A study published in Conservation Letters finds that emphasizing the ways the environment benefits the world’s poor “is a substantial improvement over dollar-based, ecosystem-service valuations that undervalue the requirements of the world’s poor” and “offers great hope for reconciling conservation and human development goals.”

“I don’t know of an armed conflict that has got a single cause,” said International Alert Secretary General Dan Smith at an event sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program on June 10, 2009. “Our argument is simply that climate change adds another major variable into that mix.” Smith was joined by Shruti Mehrotra, a senior consultant to International Alert on climate change, for a nuanced discussion of climate change’s potential impacts on global stability.

The Netherlands and Bangladesh: Capacity Matters

Both the Netherlands and Bangladesh are low-lying coastal countries vulnerable to sea-level rise and extreme weather events. Yet the Netherlands is “a wealthy country with stable government that’s transparent and accountable to the people,” said Smith. “A country like Bangladesh which is poor, which has got democracy but it’s a very iffy democracy—it’s really still in a state of transition—and which does not itself have the resources to handle those problems” could experience “great social pressure as a consequence of climate change,” he said.

Cascading Impacts: Water, Food, Livelihoods

Four hundred million people depend on the glacier-fed Ganges-Brahmaputra river system for water, food, and industry, said Smith. “A very large number of people’s livelihoods are going to be affected if water management in the Ganges-Brahmaputra area is not adequate to the task” of adapting to changing precipitation patterns and melting glaciers.

Seventy percent of Peruvians depend on glacial runoff for their water needs, according to Smith. But the Andean glaciers will essentially melt and disappear by 2015, meaning that an initial excess of water will be followed by a terrible deficit, said Smith. The impacts on Peruvian society will largely depend on how well the government, the private sector, and civil society mobilize to manage their water supply.

Scarce Resources: Migration and Conflict

Scarcer resources may lead to mass migration and conflict, said Smith, but he urged the audience to be wary of the “factoids and guesstimates being thrown around about how many people will migrate under the pressure of climate change.”

People sometimes move to avoid conflict, but “very often, unwittingly, they become the vector of conflict themselves,” said Smith. Most climate-induced migration is likely to be within a country or within a region, so “a lot of that migration is going to be people moving from areas which are no longer viable to areas which are barely viable—indeed, where their arrival threatens the viability of the area into which they’re moving,” he said.

According to International Alert’s report A climate of conflict: The links between climate change, peace and war, there are 46 countries that will be at high risk of violent conflict due to the intersecting impacts of climate change and economic, political, and social problems.

Envisioning Adaptation

No matter what happens at the December 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, people will need to adapt to the changes already underway in the climate system. But if adaptation is seen as a purely technical process, it will fail, said Smith. It is a cultural process that will only work if people have the chance to express their opinions and misgivings—and then buy into it.

“Most of development discourse is not being taken into account in these environmental negotiations,” said Mehrotra. Most climate negotiators are climate scientists or diplomats, not development practitioners. But in low-income countries, climate change will primarily be a development issue. “There is a potential that huge amounts of money will be put into this [adaptation], using a way of thinking about development from the 1970s,” warned Mehrotra.

Photos: Dan Smith and Shruti Mehrotra. Courtesy of David Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.

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Simon Dalby, a geographer at Ottawa’s Carleton University, wants to put the “human” back into “human security” with his new book Security and Environmental Change. He is trying to find a common vocabulary to bridge the disparate languages of environmental science and security studies and enable them to mesh in a way that makes “intellectual sense.”

More than 150 experts from around the world are assembled this week in Oslo, Norway, for the capstone conference of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) Project. The conference features a mix of researchers and policymakers, who are debating the practical impacts of bringing a focus on people more firmly into discussions of global environmental change.

No one is currently emigrating from Pacific small island states principally due to climate change, according to Australian geographer Jon Barnett of the University of Melbourne. In this short interview conducted at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Barnett situates climate change’s potential future impacts within the broader social, political, and economic challenges for residents of small island states, reminding us that there is great physical and political diversity among these islands.

The U.S. Global Change Research Program, which integrates federal government research on climate change, released Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States this week. The report examines climate’s likely impacts on various regions of the country.

The Guardian examines ongoing conflicts over natural resources between indigenous people and governments.

In her final dispatch from the Bonn climate negotiations, Population Action International climate director Kathleen Mogelgaard notes the conspicuous absence of demography in international climate discussions.

A webcast is now available of the Johns Hopkins University-Population Reference Bureau symposium “Climate Change and Urban Adaptation: Managing Unavoidable Health Risks in Developing Countries.”

A new policy paper from the World Bank seeks to answer the question, “Do the households in game management areas enjoy higher levels of welfare relative to the conditions they would have been in had the area not been designated as a game management area?”

A Commission on Climate and Tropical Forests, led by John Podesta, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, and Lincoln Chafee, former Republican senator from Rhode Island, has been formed to advise President Obama on how to reduce tropical deforestation through U.S. climate change policies, reports Mongabay.com.

“Some, I think, probably are surprised to hear former generals and admirals talk about energy efficiency and renewable energy, but they shouldn’t be,” said General Charles Wald, USAF (Ret.), chairman of the CNA Military Advisory Board (MAB), a group of 12 retired three- and four-star admirals and generals. “Force protection isn’t just about protecting weak spots; it’s about reducing vulnerabilities before you get into harm’s way.”

Wald was joined by fellow MAB member Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, USN (Ret.), and CNA General Counsel Sherri Goodman for a discussion of MAB’s latest report, Powering America’s Defense: Energy and the Risks to National Security, at a meeting on May 28, 2009. Two years ago, Wald, Goodman, and two other members of the MAB spoke at another Environmental Change and Security Program-hosted event on the MAB’s first report, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.

Energy, Climate, and the Military

“Our over-dependence on fossil fuels” and “our dependence on a vulnerable electric grid…present an urgent and serious risk to our national security,” said Goodman, who served as deputy under secretary of defense for environmental security from 1993-2000.

Powering America’s Defense argues that U.S. dependence on foreign oil “tethers America to unstable and hostile regimes, subverts foreign policy goals, and requires the U.S. to stretch its military presence across the globe.”

The U.S. military’s energy use presents unique risks. “Our inefficient use of oil adds to the already-great risk assumed by our troops. It reduced combat effectiveness. It puts our troops more directly and more often in harm’s way,” said Wald. “Many of our casualties—and you’ve all heard of the IEDs and EIDs that have done so much harm to so many of our young people—many of those people are in convoys carrying fuel to the battlefield” in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A major U.S. blackout in August 2003—which shut down water and sewage plants, gas stations, telecommunications outlets, and some elements of border check systems—emphasized the vulnerability of the nation’s electrical grid. “The situation can be exploited as a threat by those to wish to do us harm,” said Wald.

Innovative Solutions, With DoD in the Lead

The report recommends that:

1. Energy-security and climate-change goals should be integrated into national-security and military planning processes;
2. The Department of Defense (DoD) should design and deploy energy-efficient systems on the battlefield;
3. DoD should monitor its energy use at all levels of operations;
4. DoD should improve the energy efficiency of its installations;
5. DoD should increase renewable-energy generating capacity; and
6. DoD should invest in the development of low-carbon liquid fuels—such as those produced by algae—that can replace oil.

“The military is an important piece of this [alternative-energy] equation because the military is the nation’s single largest user of energy,” said Goodman. “What the military does can affect the nation, and the military has been a leader, both in technology and in cultural change, historically in our country.”

A Direct Appeal

Recalling the sacrifices Americans made on the home front during World War II—saving scrap metal, conserving fuel, planting victory gardens—McGinn urged Americans today to take a similar approach to meeting the nation’s energy and climate challenges.

“There are individual steps that every American can take: using less energy, being more efficient with the energy that we do use, supporting new policies to help our country take a new energy path,” he said. “They may cost money, yes, but if we don’t spend the money now, primarily thinking of that as an investment, we’ll still pay, and we’ll pay much more later. In fact, very likely, we’ll pay in American lives lost,” he said.

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In Search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement, launched at the climate negotiations this week in Bonn, represents a major step forward in the effort to determine how environmental shocks and stresses precipitated by climate change will compel populations to migrate.

According to Family Planning and Economic Well-Being: New Evidence From Bangladesh, a report from the Population Reference Bureau, “long-term investment in an integrated family planning and maternal and child health (FPMCH) program contributes to improved economic security for families, households, and communities through larger incomes, greater accumulation of wealth, and higher levels of education.”

A YouTube video from the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) shows how Darfuri refugees are struggling to manage scarce natural resources in refugee camps in Chad.

Facing Global Environmental Change: Environmental, Human, Energy, Food, Health, and Water Security Concepts, the fourth volume of the Hexagon Series on Human and Environmental Security and Peace, was launched at a side event to the 17th Session of the Commission on Sustainable Development.

The Obama Plan for Energy and Climate Security: Conference Proceedings and Final Recommendations lays out the Center for a New American Security’s recommendations to President Obama for achieving his climate and energy goals.