On Friday, October 12, 2007, the Norwegian Nobel Committee chose the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore to receive the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for their respective efforts to document and raise awareness of the effects of climate change.

Some observers are perplexed by the Committee’s decision to award a peace prize for work on an environmental issue. The Environmental Change and Security Program (ECSP), however, has long been cognizant of the myriad ways in which the environment is linked to peace and conflict. Climate change is only one of many environmental issues—including water scarcity, pollution, deforestation, and natural resource exploitation—that can affect security.

This is the second time in three years that the Committee has awarded the Peace Prize to an environmentalist. 2004 winner Wangari Maathai and her Green Belt Movement were recognized for their efforts to develop sustainable livelihoods and empower women through tree planting and other environmental activities. In the latest issue of the ECSP Report, Maathai explains the close linkage between good governance, sustainability, and peace: “When we manage our resources sustainably and practice good governance we deliberately and consciously promote cultures of peace, which include the willingness to dialogue and make genuine efforts for healing and reconciliation…Whenever we fail to nurture these three themes, conflict becomes inevitable.”

ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko reflected on the Committee’s selection of Maathai—and its implications for the international community’s notions of peace and security—in several articles on leading environmental blog Gristmill. Dabelko’s words on Maathai’s selection still ring true: “Yet the criticism may miss the point by missing the widespread violence that goes on within states, violence that is not necessarily well-organized or by force of arms. The structural violence of poverty, corruption, and environmental degradation affects literally billions every day. The Nobel Prize rightly stretched the prior confines of the award and called attention to these ‘conflicts.’”

“Energy is a critical, yet hugely neglected, determinant of human health. Health is an important enough aspect of energy policy to deserve a much greater influence on decisions about our future personal, national, and global energy strategies….Energy is as important as any vaccine or medicine. 2 billion people currently lack access to clean energy: they live in energy poverty and insecurity. International institutions, such as the World Bank and WHO, have repeatedly failed to make the connection between energy and health in their country work,” writes Lancet editor Richard Horton in the journal’s September 15, 2007 issue.

A six-article series in The Lancet examines how energy use—or the lack thereof—affects human health. Providing needed data on the health and economic impacts of both energy use and energy scarcity, the series explores one of the many links between environment and human security. The series is available on The Lancet’s website (subscription required).

At a recent conference at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, PA, I had the chance to sit down with one of the most influential military voices on environmental security debates, Dr. Kent Hughes Butts. As both a professor of geography and a retired colonel in the U.S. Army, Dr. Butts has been at the center of the U.S. military’s efforts to grapple with the implications of environmental change. I asked Dr. Butts how he saw the field of environmental security (if we can call it a field) evolving over the last two decades.

“The possibility of a world transformed by climate change is not a science fiction image of a post-apocalyptic society; it is not a road warrior movie. It is happening now. There is another holocaust now in Darfur.” Brad Miller (D-NC), chairman of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology, chose strong words to open the subcommittee’s September 26, 2007, hearing “The National Security Implications of Climate Change.”

The first witness was General Gordon R. Sullivan (USA Ret.), chairman of the CNA Corporation’s Military Advisory Board, which wrote the groundbreaking report National Security and the Threat of Climate Change. Sullivan reminded the congressmen of the potential destabilizing impacts of climate change—reduced access to freshwater, impaired food production, the spread of diseases, land loss due to flooding, and population displacement, among others—and their potential security consequences, which include an elevated risk of state failure, the growth of terrorism, mass migrations leading to regional and global tensions, and conflicts over resources.

China’s geopolitical importance should make it of particular concern to policymakers, said Alexander Lennon, a research fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. According to Lennon, two-thirds of China’s cities are currently experiencing water and food shortages. These environmental issues already cause unrest among the population, and the combined effects of climate change and rapid urbanization could increase tensions. A destabilized China, however, is only one of the various climate-related problems the United States could face in the future. Climate change could also foster terrorism, Lennon said. Rampant poverty, growing economic inequality, state failure, and ethnic tensions form a fertile substrate for terrorist groups.

James Woolsey, vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton and former director of the CIA, argued that the threats posed by climate change and terrorism should not be isolated from one another. Indeed, “terrorists may exploit vulnerabilities in our energy production and distribution or other weaknesses in our infrastructure,” he said. Fuel convoys in Iraq, for instance, are a primary target for insurgents. Woolsey encouraged policymakers to opt for a plan that would reduce both threats simultaneously. His solution: improving U.S. energy efficiency.

As the nation’s largest single consumer of oil (1.8 percent of the U.S. total), the Department of Defense (DoD) is already working on improving energy efficiency, said Kent Butts, director of National Security Issues at the U.S. Army War College’s Center for Strategic Leadership. More generally, he continued, DoD is devoting considerable attention to the destabilizing impacts of climate change, although there is no overarching directive that guides these efforts. The Navy, for instance, is currently analyzing the security implications of shrinking ice sheets in the Arctic.

U.S. Representative Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) shared his concerns regarding the military’s efforts to increase vehicles’ efficiency. Focusing too much on climate change, he argued, could be harmful to U.S. troops’ security. “If we decide to produce lighter vehicles in order to consume less oil, soldiers will be less protected. Aren’t our troops more important than climate change?” he asked. Sullivan responded that if lighter vehicles were produced, they would be designed so they protected soldiers as well as today’s heavier vehicles do.

Andrew Price-Smith, a professor of political science at Colorado College, emphasized another potential area of impact: global health. He explained that an increase in temperatures and precipitation could favor the proliferation and geographical expansion of infectious diseases such as cholera and malaria. The spread of deadly diseases to new areas could in turn undermine the economy (through absenteeism, increased medical costs, and premature deaths) and foster political instability.

Finally, several representatives shared their skepticism concerning climate change. Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and James Sensenbrenner (R-WI), who said they did not believe human activities have contributed to climate change, argued that the United States should not try to mitigate climate change, but instead try to adapt to it. “Fostering a more robust economy is our strongest defense against climate change,” said Sensenbrenner. “Because it is too late to prevent rising temperatures, the best response is to ensure that our economy is strong enough to adequately respond.” In other words, he was suggesting that we should not try to reduce carbon emissions, because doing so would slow economic growth. He concluded on an optimistic note: “Everyone agrees that the wealthiest countries and individuals will be the least affected by global warming. Putting more people in a position to afford air conditioning will actually save lives.” Needless to say, not everyone in the room shared his view.

Climate change could be to blame for many of the wars in China during the past millennium, says an article published recently in Human Ecology. The study, the first quantitative examination of the link between conflict and temperature changes, is a milestone in climate change research.

David Zhang and co-authors compared the 899 wars that occurred in eastern China between A.D. 1000 and 1911 with climatic data for the same period. They found that warfare frequency in eastern China—particularly in that region’s southern part—correlated strongly with temperature oscillations. Warfare ratios in the cold phases were twice as high as in the warm phases. Furthermore, almost all dynastic changes and warfare peaks coincided with cold phases.

“In general, rebellion was the dominant category of war,” write the authors. “The rebellions were predominantly peasant uprisings induced by famine and heavy taxation, since farmers were always the first to suffer from declining agricultural production.”

The authors surmise that by affecting agriculture, cooler temperatures disrupted food supply, especially in the ecologically vulnerable northern part of eastern China. Food scarcity could have triggered rebellions or forced people to migrate, further exacerbating food shortages in certain areas. Migration could also have generated tension between groups, producing local conflicts—especially when China was populated by nomadic tribes that could move freely. The authors also hypothesize that food scarcity may have encouraged opposing Chinese armies to conduct cross-border raids on each other’s crops. However, additional, more detailed analysis of the pathways leading from cooler temperatures to conflict in eastern China is needed.

It is unclear whether the correlation observed by Zhang in eastern China will hold true for other parts of the world. We should also be careful not to use this one study to draw premature connections to today’s unprecedented climate change. However, we hope additional quantitative studies will be carried out; they would be solid contributions to the research on climate and security, which currently suffers from a scarcity of empirical data.

Climate and security links are definitely in vogue these days. Some of the work on these connections has been measured and nuanced; some has been less judicious. I want to flag a recently published rich resource that falls in the former category and avoids the hyperbole that characterizes the latter.

The academic journal Political Geography–admittedly not a publication on every policymaker’s desk–devotes its current issue to climate change and conflict. The six pieces feature the most recent work of some longtime environmental security contributors such as Australian geographer Jon Barnett and Norwegian peace researcher Nils Petter Gleditsch. The articles were first presented at a June 2005 conference in Oslo convened by Gleditsch’s International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO) and geographer Karen O’Brien’s Global Environmental Change and Human Security Project (GECHS). Visit this space again soon for a more detailed analysis of the contributions.

The world could face a global food crisis in the next 50 years, said experts at a recent UN-backed conference in Iceland on sustainable development. Their calculus is simple: In the coming half century, there will be more people on the planet, but rapid land degradation will make it difficult to produce commensurate increases in food. Warmer temperatures and more frequent floods, caused by climate change, will diminish soil fertility in many parts of the world—particularly in developing countries. As 800 million people are already at risk for hunger today, population growth alone is likely increase global food insecurity.

The expansion of biofuels could potentially exacerbate food shortages. A major UN report on biofuels warns that as more fields are devoted to producing corn, palm oil, sugar cane, and other agricultural products for use as biofuels, the amount of food that is produced for human consumption could decrease.

Climate change’s effects on marine ecosystems could also contribute to a food crisis. Changes in water temperature and salinity can damage coral reefs, which scientists estimate support between one-quarter and one-third of all marine life. In addition, a recent study published in Nature shows that phytoplankton—single-celled ocean plants that form the base of the marine food chain—are growing more slowly as the water at Earth’s mid and low latitudes becomes warmer. As the supply of phytoplankton becomes limited, fish have less food to eat, and at the end of the chain, human beings suffer from a scarcity of fish—a particularly dire situation in communities where fish is a primary source of food.

According to scientists at the Iceland forum, competition over scarce resources could lead to conflict. Studies on the relationship between environmental degradation and conflict indicate that such conflicts are likely to be intrastate and of low intensity. Scientists suggesting that food scarcity could trigger classic interstate wars, such as James Lovelock, who predicts that China and Russia will clash to exploit Siberia’s new fertile soils, are in the minority.

Yet policymakers should not be indifferent to food scarcity in developing countries merely because it is not likely to cause global-scale conflicts. Indeed, if the developing world faces more famines and malnutrition in the coming years, pressure on Western governments will be high to intervene.

Climate change has been altering the world’s geography so rapidly that cartographers can hardly keep up. The prestigious Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World was last published in 2003, and in preparation for the release of the 12th edition this year, coastlines, lakes, forests, and cities have had to be redrawn.

The Aral Sea in Central Asia has shrunk by 75 percent in 40 years, while Lake Chad in Africa is only 5 percent of its 1963 size. Furthermore, during certain times of the year, the Rio Grande, Colorado, Yellow, and Tigris rivers fail to reach the sea.

The 12th edition of the atlas contains approximately 20,000 updates. Naturally, not all the updates are consequences of climate change: 3,500 are simply name changes, and not every geographic update is the result of climate change. Also, not all the geographic changes occurred during the last four years—some happened earlier, but are only now being noticed by mapmakers, who are becoming increasingly aware of climate change-related geographical changes.

Some changes were previously unknown because they were happening in isolated parts of the world. In India, for instance, official records list 102 islands in the Sunderbans, where the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal. Those islands are inhabited by 1.8 million people. However, after a six-year study, scientists have been able to map only 100 islands, finding that the other two had been swallowed up by the sea, said Sugata Hazra, director of Calcutta’s School of Oceanography Studies at Jadavpur University. Scientists estimate that the submersion of the two islands rendered approximately 10,000 people homeless.

Rising sea levels—which threaten to submerge some 12 additional islands in the Sunderbans—are sometimes perceptible to the human eye. In Bangladesh, many islands disappear each year, forcing populations to migrate from island to island and to live in extremely precarious conditions. As Shahidul Mullah, who lives with his family on a small island in Bangladesh, told Spiegel Online, “When I moved here, we still had three fields in front of the house. Now there are only two. I’m afraid the water will take another piece away from me this year.”