William E. Ward, commander of U.S. Africa Command (right), on January 21, 2009. Ward met with Comoran government officials as part of his first official visit to the island nation. Courtesy of by Kenneth Fidler, U.S. Africa Command.

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