The security community needs to “tell leaders that they won’t be able to guarantee security in a world where we don’t control climate change,” says Nick Mabey in this video from the Environmental Change and Security Program. “Because unless we have the authority of the security establishment and the foreign policy establishment at the table,” he says, “there’s no chance of both delivering the trillions of dollars needed to create a new clean energy economy, but also mak[ing] those tough choices.”

“A New Military Mission: Clean Energy,” part of the Center for American Progress’ “It’s Easy Being Green” series, highlights the military’s attempts to become more energy-efficient. Read more about the U.S. military’s environmental initiatives.

Simon Dalby, a professor at Carleton College, discusses the evolution of environmental security with John Tessitore, executive editor of the Carnegie Council, in a video interview (transcript available).

Climate Change, Food Security, and the Right to Adequate Food examines climate change’s expected impact on food production, with a special focus on Africa and Asia.

The BDA Foundation, a Canadian charity, and PharmAfrica, a pharmaceutical company, are working to create a medicinal plants industry that will lift local people out of poverty in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

“There are political and economic vulnerabilities that are in fact more important—or seem more important—to the participants of conflict than the physical vulnerability to climate change,” said Clionadh Raleigh at the February 19, 2009, event, “Climate Security Roundtable: U.S. and EU Research and Policy.” Raleigh, a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, was joined by Nick Mabey, founding director and chief executive of E3G, and Sharon Burke, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, to discuss climate change’s impact on conflict and how the United States and European Union (EU) have begun to adapt their foreign and security policies to the threat of climate change.

Ecological Change, Migration, and Conflict: A Complex Story

“The lack of access to power for certain communities, certain ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa, and basic access to resources among the most vulnerable populations has led to people misinterpreting the relationship that ecological change plays in their decision to either participate in conflict or to migrate,” Raleigh said. Although Raleigh’s research, which examined civil conflicts from 1990 to 2004, found that population density and growth were related to higher risks of conflict, “environmental pressures were not more likely to cause conflict in poor states—and not more likely during periods of instability,” she concluded. “Social, political, and economic factors are the most important determinants of civil war within developing countries,” she emphasized. “Poverty and unequal development come up time and time again.”

According to Raleigh, fears of mass international migration in response to climate change are overplayed. “Individuals and communities have quite a lot of coping mechanisms to deal with ecological difficulty,” including migration from rural to urban areas in the same country, she explained. Most migration, including labor and distress migration, “is temporary, internal, and circular,” she emphasized. “There is very little to no evidence that there will be an increase in international migration” in response to ecological change, although “there is evidence that there will be an increase in internal migration.”

Climate Change and Security: Perspectives from the EU

“Climate change is serious,” emphasized Mabey. “It’s a threat multiplier, it will make unstable places less stable—it’s going to change strategic interests, alliances, borders, threats, economic relationships, comparative advantages, the nature of international relations, and the legitimacy of the UN.” In the future, “security policy will need to get more preventive and risk-based because climate change just injects a huge bolt of uncertainty into the future,” said Mabey. He urged the expansion of forward-looking information systems that provide policymakers with the data they need to make decisions at the geopolitical, strategic, and operations levels. He also said security experts should strive to communicate the potential consequences of climate change to decisionmakers.

The EU has taken steps to integrate climate change into its security strategy; Great Britain, Germany, and Denmark have taken the lead. The Arctic has been a particular focus, with security experts examining trade routes, maritime zones, and new access to resources. Climate change “is not all about instability” in fragile, impoverished states, Mabey explained. “The Arctic is by far the most important climate security issue in the minds of traditional foreign-policy types in Europe.”

Environmental Security Gets a New Tool: The Climate War Game

Last year, Burke helped conduct a climate change war game based on a scenario of extreme weather events like droughts, wildfires, and cyclones. “Every country sort of hewed to what you would expect,” said Burke of the high-profile participants from China, India, Europe, and the United States. “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.” One of the key lessons from the game, Burke explained, was that “everything comes down to what China is prepared to do.”

In developing the game, Burke and her colleagues discovered “that there’s a vast poverty of the kinds of information that you need to make decisions.” As Burke explained, policymakers need specific data “to obligate large amounts of money and personnel,” and the game revealed that “policymakers don’t have the information they need to make decisions.”

Photos: From top to bottom, Clionadh Raleigh, Nick Mabey, and Sharon Burke. Courtesy of Dave Hawxhurst and the Woodrow Wilson Center.

MORE

A new study published in Conservation Biology (abstract) calculates that more than 80 percent of major armed conflicts from 1950-2000 have taken place in one of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots. “The fact that so many conflicts have occurred in areas of high biodiversity loss and natural resource degradation warrants much further investigation as to the underlying causes, and strongly highlights the importance of these areas for global security,” says coauthor Russell A. Mittermeier. He and lead author Thor Hansen argue that protecting nature during war can help recovery, and call for integrating conservation “into military, reconstruction and humanitarian programs in the world’s conflict zones.”

“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.

From Conflict to Peacebuilding: The Role of Natural Resources and the Environment, based on the work of the UN Environment Programme’s Expert Advisory Group on Environment, Conflict and Peacebuilding, summarizes the links between the environment, conflict, and peacebuilding, and includes 14 case studies of how natural resources affect—or are affected by—conflict.

The authors of “On Population Growth Near Protected Areas” come to an opposite conclusion from Wittemyer et al., who found a pattern of higher population growth near protected areas in Africa and Latin America. “To understand the disagreement, we re-analyzed the protected areas in Wittemyer et al.’s paper. Their results are simply artifacts of mixing two incompatible datasets,” write the authors. “Protected areas may experience unusual population pressures near their edges; indeed, individual case studies provide examples. There is no evidence, however, of a general pattern of disproportionate population growth near protected areas.”

“The President and I agreed to a new initiative that will further cross-border cooperation on environmental protection and environmental security,” said Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper yesterday, announcing plans for a U.S.-Canada Clean Energy Dialogue.

Scientists at Purdue University have teamed up with Google Earth to create an interactive map of U.S. CO2 emissions.

Mark Weston, who writes for the Global Dashboard blog, posted an edited version of a recent talk he gave on West African demography and security.

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).

An article in Conservation Letters examining the effect of war on wildlife in Cambodia finds that “the legacy of conflict for wildlife can be profound and destructive. To address post-conflict challenges more effectively, conservation must be integrated within broader peacebuilding processes, including disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of combatants.”

New York Times environmental reporter Andrew Revkin shares a recent nightmare on his blog, Dot Earth: If human beings achieve inexpensive, renewable energy, will this spur environmentally destructive population growth and consumption?

“Today, one-third of the world’s population has to contend with water scarcity, and there are ominous signs that this proportion could quickly increase,” writes the International Water Management Institute’s David Molden in the BBC’s Green Room. “Up to twice as much water will be required to provide enough food to eliminate hunger and feed the additional 2.5 billion people that will soon join our ranks. The demands will be particularly overwhelming as a wealthier, urbanised population demands a richer diet of more meat, fish, and milk.”

“Climate Wars” is a three-part podcast series by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Circle of Blue has launched the online radio series “5 in 15”; one episode features water expert Peter Gleick, head of the Pacific Institute, while another highlights Mark Turrell, CEO of technology company Imaginatik.