“The risks of climate change demand a rethink of approaches to security,” writes Chris Abbott in An Uncertain Future: Law Enforcement, National Security and Climate Change, a report released recently by Oxford Research Group. Climate change’s impact on security concerns has recently moved to the forefront of global dialogue, a development Abbott links to three trends: widespread acceptance of scientific evidence that climate change is real; increased attention to energy security; and growing awareness of nontraditional threats around the world.

Replacing 10-20 percent of mangroves in coastal areas of Thailand with shrimp farms does not seriously damage the mangroves’ ability to protect against tsunamis, says an article published recently in Science. According to the authors, “reconciling competing demands on coastal habitats should not always result in stark preservation-versus-conversion choices.”

Chimpanzees and other endangered species are being threatened by a thriving bushmeat trade in Tanzanian refugee camps, says a report by the NGO Traffic. “The scale of wild meat consumption in East African refugee camps has helped conceal the failure of the international community to meet basic refugee needs,” said report lead author George Jambiya.

“Health professionals have a vital contributory role in preventing and reducing the health effects of global environmental change,” argue A. J. McMichael and colleagues in an article in the British Medical Journal (subscription required to access full text).

Muslim countries around the world should follow the example of some of Indonesia’s pesantren (religious schools) and incorporate environmental conservation into the teaching and practice of Islam, argues MIT professor and frequent Wilson Center speaker Saleem Ali, who edited Peace Parks: Conservation and Conflict Resolution.

The rising price of oil is making food more expensive and threatening the food security of the poor, reports The New York Times. “According to the F.A.O., food riots have erupted in recent months in Guinea, Mauritania, Mexico, Morocco, Senegal, Uzbekistan and Yemen.”

“The surge in the copper price has stirred up an emotional debate in Zambia about the obligations of the government—and investors—regarding the exploitation of minerals for the long-term benefit of countries. For a country built on the back of a previous copper heyday, but which has experienced massive poverty and underdevelopment for decades, this is unsurprising,” writes Diana Games for Resource Investor.

This article from the Population Reference Bureau provides an overview of Kenya’s demography—including population growth, HIV/AIDS prevalence, and the country’s youth bulge—in the context of the ongoing ethnic conflict.

“Weather of Mass Destruction? The rise of climate change as the “new” security issue,” by past Wilson Center speaker Oli Brown, examines the risks and opportunities associated with the growing acceptance of climate change as a national and international security issue.

The United States should expand its civilian tools of international power, argued Wilson Center President Lee H. Hamilton in “Wielding our power smartly,” a January 14 editorial in The Indianapolis Star. “America’s crucial role in a complicated world demands that we apply effectively all the tools of U.S. power—public and private, military, economic and political. Our challenge is to cultivate an international system that puts cooperation and engagement at its core,” said Hamilton.

A publication from the U.S. Institute of Peace lays out guidelines for relations between U.S. armed forces and non-governmental humanitarian organizations in conflict zones or potentially hostile areas.

President George W. Bush signed an exemption that the U.S. Navy hopes will increase the likelihood that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will vacate a federal judge’s recent injunction that the Navy take additional steps to protect marine mammals from the sonar it uses during anti-submarine warfare training.

By destabilizing environments, global climate change can exacerbate existing security challenges and contribute to the creation of new ones. A widely publicized November 2007 report by the Council on Foreign Relations examines the linkages between climate and security and proposes a manageable set of policy options to adapt to and reduce the impacts of an inevitable global change in climate. The report, entitled “Climate Change and National Security,” was written by Joshua Busby, an assistant professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. In Part 1 of a two-part podcast series, ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko speaks with Busby about the report and his recommendations for action.

The National Interest sponsored an online debate on the links between natural resources and conflict featuring David Victor, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Michael Klare, Sherri Goodman, and Paul Kern.

Georgetown University’s Colin Kahl argues that Kenya’s present strife is largely due to deep-seated ethnic land grievances, while a Council on Foreign Relations brief claims that it is partially the result of demographic factors—the country’s “youth bulge,” for instance.

“Weathering the Storm: Options for Framing Adaptation and Development,” a new report from the World Resources Institute, reviews climate change adaptation efforts from throughout the developing world, and explores how adaptation activities intersect with poverty, environmental degradation, and other challenges.

An article from IRIN News examines whether or not the extraction of Mozambique’s mineral resources—including heavy metals, coal, natural gas, and perhaps oil—is likely to reduce the country’s widespread poverty.

Thousands of people in Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi have fled the flooding caused by the overflowing Zambezi River, reports BBC News. “Damage to crops and roads has raised fears of food shortages, and aid agencies have also warned of increased risk of waterborne diseases and diseases caused by poor sanitation.”

Visiting Garmisch, Germany, is not exactly hardship duty. The snowy peaks of the German Alps are visible well before arriving at this Bavarian skiing haven, located 88 kilometers south of Munich. But this is no typical vacation paradise: Garmisch is home to the joint U.S.-German George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, a leading security and defense educational institution, and its College of International and Security Studies (CISS). For the past 15 years, the Center has brought together security officials from militaries, intelligence services, and ministries for dialogue and education. These collaborative programs help security experts develop and maintain crucial personal connections with their counterparts in other countries.

At the Fall 2007 “Program in Advanced Security Studies” course at CISS, representatives from 34 countries met in the classroom during the day, and, perhaps just as importantly, in the local watering holes at night. The 12-week course, filled with traditional topics such as nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and asymmetrical warfare, ended with a curveball this December: The capstone lectures, meant to provoke students to look beyond traditional security concerns, focused on climate change. On December 3, 2007, three of us—Wolfgang Seiler of the Fraunhofer Institute for Atmospheric Environmental Research in Garmisch, Alexander Carius of Adelphi Research in Berlin, and I—did our best to mix things up.

Seiler led off with an energetic and sweeping presentation on the latest climate science, and proceeded to outline the likely social, economic, and agricultural effects of higher temperatures, intensified storms, changing precipitation patterns, and rising sea levels. He urged Europeans to start addressing this fundamental challenge by recognizing the inadequacy of their own climate change mitigation activities, rather than simply pointing fingers at the United States.

Carius unpacked the findings of a major climate and security study by the German Advisory Council on Global Change. He used the case of Central Asia to walk the more than 160 students through climate change’s expected impacts on regional water supply and their larger social, economic, political, and security implications. For the next few decades, melting glaciers will provide Central Asia with adequate water. But as they continue to recede, this water supply—so critical for agriculture and energy in the region—will diminish greatly. Any government—let alone the relatively new countries of Central Asia, which consistently fall in the World Bank’s lowest quartile of governance rankings—would struggle to prepare for and adapt to this impending water scarcity.

In my remarks, I urged security officials around the world to abandon the stereotype that climate change and other environmental issues are the preserve of tree-hugging environmental activists. In fact, climate change poses real threats that security officials have a responsibility to examine. To address concerns that climate science is too uncertain, I cited the parallel drawn by retired U.S. Army General Gordon Sullivan between making battlefield decisions with incomplete information and tackling climate change without precise predictions.

At the same time, I warned against overselling the links between climate change and violent conflict or terrorism. Climate change is likely to exacerbate conditions that can contribute to intra-state conflict—for instance, competition over declining resources such as arable land and fresh water, or declining state capacity or legitimacy—but it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of conflict. Labeling the Darfur genocide a “climate conflict” is both wrong and counterproductive: It lets the regime in Khartoum off the hook and ignores proximate political and economic motivations for fighting. In the case of Darfur, examining climate change’s role in desertification, the long and deep drought, declining soil moisture levels, and declining agricultural productivity provides a fuller understanding of how conflict between Sudanese pastoralists and agriculturalists has reached this extreme.

I also suggested analyzing whether policy responses to climate change—such as the increased use of biofuels—could create new social conflict. The surge in palm oil cultivation in Indonesia, for example, is arguably accelerating deforestation rates and increasing the chances of conflicts between the owners of palm oil plantations and people who depend on forest resources for their livelihoods.

Small-group discussions ranged widely: European border control officials took great interest in potential increases in South-to-North migration flows from Africa and South Asia. Naval officers focused on the implications of an ice-free Northwest Passage in the Arctic, as well as sea-level rise that may swamp harbors and low-lying island bases.

As with all classes—whether constituted of military officers or not—some students couldn’t get enough of the discussion, while others were less inspired. I left with the impression that, like most military audiences, they did not welcome climate change as a new mission for security institutions. They perhaps recognized the need to study the potential impacts of climate change that may influence their traditional security concerns, even as they remained skeptical that climate change is as critical as some policymakers and researchers claim.

U.S. President George W. Bush signed a $550 billion appropriations bill into law on December 20, 2007, which included $300 million to improve water and sanitation in the developing world under the Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act. Inter Press Service investigates the dangers of fetching water in Malawi, which include crocodiles and cholera.

On December 26, 2007, the Chinese government issued “Energy Conditions and Policies,” a white paper outlining the country’s energy use and plans. The government maintains that China’s history of greenhouse gas emissions gives it the right to grow its economy on fossil fuels, as did most of today’s developed countries, but also pledges China’s strong commitment to renewable energy sources.

Pope Benedict XVI called for better environmental stewardship in his Christmas homily this year, delivered during the traditional Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. According to The New York Times, “He expanded on the theme [of environmental protection] briefly by saying that an 11th-century theologian, Anselm of Canterbury, had spoken ‘in an almost prophetic way’ as he ‘described a vision of what we witness today as a polluted world whose future is at risk.’”

Along with other experts, Fred Meyerson, a professor of demography, ecology, and environmental policy at the University of Rhode Island—and a former Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar—is currently participating in an online discussion of population and climate change for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization that focuses on nuclear proliferation and other global security threats.

The World Bank recently released a Poverty Assessment Report for Yemen, which it produced with assistance from the UN Development Programme and the government of Yemen. IRIN News summarizes the findings.

“We are indeed at a cooperation versus conflict nexus,” said Rob Huebert, associate director of the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, at a December 11 meeting sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute. Huebert was joined by fellow Arctic expert Michael Byers, the academic director of the University of British Columbia’s Liu Institute for Global Issues, in a discussion of the potential security threats introduced by a rapidly melting Arctic.