The Effects of Climate Change on Agriculture, Land Resources, Water Resources, and Biodiversity in the United States, the long-awaited report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research, was released this week.

The Worldwatch Institute’s Robert Engelman discussed his recent book More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want on NPR’s Talk of the Nation.

Natural Security: Protected areas and hazard mitigation, a new report from WWF and Equilibrium, explores how protected areas might have prevented some of the worst impacts of recent floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis.

The Economist reviews Matthew Connelly’s new book, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population, which Connelly discussed recently at the Wilson Center, and weighs in on Malthus, calling him a “false prophet.”

The Council on Foreign Relations has a new Daily Analysis that takes Malthusian worries of food and energy shortages more seriously.

In an article featuring recent ECSP speaker Brian O’Neill, Nature explores whether a smaller global population would help solve the challenge of climate change.

Carl Ganter is a journalist with a mission. We tend to think journalists are supposed to be impartial observers, but much good reporting is done by journalists who are passionate about their subjects. And Carl is that—passionate about water, in its many forms, locations, and roles. Water and human health. Water and politics. Water and conflict. Water and food. Water and girls’ education. Water and ecosystems. Water and…

The narrow window of opportunity to address climate change makes it imperative that we “remove our heads from the proverbial sand,” writes editor Carolyn Pumphrey in “Global Climate Change: National Security Implications,” released by the U.S. Army War College earlier this month. The report aggregates the presentations given at a 2007 colloquium by the same name in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and features contributions from several authors who have worked recently with ECSP, including Kent Hughes Butts, Joshua Busby, and John T. Ackerman (who has also been a guest contributor to the New Security Beat).

The risks associated with climate change include the spread of disease, severe drought, and coastal flooding, which could lead to decreased agricultural output, mass migration, and other challenges. Pumphrey writes that while social scientists are not in full agreement that violence will result from these developments, conference participants agreed that climate change presents a serious threat, “compounded by a context of rapid population growth, increasing economic appetite, pockets of extreme violence, and global interdependence.” By inflaming latent tensions, climate change will “complicate American foreign policy in a wide variety of ways,” says Pumphrey.

Since the Senate Armed Services Committee called environmental destruction a “growing national security threat” in the late 1990s, some effort has been devoted to crafting a U.S. response, but politicians have hesitated to act on uncertain scientific data, says Pumphrey, arguing additionally that the creeping dangers associated with climate change have only recently begun to captivate the public imagination, and that attempts to spice them up can lead to inaccurate exaggeration. Finally, Pumphrey says, pervasive overconfidence in the ability of “American ingenuity” to outpace emerging dangers has hindered decisive action.

Pumphrey calls for a three-pronged strategy that includes “better intelligence, better science, and better understanding of the relationships between such things as violence, society, and climate change.” She maintains that we must slow the rate of climate change and prepare for unavoidable changes, take action to alleviate international social distress, and prepare to address potential conflicts. And, she notes, this is “a job for everyone,” not just the military.

A report commissioned by GTZ, the German government-owned technical assistance agency, examines how it can address the new challenges to development posed by climate change.

In the May/June 2008 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Jürgen Scheffran provides an overview of climate-security links.

An article in Time examining population and environmental degradation highlights Robert Engelman’s new book More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want, presented recently at the Wilson Center.

Jody Williams and Wangari Maathai, who won Nobel Peace Prizes in 1997 and 2004, respectively, recently discussed climate change, environmental degradation, human security, and women’s leadership on Living on Earth.

After a few years left out in the cold, environmental security came home to a warm welcome at this year’s International Studies Association conference in San Francisco, drawing large crowds to many star-studded panels. Water, climate, energy, and AFRICOM were hot topics, and the military/intelligence communities were out in force. Many of the publishers indicated they were seeking to acquire titles or journals on environmental security, given the scarcity of books on the topic currently in the works. Demographic security even got a few shout-outs from well-placed supporters.

Climate change and energy security panels dominated the program. Chaired by the National Intelligence Council’s Mathew Burrows, “Militarization of Energy Security” featured contributors to the edited volume forthcoming from Daniel Moran and James Russell of the Naval Postgraduate School—including original resource conflict gadfly Michael Klare, who claimed that lack of oil itself isn’t the problem, but that efforts to extract less accessible supplies would provoke violence in places like Nigeria, Venezuela, and Siberia. The intense discussion contrasted the approaches of China and the United States to ensuring energy security; Moran pointed out that China sent “bankers and oilmen” into Africa, whereas the United States created AFRICOM. “If the Chinese had created a military command in Africa, there wouldn’t be a dry seat in the Pentagon,” he added. David Hamon of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency observed that BP has a “security regime to protect their interests that would make a military blush.”

At “Climate Change, Natural Disasters, and Armed Conflict,” Clionadh Radleigh put the kibosh on the fearmongering predictions of waves of transnational “environmental refugees.” Similarly, Halvard Buhaug explored weaknesses in the reported links between climate change and conflict, calling for more rigorous research on this currently trendy topic. Christian Webersik’s research found links between negative rainfall and higher incidences of conflict in Somalia and Sudan, but he cautioned against using this relationship to predict climate-induced conflict.

A flood of panels on water, conflict, and cooperation took advantage of the conference’s West Coast location to call on water world heavies Aaron Wolf and Peter Gleick, who participated in a lively standing room-only roundtable chaired by ECSP’s Geoff Dabelko. Despite the obvious interest in the topic, publishers in the exhibit hall didn’t have much to offer on water and security.

AFRICOM drew some heat, especially from a panel of educators from military academies who explored peace parks and other “small-ball” approaches to conflict prevention. All the panelists were generally supportive of AFRICOM’s efforts to integrate nontraditional development work into the military’s portfolio—which, as discussant and retired U.S. Army Col. Maxie McFarland pointed out, it is already doing “by default” in Iraq and Afghanistan. McFarland cautioned, however, that “just because the Army can do it, doesn’t mean you want them to do it.” Air War College Professor Stephen Burgess predicted that the groundswell of climate change awareness would push the next president to include it in his or her National Security Strategy.

Rich Cincotta’s demographic security panel attracted significant interest—no small feat on the last day. The Department of Defense’s (DoD) Thomas Mahnken said that demographic trends and shocks are of “great interest to us in the government”—particularly forecasting that could identify what countries or regions the DoD should be worried about—particularly China and India (good thing demographer Jennifer Sciubba is on the case in his office).

The emphasis on prediction and forecasting stood out from the general trend of ISA panels, which mostly focus on analysis of current or past events. Mathew Burrows called for government and academia to “push the frontiers” on forecasting even further—particularly on the impacts of food security, water shortages, and environmentally induced migration.

Despite the warm, fuzzy feelings for environmental security, there were few panels devoted to general natural resource conflict, and none to post-conflict environmental peacebuilding (Michael Beevers contributed one of the few papers to explicitly address the topic).

What’ll be next year’s hot topics? Submit your proposals by May 30 for the 2009 ISA Annual Conference in New York City.

To download any of the papers mentioned above, visit the ISA’s online paper archive.

For more on ECSP at ISA, see “Environmental Security Is Hot Topic at the 2008 International Studies Association Conference.”

CIA Director General Michael Hayden identified demographic change as one of three trends that will shape the 21st century earlier this week, noting the “importance of underlying population trends and the factors that influence them…things like fertility rates, life expectancy, the prevalence of HIV, and ease of migration. Clearly,” he said, “there will be many implications for our national security to come out of this, and these trends will contribute to the complexity of the security threats facing America over the next several decades.” Population growth will hit African countries the hardest, he said, and may threaten stability on the continent.

ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko discusses how the environment can be used as a tool for peace today in the concluding program in Chicago Public Radio Worldview’s weeklong “Environmental War and Peace” series.

The U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute has released a collection of the proceedings of a colloquium on “Global Climate Change: National Security Implications,” held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, earlier this year. Contributors agree that climate change is a security issue that merits serious attention and discuss the proper role for the U.S. Armed Forces in addressing it on a global scale.

“Intensifying environmental catastrophes and downturns in living standards caused by interlocking crises of energy, water, food and violent conflict” are likely to characterize the coming century, warns Jeffrey Sachs in Time magazine’s web-exclusive feature, “What’s Next 2008.” But all is not lost; Sachs encourages us to recognize that by “seeking global solutions, we actually have the power to save the world for all, today and in the future.”

As population pressures increasingly strain ecological resources in Madagascar’s biodiversity hotspots, CARE’s Extra Mile Initiative is working in partnership with Madagascar’s government to provide family planning and reproductive health services to six remote communities on the “eighth continent.” A new report discusses the program’s challenges and successes.

Climate change will create hard security problems—including increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters, pandemic disease, desertification, and mass migration—but these challenges will not have hard security solutions, argues Nick Mabey in Delivering Climate Security: International Security Responses to a Climate Changed World (subscription or purchase required), a policy paper published by the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. Instead, policymakers, NGOs, the private sector, and the security community will need to develop nontraditional, innovative policies and programs to mitigate these threats.

Mabey, who served as a senior adviser in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit before becoming founding director and chief executive of E3G, an NGO working on sustainable development, thoughtfully outlines the security challenges that many previous reports on climate security (including by the CNA Corporation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security) have discussed. But he also examines several less frequently mentioned risks. For instance, he warns that some countries will try to use the need for renewable energy as a cover for obtaining nuclear technology for military purposes. Mabey argues that the development and dissemination of less risky energy technologies is the best way to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

In addition, Mabey notes, if the international system fails to address the threat of climate change effectively, its legitimacy will be undermined, and it will find it more difficult to resolve other global threats.

Mabey also calls our attention to the critical role that the environment plays in post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts. Strategic planners developing 10-15-year security strategies for Afghanistan based on sustainable livelihoods must take climate change into account. Attempts to use a “hearts and minds” strategy against Islamist extremism may fall short as higher temperatures and lower rainfall dry up some of the main sources of jobs for young men in the Middle East and North Africa. In addition, Mabey notes, terrorists are likely to use climate change to feed existing grievances; Osama bin Laden has already spoken several times on climate change’s unequal impacts on different parts of the globe.

“Information on present and future serious climate security impacts is as good, if not better, than other information routinely used in security planning and assessment,” asserts Mabey. Therefore, he argues, the security community has no excuse for not planning for the worst-case climate change scenarios, just as it plans for the worst-case terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation scenarios. Yet Mabey believes the international response to climate change so far has been “slow and inadequate.” He urges nations and international institutions to devote far greater resources to addressing the myriad threats it will pose to political stability and human well-being.