“Climate change alone is unlikely to trigger state failure in any state out to 2030, but the impacts will worsen existing problems—such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions,” said National Intelligence Council Chairman Thomas Fingar at yesterday’s joint hearing of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming and the House Subcommittee on Intelligence Community Management.

The hearing allowed Democrats and Republicans alike to question Fingar and other witnesses on the newly completed, classified National Intelligence Assessment (NIA) on the national security implications of global climate change through 2030. The NIA relies on the mid-range projections in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, as well as the expert opinions of scientists from the U.S. government and U.S. universities.

“Climate change could threaten domestic stability in some states, potentially contributing to intra- or, less likely, interstate conflict, particularly over access to increasingly scarce water resources. We judge that economic migrants will perceive additional reasons to migrate because of harsh climates, both within nations and from disadvantaged to richer countries,” said Fingar, adding that the United States should be prepared to assist people fleeing flooded coastal areas in the Caribbean.

Domestically, Fingar warned the representatives to expect severe water scarcity in the Southwest, increasingly frequent wildfires, and powerful storms on the East and Gulf Coasts, which could threaten nuclear power plants, oil refineries, and U.S. military installations. The military could also find its capacity overstretched abroad: AFRICOM will be tasked with responding to more frequent disease outbreaks, food scarcity, and land clashes in sub-Saharan Africa, and the U.S. military in general will be called upon to alleviate increasingly common humanitarian emergencies around the world.

According to Fingar, the NIC plans to analyze three subtopics in greater detail: climate change’s security implications for individual countries; its implications for cooperation and competition among the world’s great powers, including the United States, Russia, China, and India; and the security implications of possible climate change mitigation strategies.

Democrats and Republicans butted heads over whether the NIA was a commendable achievement or a distraction from more important security issues, such as terrorism. At one point, Representative Edward Markey (D-MA), chairman of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, asked Fingar whether he thought climate change could worsen the drivers of terrorism, and Fingar responded that yes, he thought climate change would probably increase the pool of recruits for terrorist activity, which was cause for concern.

Virtually the only issue on which Democrats and Republicans could agree—although for differing reasons—was that the NIA should be declassified. Democrats believed declassification was important so that government agencies and private businesses could begin to prepare for climate change’s impacts, while Republicans argued the NIA should be declassified because they believed the NIC’s analysts, having based their analysis entirely on open-source information, hadn’t contributed anything new to the existing body of knowledge on climate change. Fingar disagreed that secret intelligence is more valuable than open-source information: “Information is information; knowledge is knowledge.”

For her part, Representative Anna Eshoo (D-CA), chairwoman of the Subcommittee on Intelligence Community Management, seemed content to ignore the misgivings of some of her colleagues regarding the NIA. “From this day forward, the words ‘climate change’ and ‘international security’ will be forever linked,” she proclaimed.

Selected news coverage:

Wall Street Journal: Global Warming as Security Issue: Intelligence Report Sees Threat
Reuters: Climate change may strain U.S. forces
MSNBC: Climate change could threaten U.S. security
CNN: Global warming could increase terrorism, official says

The 2008 Failed States Index, released on Monday by the Fund for Peace and Foreign Policy magazine, draws attention to the increasingly interconnected spheres of politics, environment, population, and security. The Index contains a number of widely anticipated inclusions, as well as a few surprises. Somalia, ranked third last year, is currently ranked first—a consequence of its weak transitional government, offshore pirates, and a refugee crisis that saw some 700,000 people flee Mogadishu last year alone.

“Domestic policy alone is not enough; a new U.S. foreign policy to tackle climate change is also essential,” argues a Council on Foreign Relations Independent Task Force in Confronting Climate Change: A Strategy for U.S. Foreign Policy. “Unchecked climate change,” the authors write, “is poised to have wide-ranging and potentially disastrous effects on…human welfare, sensitive ecosystems, and international security.”

The Independent Task Force report comes on the heels of CFR’s widely publicized November 2007 report, “Climate Change and National Security.” ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko spoke with author Joshua Busby in a January podcast examining the links between climate and security.

In an interview, Task Force Director Michael A. Levi said, “climate change is a global problem that requires a global solution.” Rather than remaining “mired in domestic discussions,” as Levi argues the Bush administration has been, the task force calls for a shift in the way policymakers frame the issue of carbon emissions. “The point of this task force,” said Levi, “was to pull back and put this back where it belongs, in the context of American foreign policy.”

The United States, uniquely positioned to “steer international efforts to confront climate change,” must take a leadership role in advancing global policies, Levi said. Unchecked, American emissions will overwhelm any reductions made by other countries. U.S. policymakers have a valuable opportunity to show that environmental responsibility is consistent with robust economic performance, a concern in both developed and developing countries and a leading impediment to addressing climate change.

However, the report strongly cautions against the United States entering into any global framework to which other large emitters, like China and India, are not willing to adhere. The authors argue that the United States should lead through its domestic policies but use a “wide range of levers” to compel other countries to move in the right direction. The challenge of global climate change calls for a multi-pronged solution. “[J]ust like scientists tell us that no one technology is going to solve the problem, there’s no one diplomatic solution that’s going to solve it,” warned Levi. The challenge, then, is translating broad global concern over climate change into collective, and productive, action.

As Karin Bencala and Geoff Dabelko point out in the current issue of Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs, transboundary rivers and aquifers all over the world can, and do, provide opportunities to bring riparian parties together. We can identify a degree of cooperation in the management of most of the transboundary water resources in Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa. But now is the time to stop the pendulum from swinging too far towards mistaken notions of “water peace.” Tensions linger on the Tigris and simmer on the Jordan. The Nile is allocated in a remarkably inequitable and unsustainable manner, as are many of the rivers falling in all directions off the Tibetan plateau. We must continue to question regimes that preserve inequity, treaties that are ineffective “paper tigers” (Bernauer 2003, p. 547), and organisations designed chiefly as sinks for lending and donor agencies. We will be doing the world no great service if our gaze shifts to under-qualified examples of cooperation and away from the root causes of water conflict.

We should be wary of applying the “cooperation” label to transboundary interactions where asymmetric cooperation merely poisons relations and prolongs unfair arrangements. Cooperation has many faces, and not all of them are pretty. The 1994 Israel-Jordan Peace Treaty is regularly cited as a model of cooperation, for example, yet as Itay Fischhendler (2008) (subscription required) has shown, the ambiguity built into the agreement favours the more powerful (Israeli) side. In private conversations, Jordanian officials concede frustration that the agreement they signed fell far short of guaranteeing Jordan an equitable share of the waters. Last month, the Economist highlighted several other cases of such asymmetric water cooperation.

Recent efforts by Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME) demonstrate cooperation of a completely different nature. FOEME’s Good Water Neighbors project brings together mayors from Jordanian, Palestinian, and Israeli towns on the Jordan River in an effort to improve its quality. The project, like the organisation itself, represents all sides in equal measure. This equitable cooperation should be the standard analysts and policymakers shoot for.

We must be careful not to divorce small-scale cooperation from the broader water conflict within which it takes place, however. At the state level, the distribution of transboundary freshwater between Israel and the Palestinian territories remains an inequitable 90-10 split. The Israeli-Palestinian Joint Water Committee (JWC) established following the 1995 Oslo II interim agreement gives the Israeli side an effective veto over even basic rainwater catchment projects (for instance, in the southern West Bank). Multiple USAID, European, and UN development projects remain stalled because they have not cleared the JWC’s triple hurdle requiring that all water-related projects obtain Israeli technical (fine), political (?) and military (!) approval. Jan Selby (2003) (subscription required) insists this is not cooperation, but “domination dressed up as cooperation.”

While asymmetric, dominative, strategic, self-interested, and token cooperation all fall short of violent conflict, we should bear in mind that the tensions relating to the uglier faces of cooperation do not disappear with time. At the very least, treaties must be structured more equitably, in accordance with the basic water-sharing principles of international water law. They should also include re-visiting clauses, to modify the agreement when changes in politics or climate present the people dependent on the waters with a different set of circumstances. The ongoing water negotiations between Israel and Palestine and the imminent negotiations between Israel and Syria make understanding water cooperation much more than an academic indulgence. We must all push where we can to get it right.

Mark Zeitoun is a fellow at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Environmental Policy and Governance and heads the London School of Economics/King’s College London London Water Research Group.

The Effects of Climate Change on Agriculture, Land Resources, Water Resources, and Biodiversity in the United States, the long-awaited report from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research, was released this week.

The Worldwatch Institute’s Robert Engelman discussed his recent book More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want on NPR’s Talk of the Nation.

Burma’s ruling military junta is prohibiting almost all foreign aid workers from entering the country, despite the massive devastation wreaked by Cyclone Nargis last week. The military has also impounded an aid shipment from the UN World Food Program (WFP) and has refused aid from the United States, among other countries. “We are very concerned that this food is not reaching—on day six after a cyclone—the very victims of that cyclone,” said WFP spokesman Paul Risley. The United Nations has suspended aid to Burma pending resolution of the situation.

In a statement released earlier this week, the junta said it would be willing to accept foreign aid, as long as it could distribute the shipments itself. But so far, the statement has not matched up with reality.

The official death toll from the cyclone is approximately 23,000, but experts say this figure could rise significantly, as approximately 40,000 people remain missing. Hundreds of thousands are currently without shelter, food, safe water, or medical care, and international experts agree that the Burmese military does not have the capacity to meet the need. Further compounding the problem, Burma’s military rulers have pressed on with plans to conduct a national constitutional referendum in the less-affected areas tomorrow. Soldiers who could be delivering much-needed aid to survivors have instead been assigned to guard and run polling places. The ruling generals claim that approval of the referendum will set Burma on a gradual path to democracy; nearly all other observers say the vote is a sham. “If you believe in gnomes, trolls and elves, you can believe in this democratic process in Myanmar,” said chief UN human rights investigator Paulo Sergio Pinheiro last year.

Many of Burma’s citizens are probably too preoccupied with immediate survival right now to be thinking about protesting the junta’s delay of humanitarian relief. But in a few weeks or months, when the situation has (hopefully) stabilized somewhat and word has spread of the holdup of humanitarian aid, one wonders whether the junta will find itself the target of popular outrage. By dragging their feet on international humanitarian relief, Burma’s military rulers seem to be begging for an uprising.

Climate change will create hard security problems—including increasingly frequent and severe natural disasters, pandemic disease, desertification, and mass migration—but these challenges will not have hard security solutions, argues Nick Mabey in Delivering Climate Security: International Security Responses to a Climate Changed World (subscription or purchase required), a policy paper published by the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies. Instead, policymakers, NGOs, the private sector, and the security community will need to develop nontraditional, innovative policies and programs to mitigate these threats.

Mabey, who served as a senior adviser in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit before becoming founding director and chief executive of E3G, an NGO working on sustainable development, thoughtfully outlines the security challenges that many previous reports on climate security (including by the CNA Corporation and the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Center for a New American Security) have discussed. But he also examines several less frequently mentioned risks. For instance, he warns that some countries will try to use the need for renewable energy as a cover for obtaining nuclear technology for military purposes. Mabey argues that the development and dissemination of less risky energy technologies is the best way to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

In addition, Mabey notes, if the international system fails to address the threat of climate change effectively, its legitimacy will be undermined, and it will find it more difficult to resolve other global threats.

Mabey also calls our attention to the critical role that the environment plays in post-conflict reconstruction and peacebuilding efforts. Strategic planners developing 10-15-year security strategies for Afghanistan based on sustainable livelihoods must take climate change into account. Attempts to use a “hearts and minds” strategy against Islamist extremism may fall short as higher temperatures and lower rainfall dry up some of the main sources of jobs for young men in the Middle East and North Africa. In addition, Mabey notes, terrorists are likely to use climate change to feed existing grievances; Osama bin Laden has already spoken several times on climate change’s unequal impacts on different parts of the globe.

“Information on present and future serious climate security impacts is as good, if not better, than other information routinely used in security planning and assessment,” asserts Mabey. Therefore, he argues, the security community has no excuse for not planning for the worst-case climate change scenarios, just as it plans for the worst-case terrorism and nuclear weapons proliferation scenarios. Yet Mabey believes the international response to climate change so far has been “slow and inadequate.” He urges nations and international institutions to devote far greater resources to addressing the myriad threats it will pose to political stability and human well-being.

In his keynote address at the 5th Annual Unite for Sight International Health Conference, held earlier this month, Jeffrey Sachs argued that world leaders must redouble their efforts to alleviate poverty, protect human and environmental health, and balance economic growth and sustainable development. He advocated many of the same solutions that appear in his new book, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, including increasing investment in sustainable technology research and development; hastening the diffusion of sustainable technologies to the poorer regions of the world; and allocating a smaller percentage of the national budget for military spending and instead achieving the international target of 0.7 percent of GNP for foreign aid.

One part of Sachs’ presentation that was not included in his book was a memo to the next U.S. president, consisting of ten objectives to achieve global sustainability. Included in this list were the following recommendations, which illustrate Sachs’ view that human health, the environment, economic growth, and security are all integrally linked:

• “Stop putting food into the gas tank.” Sachs spoke out against the current U.S. subsidies for converting corn into ethanol. He linked the initiative to the recent global increase in food prices and the resulting turmoil in areas such as Haiti and Burkina Faso.
• Create a global forum for the leaders of dry lands. Sachs argued that it is important for leaders of areas such as Senegal, Mali, Chad, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and California to discuss water scarcity, its impact on livelihoods, and strategies to ensure human security.
• Immediately send a U.S. envoy around the world to back climate change negotiations. Sachs emphasized the need for the United States to step up as a leader on curbing climate change and its environmental and social impacts, rather than stalling international cooperation and progress, as he believes the current administration has done.
• Increase U.S. funding for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA). Sachs disapproved of the U.S. government’s decision to decrease its financial support of the UNFPA, which he argued is instrumental in fueling the voluntary decline of fertility rates in less developed countries. He identified access to contraceptives and reproductive services, the empowerment of girls and women, and the promotion of maternal and child health as crucial strategies for slowing population growth and maintaining resource sustainability.
• Make the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the heart of international development policy. Sachs noted that he had heard President Bush make reference to the MDGs only once during his two terms in office. He hoped the new administration’s approach to foreign relations and international aid would put a stronger emphasis on achieving the MDGs, which aim to increase health, stability, and prosperity worldwide.

By Global Health Contributor Kai Carter.