Showing posts from category *Main.
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Generals/Admirals Flag Climate Change
›April 15, 2007 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoPress coverage has started the day before the official launch of “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” a report by 11 retired U.S. generals and admirals organized by the CNA Corporation, a security think tank based in Alexandria, Virginia. Sherri Goodman, the former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Environmental Security during the Clinton Administrations has assembled this group with financial support from the Rockefeller Family Foundations.
The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and BBC all have coverage. An extended press release is available on the CNA site. The report will be available here on Monday, April 16.
Stay tuned as UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett will make April 17 climate and security day at the UN Security Council. -
The New York Times Sees “The Shape of Things to Come” in Very Young Populations
›April 11, 2007 // By Gib ClarkeReporting on Population Action International’s latest report, The Shape of Things to Come, The New York Times’ Celia W. Dugger calls the link between young age structures and conflict “no simple coincidence,” observing that Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo all suffer from bad governance, violent conflict, and young populations. Retired Army Major General William L. Nash sets the scene with military efficiency:You’ve got a lot of young men. You’ve got a lot of poverty. You’ve got a lot of bad governance, and often you’ve got greed with extractive industries. You put all that together, and you’ve got the makings of trouble.
Shape concludes that youthful populations (countries where up to two-thirds of the population is below 30 years old) are most likely to present hurdles to political stability, governance, and, in some cases, economic development. For example, between 1970 and 1999, 80 percent of civil conflicts (those with 25 deaths or more) occurred in countries where 60 percent of the population was under 30 years old. In contrast, countries with an older age structure had only a 5 percent chance of civil conflict in the 1990s. Increased access to family planning and reproductive health, as well as improved rights for women—legal, educational, and economic—can help countries avoid demographic problems, the report says.
While Dugger’s explanation of the link between youthful populations and conflict is strong and succinct, she does not delve into the nuances of demography that are not so simple, but yet just as illuminating. Shape also focuses on other countries along the “demographic transition”— a population’s shift from high to low rates of birth and death—including “youthful” South Korea, “mature” Germany, and “transitional” Mexico and Tunisia. Some countries are impossible to classify strictly by age structures, including the United Arab Emirates, where large numbers of young men are immigrating for work; and sub-Saharan Africa, where HIV/AIDS is killing adults and children alike.
This report, as well as the PAI’s 2003 The Security Demographic, was released in a political environment increasingly concerned with the negative economic consequences of low fertility—the “birth dearth”—in developed countries, which has led Russia, France, and Iran to offer financial rewards for women that have more children. In addition, other recent reports have focused on the “demographic dividend” that developing countries could harness by taking advantage of the ingenuity and additional labor of youthful age structures. Many developed countries, concerned about below-replacement fertility rates, are thus not noticing or remain unconcerned that the population of the developing world continues to grow—and some even consider family planning to have been “accomplished.”
Despite the shifting political landscape, the fundamental arguments for female empowerment and family planning remain the same. Provision of reproductive health information and access to family planning goods and services are development imperatives, and the only way to ensure that women and couples can choose the size of their families. Furthermore, lowering birth rates still has positive economic benefits. The NYT article, while limited in its focus, will help bolster support for such programs, because as PAI’s Tod J. Preston tells Dugger:The budget realities are such that unless you can show how your programs help achieve larger ends—security, development, poverty reduction, democracy—traditional rationales for humanitarian assistance aren’t enough.
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Pop Goes the Environment: Op-Eds Break the P-E Silence
›April 11, 2007 // By Meaghan ParkerThe population-environment connection is riding the climate change bandwagon into the Op-Ed columns—at least overseas. The Observer’s Juliette Jowit lays out four reasons why “No one is willing to address the accelerating growth in the world’s population” including:“[T]he uncomfortable suspicion that environmentalism is a soft cover for more objectionable population agendas to stop or reduce immigration or growth in developing countries. Sometimes it might be. But that doesn’t take away the underlying fact: that more people use more resources and create more pollution.”
But, she concludes, this is no reason to “to ignore one half of the world’s biggest problem: the population effect on climate change.” The lively comment board takes sides on this sometimes-controversial linkage with gusto.
London-based journalist Gwynne Dyer argues in the New Zealand Herald that despite some progress, the “Population bomb [is] still ticking away” in many developing countries. Like Jowitt, he bemoans population’s perceived political incorrectness, which means it “scarcely gets a mention even in discussions on climate change.”
But not talking about population growth is a “failure of government”—especially when the consequences include not only poverty, but war, he says:“Often, however, the growing pressure of people on the land leads indirectly to catastrophic wars: Sierra Leone, Liberia, Uganda, Somalia, Congo, Angola, and Burundi have all been devastated by chronic, many-sided civil wars, and all seven appear in the top 10 birth-rate list. Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Mozambique, which have suffered similar ordeals, are just out of the top 10.”
Aside from the rough correlation he draws between fertility rate and civil conflict, Dyer doesn’t cite any reasons or research supporting this indirect link. Experts writing in the ECSP Report’s “Population and Conflict” series provide a more nuanced look at this relationship. -
Climate and security links heat up
›April 5, 2007 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoOn April 17, the UK will use the prerogative of the chair of the UN Security Council to devote a day to the security implications of climate change. UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett is scheduled to deliver a major address meant to put climate-security links squarely on the high table of security policy.
John Ashton, the UK special envoy for climate change and an advisor to Beckett, has been making the case for treating climate as a security issue since he took up the post last fall. Writing for BBC On-line’s Green Room, Ashton saysConflict always has multiple causes, but a changing climate amplifies all the other factors. Katrina and Darfur illustrate how an unstable climate will make it harder to deliver security unless we act more effectively now to neutralise the threat.
Ashton is certain to be instrumental in framing Beckett’s upcoming Security Council session. Just last week in Berlin, Ashton laid out the rationale for the UN session and provided what is likely a sneak preview of Beckett’s main points. He highlighted climate’s coming contributions to conflict through border disputes, migration, contested energy supplies, water, land and fish scarcities, societal stresses from arrested development, and worsening humanitarian crises. In his prepared remarks Ashton states “The cumulative impacts of climate change could exacerbate these drivers of conflict, and particularly increase the risk to those states already susceptible to conflict, for example where weak governance and political processes cannot mediate successfully between competing interests.”
Even the French are picking up on the climate-security debates here in the United States. Le Monde covered a March 30-31 climate and security conference held in Chapel Hill, North Carloline under the auspices of the Triangle Institute for Security Studies and with U.S. Army War College funding. -
Environmental Security – It’s Big in Europe
›April 5, 2007 // By Gib ClarkeTo an American “outsider” like me, a recent conference in Berlin on integrating environment, development, and conflict prevention reflected the stark contrast between our policies and those of the EU. Though we are confronting similar situations – indeed, the same situation – we are dealing with them quite differently. In recent years, European policymakers have tried to balance environmental and energy concerns, working to decrease humans’ impact on climate and the environment and encourage environmental cooperation, while still generating enough energy for growth.
The tone of the conference was bleak, but the EU’s recent action on climate change is an encouraging sign of how governments can use scientific data to make difficult policy decisions. Only a month age, the EU agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2012.
Interestingly, the conference was situated at the center of German’s current political dominance, coming on the heels of the EUs 50th Anniversary celebration in Berlin and during the year of Germany’s joint Presidency of the EU and the G8. The conference’s timing also preceded the start of the UK’s Presidency of the United Nations Security Council. John Ashton, special representative on climate change at the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office, announced that the UK will hold a “thematic debate” in the Security Council exploring the relationship among climate, energy, and security. The debate, the first of its kind at such a high level, will focus on the security implications of a changing climate, as well as other factors that contribute to conflict, like population growth, immigration, and access to food, water, and natural resources. -
Britain’s Environment Secretary Sees the Security Light
›April 2, 2007 // By Christine CraddockBritain’s Environment Secretary David Miliband is calling for increased action on climate change, asserting that it would result not only in environmental and economic benefits but also a “peace dividend.” He said last Tuesday at a World Wildlife Fund conference:“[Action on climate change is] our best hope of addressing the underlying causes of future conflict in the world, and [it] is as significant for foreign policy as it is for environment policy.”
I agree that action on climate change can engender a “triple dividend” — to the economy, environment, and security. Encouraging a gradual transition toward a “low-carbon” economy is crucial for attracting investment and avoiding an abrupt, costlier one in the future. The welfare of many nations’ economies is linked to environment and security: rising sea levels would lead to displacement of coastal populations and potential battles over natural resources, while changing weather patterns could result in prolonged drought and famine in some places, or floods and the spread of waterborne diseases in others. As our planet changes, so too changes the availability of resources and how they are allocated.
I see Miliband’s comments as an articulation of the biggest economic, environmental, and security threat we currently face: a failure to successfully adapt to the impacts of climate change in the long run. Climate change “aggravates tensions that are already there and acts in conjunction with other sources of instability,” he said. The “peace dividend” he speaks of will result from soothing these tensions through adaptive climate policies on mitigating the foreign and domestic levels.
Miliband’s statement also comes at an interesting time for British policymaking, as parliament tries to establish a legislative framework for the country’s low-carbon transition. Additionally, with Prime Minister Tony Blair on the way out in 12 weeks, a storm of speculation brews over who will be the next Labour Party leader, and Miliband finds himself among the potential candidates. Rumored to also be a candidate for the foreign secretary cabinet post, his comments, at the very least, his comments rrepresent a growing awareness of the environment as a security issue in Britain. -
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. -
The French Connection: Population, Environment, and Development
›April 1, 2007 // By Gib ClarkeFor the past three years, the Parisian NGO Committee for International Cooperation in National Research in Demography (CICRED) has funded programs around the world on the connections among population, environment, and development. Last week, representatives from these research programs—the overwhelming majority of whom are natives of the countries where the work was done—presented the findings of their studies at an international colloquium at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris.
Twenty studies, representing countries throughout sub-Saharan African and Asia, were presented. Although each study produced unique findings, common themes emerged: inter- and intra-national immigration and rapid urbanization are cause for concern. In many of the studies, the rates of urbanization were such that urban planning could not keep up, leading to shortages of basic services like water and sanitation.
While immigration is often looked at in terms of the impact on the country of destination, presenters emphasized the negative impacts in the country of origin. Emigration often creates imbalances in gender and age cohorts (i.e., differing proportions of males and females, and a partially “missing” generations of younger people). The loss of social bonds and relationships—a phenomenon that Harvard’s Allan Hill calls a breakdown in the “moral economy,” as well as the loss of available labor, leads to less labor-intensive agricultural practices which sacrifice the environment and favor short-term gain for long-term need. Finally, although climate change was not the focus of any of these studies, its potential impact on the environment and livelihoods was an ever-present theme.
Background documents, PowerPoint presentations, data sets, and other valuable tools will be available soon from CICRED.
