“Domestic policy alone is not enough; a new U.S. foreign policy to tackle climate change is also essential,” argues a Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force in Confronting Climate Change: A Strategy for U.S. Foreign Policy. “Unchecked climate change,” the authors write, “is poised to have wide-ranging and potentially disastrous effects on…human welfare, sensitive ecosystems, and international security.”

The Independent Task Force report comes on the heels of CFR’s widely publicized November 2007 report, “Climate Change and National Security.” ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko spoke with author Joshua Busby in a January podcast examining the links between climate and security.

In an interview, Task Force Director Michael A. Levi said, “climate change is a global problem that requires a global solution.” Rather than remaining “mired in domestic discussions,” as Levi argues the Bush administration has been, the task force calls for a shift in the way policymakers frame the issue of carbon emissions. “The point of this task force,” said Levi, “was to pull back and put this back where it belongs, in the context of American foreign policy.”

The United States, uniquely positioned to “steer international efforts to confront climate change,” must take a leadership role in advancing global policies, Levi said. Unchecked, American emissions will overwhelm any reductions made by other countries. U.S. policymakers have a valuable opportunity to show that environmental responsibility is consistent with robust economic performance, a concern in both developed and developing countries and a leading impediment to addressing climate change.

However, the report strongly cautions against the United States entering into any global framework to which other large emitters, like China and India, are not willing to adhere. The authors argue that the United States should lead through its domestic policies but use a “wide range of levers” to compel other countries to move in the right direction. The challenge of global climate change calls for a multi-pronged solution. “[J]ust like scientists tell us that no one technology is going to solve the problem, there’s no one diplomatic solution that’s going to solve it,” warned Levi. The challenge, then, is translating broad global concern over climate change into collective, and productive, action.

“The only future is resettlement,” a local Ethiopian official recently told the Economist, commenting on dire conditions in the Goru Gutu district, which is facing starvation following unpredictable rains and insect infestations. “Ethiopia has been synonymous with disastrous famine since the 1980s,” notes Sahlu Haile in “Population, Development, and Environment in Ethiopia“, his award-winning article for Environmental Change and Security Program Report 10. In fact, writes Haile, “the agricultural sector—the mainstay of the national economy—is less productive per capita today than it was 20 years ago.”

If resettlement were to take place in Goru Gutu, roughly 4,000 people would have to be resettled every year, and the government has a budget equal to only a fraction of the task. In addition, previous resettlement attempts have been disastrous. According to Haile, “previous resettlement programs were not voluntary…neither were they based on serious economic, social, and environmental studies.” As a result, they led to hardship for the migrants and to conflict with local populations, who felt threatened by the newcomers.

In “The Missing Links: Poverty, Population, and the Environment in Ethiopia,” Mogues Worku points out that in coming years, a rapidly growing population—the result of a lack of access to family planning and education among women—will put additional stress on the country’s ability to feed itself. In addition, Worku explains that climate change “has intensified these environmental problems by altering the region’s rainfall patterns.” Ethiopia’s population and climate challenges will likely lead to additional pressure for resettlement, paving the way for possible conflict. There are many national and international NGOs doing impressive work in Ethiopia on food security, family planning, sustainable livelihoods, and other issues, but much work remains to be done.

“Often, those who are already vulnerable to threats because they are poor, illiterate, lack political power, or face gender or ethnic discrimination are the ones who find themselves in the front lines of the negative dimensions of environmental change,” writes Richard Matthew of the Center for Unconventional Security Affairs at the University of California, Irvine, in “Resource Scarcity: Responding to the Security Challenge,” a new paper from the International Peace Institute. Vulnerable populations “face water and land scarcity, are displaced into marginal ecosystems where they encounter unfamiliar parasites, experience severe weather events, lose everything to floods and mudslides, and daily eke out an existence in peri-urban areas awash with human waste.”

Researchers continue to debate the security implications of various kinds of resource scarcity, but according to Matthew, there are at least four areas of general agreement:

• Resource scarcity is never the sole cause of conflict, but is often a contributing factor;
• Migration is frequently the link between resource scarcity and conflict;
• Rapid changes in access to resources are more likely to cause conflict than gradual changes; and
• Climate change will lead to resource scarcity in many areas that are experiencing or vulnerable to conflict.

Despite these dire circumstances, Matthew believes key actions and policies could significantly reduce the likelihood that resource scarcity will lead to conflict and insecurity. He offers 14 specific recommendations for NGOs, governments, and international organizations, which include supporting “the effort in UNEP to integrate the environment into post-conflict assessment, disaster management, and peacebuilding” and mobilizing “the enormous capacity of the private sector and NGO communities…around sustainable development, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding.”

On June 10, at the 12th session of the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) released Africa: Atlas of Our Changing Environment, a comprehensive look at the environmental devastation being wrought in Africa. Highlighting the ecological damage caused by high population growth, climate change, and the unsustainable use of natural resources, the atlas shows before-and-after satellite images of “disappearing forests, shrinking lakes, vanishing glaciers and degraded landscapes.” The above image, courtesy of UNEP, shows how Lake Chad has shrunk to one-twentieth of its size 30 years ago.

As The Independent put it: “Put it all together and you have a picture that is hard to credit, so enormous is the destruction.” Much of the impetus behind the atlas was to spur African governments to improve their environmental records.

On July 1, ECSP will host UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner at the Washington, DC, launch of the atlas.

Natural disasters “are not ‘natural’ at all but are the consequence of our scant regard for the ecosystem services our natural environment provides,” write the authors of “Natural Security: Protected areas and hazard mitigation,” fifth in the Arguments for Protection series published jointly by the World Wildlife Fund and Equilibrium.

This weekend, Jan Egeland, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s special adviser on conflict, concluded a trip through Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger to study the effects of climate change on the Sahel. The “trip has convinced me that there is a very clear link between climate induced resource competition and conflict, and I will be using what I have seen here to convince sceptics ahead of the Copenhagen meeting in 2009,” writes Egeland in one of his daily dispatches to IRIN News.

Climate change is causing diminished rainfall in the Sahel, and what rain there is comes in unpredictable flood/drought cycles, which alternately sweep away and wither crops. Local farmers adapt to these changes by using unsustainable farming practices, which may produce higher initial yields, but ultimately lead to lower long-term yields. Growing populations further strain these countries’ shrinking water supplies.

With limited water and fertile land, conflict and the potential for conflict are on the rise. “As was explained to me by the Nigerien minister of water who travelled with me in one of the many cars in our convoy through the desert, there are already many conflicts between and among nomads and agricultural people in Niger, and between various ethnic groups, because of the scarcity of resources,” writes Egeland. “Others have estimated that around Lake Chad there are as many as 30 or more named armed groups, and the potential for increased conflict is endless.” These conflicts are almost universally local—in Mali alone, “there are hundreds of small and quite localized conflicts,” he says. The brewing and active conflicts fuel arms trafficking, a security concern in its own right.

Egeland believes that major international investment in climate change adaptation is important to reducing both poverty and the potential for conflict in the region. He calls for developed countries to provide both monetary and technical aid to African countries struggling to adapt to the effects of climate change, and he plans to continue his advocacy in preparation for the 2009 climate meeting in Copenhagen.

“Experts say a third of Bangladesh’s coastline could be flooded if the sea rises one metre in the next 50 years, creating an additional 20 million Bangladeshis displaced from their homes and farms,” says a recent article from Reuters, echoing a refrain about the links between climate change, migration, and instability that has become common in news stories and think tank reports over the past several months.

“Climate change is potentially the greatest challenge to global stability and security, and therefore to national security. Tackling its causes, mitigating its risks and preparing for and dealing with its consequences are critical to our future security, as well as protecting global prosperity and avoiding humanitarian disaster,” says the UK’s first National Security Strategy report.

A water-sharing deal will be essential to achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace, reports National Geographic magazine.

In the BBC’s Green Room, Gonzalo Oveido, a senior social policy adviser with IUCN, argues that the global food crisis will only be ameliorated if policymakers put greater emphasis on biodiversity and overall ecosystem health.

USAID has released The United States Commitment to the Millennium Development Goals, which outlines the U.S. government’s contribution toward meeting the eight goals by 2015. Fragile states face some of the steepest challenges to achieving the MDGs.

An article in Nature Conservancy magazine asks five conservation experts whether—and if so, how—conservation organizations should contribute to poverty alleviation.