Showing posts from category climate change.
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Climate, Security Bill Introduced in Senate
›April 1, 2007 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoLast week the Senate’s number two Democrat Dick Durbin and Republican Senator Chuck Hagel dropped a bill calling for a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) to assess the threat of climate to the United States and abroad.
Refreshingly, the bill requires a 30-year time horizon. Climate scientists will still find this window painfully small, but security analysts (and the rest of government, frankly) will recognize this as progress in comparison to the normal Washington policy timelines (a few years or until the next election).
Momentum to consider climate and security connections has been growing over the last few years, with the United States lagging behind. The Europeans long ago jumped on these connections. And numerous developing countries—Egypt, Bangladesh, and small island states, to name only a few—view expected sea level rise from global warming as an ultimate security threat to the survival of large swathes of territory and tens of millions of people. Facing the prospect of longer and deeper droughts, countries in the Horn of Africa are also coming to recognize these fundamental threats to the national interest.
In the United States, Hurricane Katrina provided a glimpse of what a warmer world may be like, the experience of which, it could be argued, made its way into the 2006 revision to the U.S. National Security Strategy. The key passage, admittedly at the end of the document, explains that environmental destruction—caused by humans or nature—presents new security challenges:“Problems of this scope may overwhelm the capacity of local authorities to respond, and may even overtax national militaries, requiring a larger international response. These challenges are not traditional national security concerns, such as the conflict of arms or ideologies. But if left unaddressed they can threaten national security.”
If Durbin’s bill is eventually passed, we can expect the resulting assessment to be markedly different from Peter Schwartz’s scenario for the Pentagon in 2003 or the new report for “an unnamed intelligence agency” in 2007. Schwartz imagined all things bad happening at once, highlighting the key prospect for nonlinear abrupt climate change and earning great criticism from scientists. It also became a tempest in the teapot when the British press conspiratorial referred to it as a secret report after being pulled from the Pentagon’s website (more likely it was pulled because it was seen as diverging from White House policy on climate change). The new report “Impacts of Climate Change,” departs from the scientifically conceivable but criticized ice age scenario, one that closely tracked with the plot of the over-the-top film The Day After Tomorrow.
The NIE, coordinated and written by the National Intelligence Council, would carry considerable weight across government, passing the climate change challenges through the lens of U.S. national security. -
Princeton Project Outlines New National Security Strategy
›March 29, 2007 // By Sean PeoplesAcademics and policymakers alike appreciate the complexity of new threats to national security like non-state actors and global terror networks. But a report released in September 2006 by the Princeton Project on National Security (PPNS) warns that ignoring unfashionable, but long-established geopolitical threats can endanger U.S. foreign policy. Billed as a bipartisan initiative, PPNS is ultimately an academic affair, with members of its group including such luminaries as Francis Fukuyama, G. John Ikenberry, Laurie Garrett, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Tod Lindberg, and Walter Russell Mead, among many others. The initiative engaged these experts to develop a basic framework of principle threats to U.S. national security and potential responses.
The old and new geopolitical dynamics are worth elucidating, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, gives us something to consider:“Old geopolitics has not gone away. China and Asia are rising rapidly, industrially, and economically. However, we are now just as threatened by the inability of governments to address terrorists within their country, prevent spread of disease and take care of the environment.”
The report cites energy independence and increased consumption as the dominant new challenges, particularly as U.S. consumption of oil increases, and in turn increases our dependence on foreign nations (featuring a who’s-who along the continuum of unpredictability). Rightly, the report supports incentives for energy alternatives. It also supports a gasoline tax and stricter fuel efficiency standards as ways to promote smarter approaches to increasing climatic changes.
Promoting these changes is a good start, but convincing policymakers to adopt them may be a greater challenge. -
Climate Change and Non-Pro: One of These Things is Not Like the Other
›March 27, 2007 // By Alison WilliamsWhat do climate change and non-proliferation have in common? Not much, Carnegie Endowment President Jessica Mathews said yesterday at a remarkably frank and insightful discussion at the Wilson Center. Yet climate change and non-proliferation are often lumped together as the “ultimate global issues” and approached similarly, she said:“With non-proliferation, the world is vulnerable to the smallest, poorest, most miserable country on the planet—North Korea.… Climate change is totally different. There are really only seven political actors that matter, and only two that really matter.”
Those two, of course, are the United States and China, whose combined carbon emissions add up to 39 percent of the world’s total. Given this fact, Mathews believes the solution to climate change is anything but global. It is incumbent upon the biggest emitters to take the first steps. With them in the lead, the world will follow suit, she thinks. But without them, no real change can occur.
In contrast, United Nations Foundation Senior Fellow Mohamed El-Ashry argued for a more diplomatic track, in which the United Nations would harness its convening power to bring the necessary parties to the table. The skeptic in me wonders whether the UN has this much power. El-Ashry himself, when asked whether UNEP would have more authority if it were upgraded to the status of an agency, said, “You wake up one morning and think of your cat as a tiger, but it is still a cat.”
The UN is a bit of a cat itself right now. Does it have the credibility, legitimacy, or sway to bring all the necessary actors to the table? I’m not so sure. And the former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, certainly didn’t help. The man did once say that the United Nations does not exist, and that “there is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States.”
Whether the solution should be global or local, yesterday’s debate was utterly refreshing. Representatives from the U.S. Department of State, EPA, and other organizations were on hand to debate the relative merits of multilateral and bilateral agreements, unilateral action, and global commitment. While little may have been resolved, this was the sort of open and honest dialogue about climate change that we hope to see more of. Take the time to watch the webcast. -
Climate Change Possible Culprit of Darfur Crisis
›March 15, 2007 // By Karen BencalaWhile the crisis in Darfur is often characterized as an ethnically motivated genocide, Stephan Faris argues in April’s Atlantic Monthly (available online to subscribers only) that the true cause may be climate change. Severe land degradation in the region has been blamed on poor land use practices by farmers and herders, but new climate models indicate that warming ocean temperatures are the culprit behind the loss of fertile land.
Faris says:“Given the particular pattern of ocean-temperature changes worldwide, the models strongly predicted a disruption in African monsoons. ‘This was not caused by people cutting trees or overgrazing,’ says Columbia University’s Alessandra Giannini, who led one of the analyses.”
Furthermore, Faris points out that the violence is not necessarily merely between Arabs and blacks, but between farmers (largely black Africans) and herders (largely Arabs). Historically, the two groups shared the fertile land. Now, however, farmers—who once allowed herders to pass through their land and drink from their wells—are constructing fences and fighting to maintain their way of life on the diminished amount of productive land.
If climate change is the real cause of the conflict, Faris concludes, the solution must account for this reality and address the environmental crisis in order to make peace. And he calls on all of us to accept some of the blame for the crisis:“If the region’s collapse was in some part caused by the emissions from our factories, power plants, and automobiles, we bear some responsibility for the dying. ‘This changes us from the position of Good Samaritans—disinterested, uninvolved people who may feel a moral obligation—to a position where we, unconsciously and without malice, created the conditions that led to this crisis,’ says Michael Byers, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia. ‘We cannot stand by and look at it as a situation of discretionary involvement. We are already involved.’”
That said however, researchers at the African Centre for Technology Studies an international policy research organization based in Nairobi, Kenya, say that while environmental changes have decreased agricultural production, these problems must be examined within the wider context of a long history of discrimination and governance problems: “The legacies of colonialism, political discrimination, and lack of adequate governance in Darfur should not be underestimated in favor of an environmental explanation-particularly as it serves the interests of some actors to use environmental change as a non-political scapegoat for conflict.” (forthcoming ECSP Report 12) -
Reforestation in Niger: Is It a Model for Success?
›February 13, 2007 // By Sean PeoplesYears of drought, irregular rainfall, and environmental degradation ravaged Africa’s Sahel region in the 1970s and ‘80s, exacerbating economic, social, and environmental conditions in one of the world’s poorest regions. Coupled with an exploding population, these events provoked a collective re-think on development and conservation policy—shifting toward regional schemes to boost local capacities, establish effective land use policies, and improve community resilience to unpredictable climate conditions. Farmers in southern Niger provide a success story, reports The New York Times:“Better conservation and improved rainfall have led to at least 7.4 million newly tree-covered acres in Niger, researchers have found, achieved largely without relying on the large-scale planting of trees or other expensive methods often advocated by African politicians and aid groups for halting desertification, the process by which soil loses its fertility.”
Nevertheless, drought is only one of many forces dictating life in the Sahel. Add to the mix unknown impacts of climate change on the region’s drought cycles, shifting political and military power as well as variable financial flows from volatile markets like oil and it remains to be seen if this model can be replicated and sustained throughout the region.
For additional resources on the Sahel, see University of Nigeria Professor Anthony Nyong‘s presentation at the Wilson Center. -
Will Climate Change Ignite Terrorism?
›February 5, 2007 // By Alison WilliamsThe effects of climate change could launch a new wave of conflict and terrorism, say climate and security experts. Increased drought and refugee migration resulting from rising sea levels could lead to conflict in the countries worst affected by global warming.
Sir Crispin Tickell, Britain’s former ambassador to the United Nations, said terrorists might exploit these tensions, reported Reuters:“Those who are short of food, those who are short of water, those who can’t move to countries where it looks as if everything is marvelous are going to be people who are going to adopt desperate measures to try and make their point.”
Crispin says the world “must accept” the likely increase of violence within and between states at the hands of environmental change.
