While flipping through The New York Times Magazine’s “The 7^th Annual Year in Ideas,” I was struck by one of the entries in the annual rundown of innovation. This year’s list pointed to climate change’s potential to lead to conflict—“climate conflicts,” as author Stéphanie Giry put it. In a year that witnessed growing news coverage and public awareness of climate change, “it took no time at all, it seems, for leaders around the world to latch onto the notion that global warming will bring war,” wrote Giry.

The magazine’s short blurb, however, fails to capture the complexity of an issue that is steeped in geopolitical and scientific nuance. Although Giry mentions the conflict in Darfur, Al Gore’s recent Nobel Peace Prize, and the CNA Corporation report by retired military leaders on climate change and security, she is forced to truncate her analysis of these developments. If you are looking for nuance and substance on the connections between conflict, climate change, population dynamics, and poverty, visit the environmental security portion of ECSP’s website.

Mitigating the effects of global climate change will require an integrated approach, says the UN Development Program’s (UNDP) new report, Human Development Report 2007/2008, which focuses on the human dimensions of a warming planet and highlights the challenges vulnerable populations face in adapting to climatic shifts.

The November issue of International Affairs focuses on security issues in Africa, with several articles investigating the links among environment, population, and security.

Chatham House’s Nicholas Shaxson explores poverty and bad governance in oil-rich countries in the Gulf of Guinea. “Oil, corruption and the resource curse” builds on the author’s extensive research into the politics of oil in sub-Saharan Africa, including interviews with numerous key players.

“Climate change as the ‘new’ security threat: implications for Africa,” by Oli Brown, Anne Hammill, and Robert McLeman, reviews the linkages between climate change and security in Africa. Climate change could precipitate socio-economic and political collapse, the authors say. However, good adaptation policies could help prevent environmental stresses from triggering conflict.

In “Human security and development in Africa,” Nana K. Poku, Neil Renwick, and Joao Gomes Porto note that Africa is unlikely to achieve a single Millennium Development Goal by the target year of 2015. Arguing that security and development are closely intertwined, they identify four critical developmental security issues: ensuring peace and security; fostering good governance; fighting HIV/ AIDS; and managing the debt crisis.

Finally, David Styan of Birkbeck College, London, examines the relationship between international migration and African economic security in his article “The security of Africans beyond borders: migration, remittances and London’s transnational entrepreneurs.”

For years, some experts have predicted that the depletion of global oil reserves—and the resulting rising price of oil—would make U.S. dependence on foreign oil economically untenable. Calls to address American energy consumption are nothing new. Yet technology has expanded the industry’s ability to find and extract oil: The National Petroleum Council estimates the total proven reserves at 1.2 trillion barrels—38 years of supply at current rates of consumption. It is likely that another trillion barrels of undiscovered oil exist, as well as 1.5 trillion barrels of “unconventional” reserves of heavy oil, according to the federally chartered advisory committee. As Vijay Vaitheeswaran argues in Foreign Policy magazine, “the world is simply not running out of oil. It is running into it.”

Recently, then, many advocates of oil independence have shifted from an economic argument, which has become hard to sustain at a time when governments are paying $98 a barrel for oil, to a security argument—although this is not to say that national security was not a concern at all previously. Besides the failure of alarmist predictions, two factors explain the shift from an economic to a security discourse: climate change and terrorism. The growing awareness of the causes and extent of climate change has tarnished the image of fossil fuels. According to a BBC poll, 50 percent of the world population favors higher taxes on fossil fuels.

Even more than climate change, however, it is the links between oil and terrorism that cause concern among policymakers. At a conference at the Brookings Institution, former CIA director James Woolsey argued that oil revenue often flows to Islamist regimes that finance madrassas, which educate the next generation of terrorists. Oil can be a source terrorism, but it can also be a target. Oil convoys are one of the main concerns of U.S. troops in Iraq, as they are frequently attacked by terrorists. In addition, the oil fields of the Niger Delta are often attacked by rebel groups.

In his book Freedom from Oil, David Sandalow, an expert on energy policy and climate change, explores what could happen if the next president prioritized oil independence– which he defines as reducing U.S. oil consumption to the point that imports are minimal. [For Sandalow’s response, read comments below.] He believes the transportation complex should be the target of future policies, and that biofuels and plug-in cars are part of the solution. Indeed, as Vaitheeswaran notes, “this year, two-thirds of U.S. oil consumption—and half of global oil consumption—will be sucked up by cars and trucks. Reinventing the car is the only serious way to wean the world off oil.”

Today marked the release of The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change, a report by the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). This morning’s launch of the report featured commentary by a few of the report’s many high-profile contributors, including John Podesta, who served as former President Clinton’s chief of staff, Leon Fuerth, who served as former Vice President Gore’s national security adviser, and James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA.

The Age of Consequences analyzes the effects three different climate scenarios could have on foreign policy and national security: an expected scenario (based on a 1.3ºC average global temperature increase by 2040); a severe scenario (a 2.6ºC increase by 2040); and a catastrophic scenario (a 5.6ºC increase by 2100). Leaders and policymakers must strive to understand and plan for the potential geopolitical impacts of climate change, said the report’s authors, despite inherent uncertainty regarding the precise severity and timing of those impacts.

Podesta described the expected scenario—which is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) medium-range scenario—as the “best we can hope for, the least we should be prepared for.” This least-dramatic scenario still anticipates a plethora of effects stemming from climate change, including a sharp rise in internal and international migration, the spread of infectious diseases, and growing tensions over the distribution of dwindling natural resources. Podesta emphasized that leaders must prepare for climate impacts to interact with one another and cause cascading geopolitical implications. For better or worse, he said, the United States is already viewed as the world’s first responder to natural disasters, and even under the mildest climate scenario, the American military’s disaster response role can be expected to grow.

While presenting the severe climate scenario, Fuerth reminded the Washington policymaker audience that extreme nonlinear environmental changes will likely generate dramatic institutional changes with far-reaching geopolitical implications—but that the trigger point for these changes is always hard to predict. He also argued that the United States and other wealthy countries have a responsibility to take action to mitigate climate change’s harmful global effects. Inaction by the United States over the next 30 years in the face of severe climate change impacts in the developing world would be akin to “kicking people away from the lifeboats,” he said. The report emphasizes that poorer countries will be disproportionally affected by climate change under all scenarios, in part because they lack the resources to cope with changing conditions. However, even for developed countries, says the report’s Executive Summary, the “collapse and chaos associated with extreme climate change futures would destabilize virtually every aspect of modern life.”

Woolsey emphasized that a catastrophic climate scenario would seriously threaten both ecosystems and infrastructure systems. The debate should not become mired in whether catastrophic climate events may occur in 2050 or 2100, said Woolsey—just as it is useless for a heavy smoker to debate whether he will contract lung cancer at age 49 or 53. As a society, he argued, we are effectively “smoking six packs a day.”

Woolsey stressed that both the “treehugger” interested only in reducing carbon emissions and the “hawk” interested only in security vulnerabilities want many of the same things. For instance, they both wish to move away from a carbon-based economy—the treehugger to mitigate climate change, and the hawk to reduce the nation’s dependency on unstable overseas regimes and its energy infrastructure’s vulnerability to terrorist attack. Woolsey will expand on this coincidence of interests with a future publication featuring an imagined conversation between the ghosts of “treehugger” John Muir and “hawk” General George Patton.

ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko, who attended this morning’s briefing, noted, “The Age of Consequences is an important report that brings together a wide range of experts and succeeds at bolstering the significance of climate change as a serious long-term security concern.” Dabelko believes the next steps are “deriving specific action items for a range of actors from this report” and from similar reports, including the April 2007 CNA Military Advisory Board report, the forthcoming Council on Foreign Relations report by Joshua Busby, and the National Intelligence Council’s National Intelligence Estimate, which is expected in early 2008.

ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko contributed to this report.

Yesterday, Senators Lieberman and Warner teamed up to move the America’s Climate Security Act (S. 2191) to the full Committee on Environment and Public Works. The act would go beyond recent legislation mandating that the intelligence community assess climate-security linkages and would create more formal institutional structures and resources for addressing climate-conflict connections.

Hill Heat summarizes the provisions for a new Climate Change and National Security Council as:

The Secretary of State is the Council’s chair, and the EPA Administrator, the Secretary of Defense, and the Director of National Intelligence are the Council’s other members.

The Council makes an annual report to the President and the Congress on how global climate change affects instability and conflict, and recommends spending to mitigate global warming impacts and conflict.

Up to five percent of auction proceeds, at the President’s discretion, may be used to carry out the report recommendations.

Some environmentalists don’t care for the provisions. They are wary of national security discretion for some adaptation resources and find the strings reminiscent of Cold War conditionality, when foreign assistance went to those who stood with the U.S. against the Communist menace. We will be watching the progress of this bill with interest; check back in this space for the latest developments.

Our notion of security has evolved in the years since September 11th, with increasing attention being given to understanding the underlying causes of conflict and state failure. Colin Kahl, an assistant professor in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, argues that these underlying causes of conflict can include—but are not limited to—demographic change, environmental degradation, and poverty.

“What we’re changing is how we do business, not what we do. And it is true, in Africa our focus has been basically around three issues…the first is civil control of the military and defense reform, which we see as sort of two sides of the same coin. The second is military professionalization, and the third is capacity building. And those three things are the things that DOD has been focused on in Africa for the probably about the last 10 years. And those three things will continue to be DOD’s focus in the context of capacity building and the mission of the command,” said Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs Theresa Whelan, discussing the creation of AFRICOM, the U.S. military’s new Africa Command, with a group of foreign policy and security bloggers.

One issue Whelan expects AFRICOM to focus greater attention on is maritime security. She explained that several illicit maritime activities are hurting African economies and environments, including trafficking in people, weapons, and drugs; piracy, which has been on the rise recently; and illegal fishing—which can also damage coral reefs. “I think the World Bank did a study not too long ago—a couple of years ago—in which they found that…countries like Mozambique were losing in excess of a billion dollars a year in lost revenue from illegal fishing and also the destruction to their reefs—reef structures and also the depletion of their fishing resources,” said Whelan. A full transcript of the October 24, 2007, discussion is available online.