The strategic minerals debate is back—but starring some new rocks. One that has received much recent attention is lithium, which is used in cell phone batteries, as well as those under development for electric cars.

Turns out lithium isn’t found in too many places. Around 50 percent of known reserves are in Bolivia, underneath some very dramatic and desolate salt flats. Worldfocus has a terrific news story that gives a glimpse of the place, the politics, and the battle over lithium extraction. Talk of an OPEC-like lithium cartel with China and Chile suggests that the politics at the international level will be just as contentious as the Bolivian domestic scene.

The prevalence of armed conflict in areas of high biodiversity is alarming, though not entirely surprising. According to “Warfare in Biodiversity Hotspots” (abstract online), which was published earlier this year in Conservation Biology, 80 percent of the major armed conflicts between 1950 and 2000 took place in biodiversity hotspots. While natural resources are rarely the principal causes of conflict, their allocation and ownership are frequently among its drivers.

A study published in Conservation Letters finds that emphasizing the ways the environment benefits the world’s poor “is a substantial improvement over dollar-based, ecosystem-service valuations that undervalue the requirements of the world’s poor” and “offers great hope for reconciling conservation and human development goals.”

The second day of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security conference in Oslo illustrated the evolution of the environment, conflict, and security debate. The key discussion came from a panel entitled “Environmental Change, Conflicts, and Vulnerability in War-Torn Societies” that featured Ken Conca of the University of Maryland; David Jensen of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP); and Arve Ofstad of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.

Simon Dalby, a geographer at Ottawa’s Carleton University, wants to put the “human” back into “human security” with his new book Security and Environmental Change. He is trying to find a common vocabulary to bridge the disparate languages of environmental science and security studies and enable them to mesh in a way that makes “intellectual sense.”

More than 150 experts from around the world are assembled this week in Oslo, Norway, for the capstone conference of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security (GECHS) Project. The conference features a mix of researchers and policymakers, who are debating the practical impacts of bringing a focus on people more firmly into discussions of global environmental change.

Today’s Center for a New American Security (CNAS) annual conference was replete with heavy hitters like General David Petraeus discussing the world’s top security challenges, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North Korea. But at an afternoon panel, CNAS’s Sharon Burke argued that although environmental and natural-resource issues may not get their own section in the Presidential Daily Briefing, they are intimately intertwined with many of the high-profile security issues that do.

President Obama recently called for a stronger focus on agricultural development in Afghanistan, said Burke, as part of a broader approach to increasing stability and improving Afghans’ quality of life. But decades of war have contributed to severe deforestation and land degradation, and farmers “can’t plant their seeds if the land is barren, and that’s where we are right now,” she said.

The panel also served as the launch for CNAS’s new Natural Security program (see working paper) and blog, which aim to study the “national-security implications of natural resources use,” said Burke. The program grows out of CNAS’s investigation of the security impacts of climate change and energy over the past several years. Burke explained that it was difficult to discuss energy and climate change without also talking about water, land, biodiversity, and a host of other related issues, so CNAS decided to create a program that would not attempt to separate these interconnected issues.

Burke was joined by former U.S. Senator John Warner, Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, Roderick Eggert of the Colorado School of Mines, and Commander E. J. McClure of the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

The security threat of sea level rise to small island states appears to have proven so obvious as to overcome the common objections of many countries (notably P5 members China and Russia) to framing climate change as a threat to security. Just yesterday, the UN General Assembly passed by consensus a non-binding resolution linking climate and security. The final version of the resolution (GA/10830) is not yet online, but the May 18 draft resolution gives you an idea of the final language.

Symbolic, yes, but perhaps this will make it easier for climate security questions to come before the UN Security Council again. The April 2007 Security Council session on climate change and security, at the behest of the British chair at the time, was, shall we say, met with a mixed reception, but 2009 is already different than 2007 in so many ways. It will be interesting to watch where the discussion goes from here at the UN and in national capitals.

Graphic: Symbol of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).

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