Today’s Center for a New American Security (CNAS) annual conference was replete with heavy hitters like General David Petraeus discussing the world’s top security challenges, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North Korea. But at an afternoon panel, CNAS’s Sharon Burke argued that although environmental and natural-resource issues may not get their own section in the Presidential Daily Briefing, they are intimately intertwined with many of the high-profile security issues that do.

President Obama recently called for a stronger focus on agricultural development in Afghanistan, said Burke, as part of a broader approach to increasing stability and improving Afghans’ quality of life. But decades of war have contributed to severe deforestation and land degradation, and farmers “can’t plant their seeds if the land is barren, and that’s where we are right now,” she said.

The panel also served as the launch for CNAS’s new Natural Security program (see working paper) and blog, which aim to study the “national-security implications of natural resources use,” said Burke. The program grows out of CNAS’s investigation of the security impacts of climate change and energy over the past several years. Burke explained that it was difficult to discuss energy and climate change without also talking about water, land, biodiversity, and a host of other related issues, so CNAS decided to create a program that would not attempt to separate these interconnected issues.

Burke was joined by former U.S. Senator John Warner, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, Roderick Eggert of the Colorado School of Mines, and Commander E. J. McClure of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development has released two reports on climate change and security: Rising Temperatures, Rising Tensions: Climate change and the risk of violent conflict in the Middle East and Climate Change and Security in Africa.

In “The Changing Face of Israel,” a Foreign Policy web exclusive, Richard Cincotta and Eric Kaufmann explain how Israel’s demographics are influencing the country’s politics.

CNN’s Inside Africa reports on a bill in the U.S. Congress that seeks to quell the violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by forcing American companies to disclose the sources of their minerals.

Population Action International’s Kathleen Mogelgaard reports from international climate change negotiations in Bonn, Germany, on how climate change disproportionately affects women and the poor.

A Christian Science Monitor op-ed on global demographic trends cites Wilson Center Senior Scholar Martin Walker.

On Grist, Earth Policy Institute Founder Lester Brown explores the massive migration that would be precipitated by even partial melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets.

The security threat of sea level rise to small island states appears to have proven so obvious as to overcome the common objections of many countries (notably P5 members China and Russia) to framing climate change as a threat to security. Just yesterday, the UN General Assembly passed by consensus a non-binding resolution linking climate and security. The final version of the resolution (GA/10830) is not yet online, but the May 18 draft resolution gives you an idea of the final language.

Symbolic, yes, but perhaps this will make it easier for climate security questions to come before the UN Security Council again. The April 2007 Security Council session on climate change and security, at the behest of the British chair at the time, was, shall we say, met with a mixed reception, but 2009 is already different than 2007 in so many ways. It will be interesting to watch where the discussion goes from here at the UN and in national capitals.

Graphic: Symbol of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).

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ABC’s Earth 2100 documentary, airing tonight at 9:00 p.m. EST, will feature many ECSP speakers—including Jared Diamond and Peter Gleick—as well as the Center for a New American Security’s (CNAS) Clout and Climate Change War Game. Held in Washington, D.C., in July 2008, the war game focused on the national security implications of climate change.

Earth 2100 explores possible worst-case scenarios for this century that could be triggered by a “perfect storm” of population growth, resource depletion, and climate change. Environmental security expert Thomas Homer-Dixon tells host Bob Woodruff that “energy, climate food, population, economic pressures—any one of these challenges might be very serious in and of itself. But because they are happening all simultaneously, it’s going to be very difficult for our governments to cope.”

During the climate-change war game, “every country sort of hewed to what you would expect,” said CNAS Vice President for Natural Security Sharon Burke at an ECSP event earlier this year.

“The EU team spent the first two hours debating whether they could really be a country; the Indian team instantly came up with a negotiating strategy that sounded cooperative and brilliant but was completely impossible to execute; the Chinese team was, ‘No, we’re not going to do anything unless you pay us’; and the American team was keen to lead, only nobody was following,” she said.

One of the key lessons from the game, Burke added, was that “everything comes down to what China is prepared to do.” She also described insights from the war game in a New Security Beat guest post.

Several war-game participants are now members of the Obama administration, including Todd Stern, the lead U.S. negotiator on climate change; Michèle Flournoy, under secretary of defense for policy; and David Sandalow, assistant secretary for international affairs at the Department of Energy.

An ABC producer working on Earth 2100 consulted ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko earlier this year.

“Addressing the issue of the environment in the context of conflict resolution, conflict prevention, peacekeeping, [and] peacebuilding becomes ever more important because we know from everything we have learned—and are learning every day—about climate change that one thing is for certain: The world is going to be under more stress,” says UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Director Achim Steiner in a short expert interview on YouTube.

Yet in another original Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP) video, Steiner emphasizes that environmental issues do not lead inexorably to conflict. “History shows that human societies are not prone to looking for conflict but rather for conflict resolution, particularly when it comes to fundamental elements of life support systems, be it water, or be it clean air or other issues—we have seen the model of cooperation emerge.”

Steiner was at the Wilson Center in March 2009 for the launch of From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment, a new report by UNEP’s Disasters and Conflicts Programme. According to From Conflict to Peacebuilding:

• Forty percent of intrastate conflicts within the past 60 years have been strongly linked to natural resources.
  
• Such conflicts are twice as likely to relapse within the first five years of peace.
  
• Less than a quarter of peace agreements for these conflicts address natural-resource issues.

Watch other short expert commentaries—on water, demographic security, climate change and security, and other issues—on ECSP’s YouTube channel.

The Copenhagen climate conference will be “the most important gathering in human history,” said the United Kingdom’s environment secretary, Hilary Benn, at the Wilson Center on May 14, 2009 (full text of speech). While “an agreement on cutting emissions would be the biggest single step we could take to safeguard [natural] resources,” said Benn, “even such an agreement will not—indeed cannot—encompass all of the things we need to do to safeguard our environment.”

“The most glaring threat is that of dangerous climate change. But it is not the only example of the problems we create when we exploit the world’s resources unsustainably,” explained Benn.

“The spiraling price of food in 2008 was a wake-up call. Riots threatened political stability. Export bans threatened world trade. Wheat prices doubled, rice quadrupled. And another 75 million people were threatened by poverty and hunger,” Benn said.

Although food prices have fallen recently, continuing growth in the global population—expected to reach at least 9 billion by 2050—and rising standards of living in poor and middle-income countries mean that world food production will need to double by 2050. This demand for food—especially more meat and dairy products—will put increasing pressure on land and water. Conflicts could erupt over these scarce resources if they are not managed properly, Benn warned.

Already, wealthy governments and corporations are buying farmland in Africa and other parts of the developing world—leading to unrest. Widespread anger at South Korean company Daewoo’s proposal to purchase more than half of Madagascar’s arable land contributed to the ouster of former Malagasy President Marc Ravalomanana.

Benn highlighted an apparent Catch-22: “Development is the best way of lowering the rate of population growth and so, in turn, lowering the pressure on resources. But development also increases income, and therefore demand.”

The way to free ourselves from this cycle, Benn said, is to create an environmentally sustainable economy, so that economic development does not degrade the environment. He proposed:

• Starting to build tomorrow’s sustainable economy even as we work to contain today’s economic crisis;


• Changing the incentives in our economies—through regulation and financial inducements—to promote environmentally sustainable choices;


• Creating the jobs that will power this new sustainable economy; and


• Working together as an international community to address water scarcity, food security, and biodiversity loss.

Benn called for U.S. leadership on climate change and other environmental issues: “We need America to apply all of its great energy to the task we, together, face.”

Photo: Hilary Benn. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.

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Troubled Waters: Climate Change, Hydropolitics, and Transboundary Resources, a recent report by the Stimson Center’s “Regional Voices: Transnational Challenges” project, exemplifies the kind of integrated analysis that needs to be done on global security, governance, and environmental issues. I want to highlight four areas where the report points us in the right direction for this kind of work:

1. It takes a regional approach. Regions have historically been neglected as units of analysis, and there has not been enough focus on regional institutions. We organize our foreign assistance on an overwhelmingly bilateral basis; we have country strategies and spend much of our money bilaterally. Yet river basins or other ecosystems are almost always transboundary and therefore regional. The chapters in this report show time and again that bilateral approaches are not sufficient to meet the challenges posed by climate change’s impacts on the hydrological cycle.

2. It examines what climate change means in specific contexts. In year of Copenhagen, we need to be talking about global targets and timetables, grand bargains, and massive mitigation. But we must keep a parallel focus on what climate change will mean in specific sectors (e.g., water, food, desertification), in specific locations, and for specific groups (e.g., the poor).

The report has many examples of where glacial and snowmelt patterns have big impacts many hundreds and thousands of miles away. My own program just hosted a conference in Bangkok where we had the India-based expert on glacial melt in the Tibetan plateau talking with USAID environment officers in Southeast Asia. We need more of these kinds of conversations.

3. It takes a holistic, integrated approach toward analyzing problems and recommending responses. This report makes explicit the importance of the analytical and policy connections among climate change, water, governance, conflict, and cooperation. However, governments, NGOs, donors, and international bodies remain wedded to stovepiped, single-sector approaches to diagnosing and responding to problems. This must change.

In 2009 in Washington, there is a greater appetite and a better political environment for taking on a broader approach. This has been framed as rebalancing the “3Ds” of defense, diplomacy, and development; as “sustainable security”; and as “smart power.” Whatever the name, environmental issues such as climate change and water should be front and center in these discussions.

4. It has a nuanced view of conflict and cooperation over natural resources. The report—and David Michel’s chapter in particular—successfully highlights the geopolitical implications of changes in climate and water without inaccurately hyping “water wars.” As we know, there is extensive subnational conflict around water, and we are likely to see more of this type of conflict under the conditions described in Troubled Waters. But states frequently work hard to cooperate and deflect violent conflict over transboundary water.

However, we need greater political and financial investment in transboundary institutions, as international cooperation around water doesn’t happen without a lot of effort. It needs to happen, though, because the future may be more dangerous than the past when it comes to water conflict and cooperation.

As we move forward on the water conflict and cooperation agenda, let’s not just focus on onset of conflict. Let’s be sure to look all along the conflict continuum, from prevention, to conflict, to post-conflict, and evaluate the high-politics importance of water at each of these stages.

I’ll end with an example of where we could broaden our approach to water in a current Washington policy context. Senator Dick Durbin recently introduced the Senator Paul Simon Water for the World Act of 2009, which builds on the Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act of 2005. The new bill is heavily focused on access to safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene, which are indeed pressing priorities. It says some of the right things about transboundary water, but historically, this has received little funding.

Further complicating efforts to secure more robust funding for transboundary water management and security is the fact that other water activities are usually funded through the Department of State, but transboundary efforts are often put through a multilateral institution like the World Bank—and the Department of the Treasury, not State, typically manages that relationship. This complicated tangle of agencies and institutions emphasizes my earlier point that foreign assistance is too stovepiped, and that we must get better at working across sectors.

Photo: The Nile River Basin is shared by 10 countries. Courtesy of Flickr user Michael Gwyther-Jones.

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The United States’—and the Department of Defense’s (DoD)—dependence on fossil fuels poses a significant national-security threat, concludes Powering America’s Defense: Energy and the Risks to National Security (summary), the second report from CNA’s Military Advisory Board (MAB), a group of 12 retired three- and four-star admirals and generals. At the report’s launch this morning, several members of the MAB were joined by several of the people they are trying to influence, including Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Ashton Carter and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Energy, Sanctions, and Commodities Douglas Hengel.

Carter outlined some of the ways DoD is attempting to increase its energy efficiency, from insulating air-conditioned tents in Iraq with foam, which can lead to a 45 percent reduction in energy usage, to incorporating the fully burdened cost of fueling vehicles into the acquisitions process, to tripling the amount of spending on energy research and development over the past two years.

Hengel echoed the report’s emphasis on the interconnectedness of energy, climate change, and security, explaining that President Obama added the Secretary of Energy to the National Security Council for precisely this reason.

On May 28 at 3:00 p.m., ECSP will host a discussion of the report’s findings, featuring CNA General Counsel Sherri Goodman; General Charles Wald USAF (Ret.), chairman of the MAB; and Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn USN (Ret.), a member of the MAB. ECSP also hosted a discussion of the MAB’s previous report, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.