Showing posts from category conflict.
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Loaded Dice and Human Health: Measuring the Impacts of Climate Change
›In a new article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), “Insights From Past Millennia Into Climatic Impacts on Human Health and Survival,” Anthony McMichael compares scientific literature that reconstructs past climates with epidemiological research and comes away with more than a dozen examples of the influence of climate on human health and survival. “Risks to health [as a result of climatic change] are neither widely nor fully recognized,” McMichael writes, but “weather extremes and climatic impacts on food yields, fresh water, infectious diseases, conflict, and displacement” have led to human suffering across the centuries. Some of the literature reviewed, for instance, links the Younger Dryas (a several centuries long period of cooling) to hunger in the Nile Valley between 11,000 and 12,000 years ago, climatic shifts that expanded the range of disease carrying rats and fleas to the “Black Death” during the mid-1400s, and unusually strong El Niño events to a series of late Victorian-era droughts during the late-1800s.
“Climate Variability and Climate Change: The New Climate Dice,” a working paper from James Hansen, Makiko Sato, and Reto Ruedy recently submitted to PNAS, uses surface air temperature analysis from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies to examine the impact of global warming on the frequency of extreme weather events. Using measurements from 1951 to 1980 as a baseline, the study finds, first, that the planet has warmed by around half of a degree Celsius since the reference period, and second, that the global area affected by “extreme anomalies” (exceeding three standard deviations from the mean climate) has increased by a factor greater than 10. Affecting approximately 10 percent of global land surface in the last several years, these anomalies, such as the droughts and heat waves observed in Texas in 2011, Moscow in 2010, and France in 2003, “almost certainly would not have occurred in the absence of the global warming,” according to the authors.
The study uses this new evidence about the impact of climate change to update the concept of climate change as a “loading of the climate dice.” Where, the “climate of 1951-1980 [is represented] by colored dice with two sides red for ‘hot,’ two side blue for ‘cold,’ and two sides white for near average temperature,” and the dice themselves represent the chance of observing variations on mean temperature. Under this metaphor, today’s climate is best approximated by a dice with four sides red, one blue, and one white, according to the study.
As for the future, the data suggest that with just one full degree of warming, anomalies three deviations beyond the mean will be the norm, and five deviations beyond the mean will become more likely (the latest IPCC projections suggest between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius are likely). In essence, the red side of the die are not only multiplying, but becoming much more extreme. To put this into scale, the Moscow 2010 heat wave, an event that exceeded the three deviations mark, coincided with a doubling of the death rate in the Russian capital. -
‘Green Prophet’ Interviews Geoff Dabelko on Water Security in the Middle East
›April 18, 2012 // By Schuyler NullTafline Laylin, managing editor of the Green Prophet blog, recently interviewed ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko about the just-released U.S. intelligence assessment on global water security and what it says about the Middle East.
The conversation touched on regional water scarcity, Palestinian-Israeli water tensions, and the role of the international community.
“We put a lot of faith in the past helping us understand the future and it rests at the center of much of the way we analyze things,” said Dabelko. “But at the same time, we also, especially in the natural world, have established patterns of thresholds and tipping points and sudden changes.”
We’ve excerpted the first few questions below; read the full interview on Green Prophet:Green Prophet: So, for context, can you say a little bit about the National Intelligence report and why it was compiled?
Continue reading on Green Prophet.
Geoff Dabelko: The water and security assessment from the National Intelligence Council was done at the request of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The National Intelligence Council has a strong history of looking at long term trends in the environmental, technological, demographic realms and working to understand how trends in these areas are and could be part of larger economic, political, and social dynamics that may pose national security issues for the United States.
Green Prophet: There were seven river basins of particular concern, of which four are located in the MENA region: the Euphrates, Jordan, Nile, and the Tigris. Why do you think these are of particular importance?
Geoff Dabelko: I do not explicitly know the criteria for their selection of the seven basins. But I think these four, like the other three, have some common characteristics. They are basins where the rivers are shared by two or more countries/territories that are heavily dependent on the waters; that have relations among the states that include uncertain, tense, or even overtly hostile relationships; that are now and/or likely to experience big growth in demand for the water resource based on both population growth and consumption growth, that at the same time there is concern that climate change will at least increase variability, timing, and or quantity of that water (both scarcity and abundance i.e. floods).
And then the report focuses on the institutional river basin arrangements and differentiates among their assessed capacities for addressing these current and future stresses. That diversity aside, it is fair to say that the transboundary water institutions remain a priority yet a challenge for addressing the multiple dimensions of the water relationship. I say “multiple” given all the different uses water performs in most of these settings (transport, irrigation, hydropower, culture, industrial, household, etc).
Photo Credit: “Umm Qais – Sunset,” courtesy of flickr user Magh. -
Responses to JPR Climate and Conflict Special Issue: John O’Loughlin, Andrew M. Linke, Frank Witmer (University of Colorado, Boulder)
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Complexity, in terms of economic, cultural, institutional, and ecological characteristics, weighs heavily on contemporary attempts to unravel the climate change/variability and conflict nexus. The view that local-level complexity can be “controlled away” by technical fixes or adding variables in quantitative analysis does not sit well with many geographers (though some do try to adopt a middle ground position).
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Natural Resource Management, Climate Change, and Conflict
›In Climate Change and Conflict: Lessons From Natural Resource Management, a new report from the Danish Institute for International Studies, authors Mikke Funder, Signe Marie Cold-Ravnkilde, Ida Peters Ginsborg, and Nanna Callisen Bang, review literature on how natural resource management, climate change, and conflict interact on the local, national, and transboundary levels, from which they offer lessons for development policymakers and programmers. Since natural resource management is “strongly related” to how climate change and conflict interact, they write, a better understanding of how natural resource management has taken conflict prevention and resolution into account would benefit development work aimed at mitigating climate change’s “multiplier effect” on conflict. Recommendations include working on as local a level as possible; working with and strengthening existing customary and legal conflict resolution frameworks; and coordinating development efforts across sectors so that policymakers and programmers can minimize the risk of unintentionally causing or aggravating conflict.In his March 2012 Transatlantic Academy paper, “The Geostrategic Implications of the Competition for Natural Resources: The Transatlantic Dimension,” François Heisbourg analyzes the strategic implications of emerging trends affecting the global energy marketplace, including climate change and scarcity. Whereas Europe and the United States shaped energy markets in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively, there is no comparable leader in the 21st century marketplace, writes Heisbourg, nor is it clear that one will emerge. Instead, there will be a growing number of influential countries, like Brazil, India, and China, that will have an impact as both consumers and producers. That said, the Persian Gulf will remain geopolitically important given its dominance of the oil market, giving reason for the United States, Europe, India, and China to actively pursue cooperation in the Gulf in order to minimize the risk of future energy crises, Heisbourg concludes. -
Responses to JPR Climate and Conflict Special Issue: Steve Lonergan (University of Victoria)
›The relationship between climate change and conflict has been discussed for over two decades but most of the evidence of the link between the two has been anecdotal, drawing on extreme climate scenarios. The authors featured in the January special issue of the Journal of Peace Research devoted to climate change and conflict are therefore to be commended for their detailed investigations into a possible causal relationship between the two.
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Responses to JPR Climate and Conflict Special Issue: François Gemenne (Sciences Po)
›If you want a government to address something, make it a defense issue. No need to hold a PhD in political science to know that governments tend to give the highest priority to issues that involve national security interests – one can complain and whine about it, but that’s the way it is.
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Responses to JPR Climate and Conflict Special Issue: Solomon Hsiang (Princeton University) and Todd G. Smith (University of Texas, Austin)
›A January special issue of the Journal of Peace Research brings together a new collection of evidence on a subject that has been a mainstay of the environmental security agenda: the links between climate and conflict.
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Much Ado About Conflict? Climate’s Links to Violence Reexamined
›Violence is on the wane in human affairs, even if slowly and irregularly. Could climate change reverse this trend? Pundits and politicians have raised the specter of havoc caused by rising temperature, erratic patterns of rainfall, and rising sea levels. In this way, so the story goes, climate change will produce famine and mass migration that threatens political stability and provokes violence. However, to date there is little evidence that the meteorological or agricultural conditions associated with climate change are actually a major source of violence.
