In a rare display of bipartisan unity, the U.S. Senate voted 80-16 Wednesday to reauthorize the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Originally passed in 2003 and set to expire this September, the White House credits PEPFAR with delivering antiretroviral drug treatment to 1.7 million people worldwide.

Reflecting the bipartisan support of the program, the top two members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee heaped praise on the program and the president. Senator Joseph Biden (D-DE), chairman of the committee, said the program is “the single most significant thing the president has done.” Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), the committee’s ranking member, argued eloquently that PEPFAR benefits U.S. national security and foreign policy. During the floor debate, he made the following statement:

We should understand that our investments in disease prevention programs have yielded enormous foreign policy benefits during the last five years. PEPFAR has helped to prevent instability and societal collapse in a number of at-risk countries; it has stimulated contributions from other wealthy nations to fight AIDS; it has facilitated deep partnerships with a new generation of African leaders; and it has improved attitudes toward the United States in Africa and other regions.

In my judgment, the dollars spent on this program can be justified purely on the basis of the humanitarian results that we have achieved. But the value of this investment clearly extends to our national security and to our national reputation.

The Senate legislation extends the program five years and triples its funding to $48 billion. The bill met with initial opposition from several conservatives, and the Democratic-controlled Senate defeated several Republican amendments earlier this week. The House passed a slightly different version of the legislation in April; differences between the two bills will be resolved in a conference committee.

“Among the major challenges that the United States will face over the coming decades are climate change, water scarcity, food insecurity, and environmental degradation. These are challenges that will threaten the economic well-being and security of all countries on earth, and by dint of their global nature, their effects cannot be overcome unless we adopt a global perspective and strategy,” writes Gayle Smith of the Center for American Progress in In Search of Sustainable Security, where she argues that the United States must improve its security by coordinating and modernizing its global development programs and re-engaging in international institutions.

The sustainable security Smith proposes combines three elements:

• National security, “the safety of the United States”;
• Human security, “the well-being and safety of people”; and
• Collective security, “the shared interests of the entire world.”

According to Smith, U.S. security policy is currently focused almost exclusively on direct, traditional threats—nations, terrorist cells, and rebel groups—and it goes about combating those threats unilaterally. As a result, the United States has withdrawn from the global community. Yet in efforts such as the war in Iraq, we have seen that security is unattainable without strong states and strong societies in which people feel they have economic and social opportunities. Even enormous military commitment cannot guarantee security in the absence of these conditions.

Over the course of the past several years, the Department of Defense (DoD), including Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, has increasingly recognized the role development plays in security. “The Pentagon’s development budget has soared from 5.6 percent of the executive branch total in 2002 to 21.7 percent, or $5.5 billion, in 2005, and is slated to increase further. New authorities have been secured, new programs have been initiated, and with DoD Directive 3000.05, the U.S. military is now mandated to treat stability operations as a core mission on par with combat operations,” writes Smith. A 2007 working paper by the Center for Global Development also addressed the DoD’s expanding role—and interest—in international development.

“America used to be the champion for all of us, and now it is the champion only for itself,” the report quotes a young attorney in East Africa as saying. By re-energizing our commitment to global development and multilateral engagement, we can once again become the world’s champion—and strengthen our own security at the same time.

The cost of taking no action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be “equivalent to a 3.6% loss of the U.S. GDP in 2100,” said Sir Nicholas Stern in his written testimony to the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality last week (archived webcast). “We should emphasize, however, that there are many likely, larger, and deeply damaging, effects which will occur after 2100 and these calculations take no account of the effects on the USA of the damages and devastation which occur outside the USA.”

Stern, who authored the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, discussed the non-economic costs of climate change, as well. Extreme climate change scenarios “involve movements of population, and we know that movement of population means not only the hardship around the movements themselves, but also conflict,” he said at the hearing.

Sherri Goodman, general counsel of the Center for Naval Analysis (CNA) Corporation, asserted the interdependence of climate change, national security, and energy dependence. “Numerous DoD studies have concluded that high fuel demand by combat forces detracts from combat capability, makes our forces more vulnerable, diverts combat assets from offense to supply line protection, and increases operating costs,” said Goodman’s testimony.

Energy is also a security issue at home. “The Defense Department is almost completely dependent on electricity from the national grid to power critical missions at fixed installations,” explained Goodman. “The national electric grid is fragile and can be easily disrupted, as happened in the Northeast Blackout of 2003, caused by trees falling onto power lines in Ohio. It affected 50 million people in eight states and Canada, took days to restore and caused a financial loss in the U.S. estimated to be between $4 billion and $10 billion. As extreme weather events become more common [due to climate change], so do the threats to our national electricity supply.”

A day earlier, two other House committees discussed the newly completed—and still classified—National Intelligence Assessment on the U.S. national security implications of climate change.

“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.

“From ‘youth bulges’ in the Muslim world to a population implosion in Russia to ‘premature aging’ in China, striking demographic trends the world over will reshape the future environment for U.S. policy,” says a new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of how demographic change will affect national and international security in the 21st century. As its title—The Graying of the Great Powers: Demography and Geopolitics in the 21st Century—indicates, the report focuses primarily on aging populations in developed countries, although one chapter does address the developing world.

The Graying of the Great Powers does a thorough job exploring the economic, geopolitical, and cultural implications of aging in Europe, Japan, and the United States, and it is to be praised for its readability and attention to concrete policy implications. But its focus on the developed world sometimes causes it to downplay the serious economic, socio-political, environmental, and security challenges posed by high population growth in developing countries—and by a global population that is expected to top 9 billion by 2050.

For instance, the authors use the past tense to refer to a time “when the prevailing worry was overpopulation.” Now, the word “overpopulation,” with its implication that some of us should not be here, is somewhat problematic. Nevertheless, it is clear that today, billions of human beings are consuming record amounts of natural resources at unsustainable rates—witness Yemen, where current annual water use is 30 percent greater than renewable water resources. Furthermore, many of the countries least able to provide employment and health care to their citizens have the highest population growth rates—for instance, Somalia and Afghanistan, which both have total fertility rates of 6.8 children per woman.

Wrapped up in their worries about the impact of low birth rates on armed services recruitment and government spending on pensions and health care for the elderly, the authors seem to forget what is actually at stake here: a woman’s decision to give birth to a child. Politicians can institute reforms that will make having children an easier proposition, but they should not pressure people to have children because they wish to avoid geopolitical upheaval. Ultimately, wanting to have a child is the only good reason to bring one into the world.

“Climate change is potentially the greatest challenge to global stability and security, and therefore to national security. Tackling its causes, mitigating its risks and preparing for and dealing with its consequences are critical to our future security, as well as protecting global prosperity and avoiding humanitarian disaster,” says the UK’s first National Security Strategy report.

A water-sharing deal will be essential to achieving Israeli-Palestinian peace, reports National Geographic magazine.

In the BBC’s Green Room, Gonzalo Oveido, a senior social policy adviser with IUCN, argues that the global food crisis will only be ameliorated if policymakers put greater emphasis on biodiversity and overall ecosystem health.

USAID has released The United States Commitment to the Millennium Development Goals, which outlines the U.S. government’s contribution toward meeting the eight goals by 2015. Fragile states face some of the steepest challenges to achieving the MDGs.

An article in Nature Conservancy magazine asks five conservation experts whether—and if so, how—conservation organizations should contribute to poverty alleviation.