The National Library of Medicine’s newest exhibit, “Against the Odds: Making a Difference in Global Health,” examines the “revolution in global health” that has transformed communities over the past several decades. In addition to acknowledging the vast achievements in health and science, the exhibit also aims to raise public awareness of the various factors that cause illness, from economic and social inequality to conflict.

The exhibit is divided into six sections: Community Health, Food for Life, Action on AIDS, The Legacy of War, Preventing Disease, and Global Collaboration. Each section reveals how doctors and nurses, advocates, and communities have joined forces to overcome public health challenges. For instance, “The Legacy of War” highlights the Nobel Peace Prize-winning work of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which worked to inform policymakers and citizens of the consequences of nuclear war, and the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which advocated successfully for the passage of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. The exhibit’s website features compelling photographs, guest columns by leading public health experts, and a range of interactive features.

The narrow window of opportunity to address climate change makes it imperative that we “remove our heads from the proverbial sand,” writes editor Carolyn Pumphrey in “Global Climate Change: National Security Implications,” released by the U.S. Army War College earlier this month. The report aggregates the presentations given at a 2007 colloquium by the same name in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and features contributions from several authors who have worked recently with ECSP, including Kent Hughes Butts, Joshua Busby, and John T. Ackerman (who has also been a guest contributor to the New Security Beat).

The risks associated with climate change include the spread of disease, severe drought, and coastal flooding, which could lead to decreased agricultural output, mass migration, and other challenges. Pumphrey writes that while social scientists are not in full agreement that violence will result from these developments, conference participants agreed that climate change presents a serious threat, “compounded by a context of rapid population growth, increasing economic appetite, pockets of extreme violence, and global interdependence.” By inflaming latent tensions, climate change will “complicate American foreign policy in a wide variety of ways,” says Pumphrey.

Since the Senate Armed Services Committee called environmental destruction a “growing national security threat” in the late 1990s, some effort has been devoted to crafting a U.S. response, but politicians have hesitated to act on uncertain scientific data, says Pumphrey, arguing additionally that the creeping dangers associated with climate change have only recently begun to captivate the public imagination, and that attempts to spice them up can lead to inaccurate exaggeration. Finally, Pumphrey says, pervasive overconfidence in the ability of “American ingenuity” to outpace emerging dangers has hindered decisive action.

Pumphrey calls for a three-pronged strategy that includes “better intelligence, better science, and better understanding of the relationships between such things as violence, society, and climate change.” She maintains that we must slow the rate of climate change and prepare for unavoidable changes, take action to alleviate international social distress, and prepare to address potential conflicts. And, she notes, this is “a job for everyone,” not just the military.

The authors of “Reassessing HIV Prevention,” an article in the most recent issue of Science, question the assumptions behind current HIV prevention interventions in Africa. The authors challenge the commonly accepted belief that poverty and political instability increase a population’s vulnerability to HIV infection, arguing that it is not supported by the evidence. They point to data demonstrating that “African regions suffering from conflict, genocide, and rape, such as Rwanda, Congo, and Angola, are much less affected by AIDS than peaceful, wealthier, and more literate countries such as Botswana or Swaziland, which have the world’s highest HIV prevalence.”

Studies have shown that civil war and the breakdown of health service delivery result in an increase in preventable deaths—such as those due to malnutrition, diarrhea, and malaria—but perhaps HIV follows a different pattern. Clearly, there is a need for research that compares the spread of HIV/AIDS in politically stable, wealthier African countries with those torn by conflict.

At a 2007 ECSP event on the human cost of war, Dr. Frederick Burkle of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative—who will discuss public health management after natural disasters on June 17—admitted that the direct impact of poverty, inequality, and cultural incompatibilities on the spread of infectious diseases and mortality during complex emergencies is “difficult, if not impossible,” to measure.

The complex relationships between natural resources and political stability are gaining prominence in the political science community, as evidenced by three articles on those connections in the May/June 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs. As each article argues, more effective international approaches are needed to combat inequitable benefit distribution, population pressures, and infrastructure underdevelopment.

Michael Ross’ “Blood Barrels: Why Oil Fuels Conflict” explores the paradox that in an increasingly peaceful world, oil-producing countries are plagued by a unique level of violence. Developing countries that produce oil are twice as likely to suffer internal rebellion as those that do not. “Oil alone cannot create conflicts,” he says, “but it both exacerbates latent tensions and gives governments and their more militant opponents the means to fight them out.” He calls for a four-fold solution, with provisions including increased transparency in oil-producing governments and international assistance for countries in managing their revenue responsibly and equitably.

In “The Trouble With Congo: How Local Disputes Fuel Regional Conflict,” Severine Autesserre argues that international peacekeeping efforts have missed the “critical fact that today local conflicts are driving the broader conflicts, not the other way around.” She argues that the international focus on elections as the mark of a peaceful nation is misplaced and can do more harm than good. “The international community must fundamentally revise its strategy” for addressing local grievances, especially those around land ownership, Autesserre says. Her take-home message: “Think local, act local.” In ECSP Report 12, John Katunga offers his perspective on resources and conflict in the DRC.

Former U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan Andrew Natsios writes in “Beyond Darfur: Sudan’s Slide Toward Civil War” that land and resource management issues are of primary importance in Darfur. He also criticizes international aid efforts for missing the mark; rather than focusing on resolving the ongoing crisis in Darfur, he writes, the United States should work to enforce the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) of 2005. Because the CPA has been ineffectively applied, many issues continue to contribute to instability. For instance, tensions over oil revenue are working against the emergence of stability in Sudan. The revenue-sharing agreement outlined in the CPA has not been consistently implemented, and until this happens, Natsios writes, the outlook for Sudan is not promising.

CIA Director General Michael Hayden identified demographic change as one of three trends that will shape the 21st century earlier this week, noting the “importance of underlying population trends and the factors that influence them…things like fertility rates, life expectancy, the prevalence of HIV, and ease of migration. Clearly,” he said, “there will be many implications for our national security to come out of this, and these trends will contribute to the complexity of the security threats facing America over the next several decades.” Population growth will hit African countries the hardest, he said, and may threaten stability on the continent.

ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko discusses how the environment can be used as a tool for peace today in the concluding program in Chicago Public Radio Worldview’s weeklong “Environmental War and Peace” series.

The U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute has released a collection of the proceedings of a colloquium on “Global Climate Change: National Security Implications,” held in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, earlier this year. Contributors agree that climate change is a security issue that merits serious attention and discuss the proper role for the U.S. Armed Forces in addressing it on a global scale.

“Intensifying environmental catastrophes and downturns in living standards caused by interlocking crises of energy, water, food and violent conflict” are likely to characterize the coming century, warns Jeffrey Sachs in Time magazine’s web-exclusive feature, “What’s Next 2008.” But all is not lost; Sachs encourages us to recognize that by “seeking global solutions, we actually have the power to save the world for all, today and in the future.”

As population pressures increasingly strain ecological resources in Madagascar’s biodiversity hotspots, CARE’s Extra Mile Initiative is working in partnership with Madagascar’s government to provide family planning and reproductive health services to six remote communities on the “eighth continent.” A new report discusses the program’s challenges and successes.

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.

An article in Time magazine surveys the growing awareness of climate change’s links to traditional and nontraditional security threats.

“Unless some way can be found to stop the explosive rise in food prices generally, and rice prices in particular, we will see sharply higher mortality….This will not be mass starvation, with people dying in the streets, but it will be sharply higher infant and child mortality and weakened adults succumbing prematurely to infectious diseases,” said Peter Timmer, an expert on agriculture and development and a current Center for Global Development non-resident fellow, in an interview earlier this week.

It was hard to tell which environmental adviser was representing which presidential candidate at a recent news conference sponsored by SEJ on climate change (watch; listen; read)—all three explicitly named it a security priority, and called for a mandatory cap and trade program and the development of new technology. (The question of whether to build new nuclear power plants revealed the only major difference: Clinton’s generally con, McCain is pro, and Obama falls somewhere in the middle.)

Clinton adviser and WilmerHale partner Todd Stern charged out of the gate first, deeming climate a “first-order national security issue” that is “going to exacerbate food security problems. It’s going to exacerbate water scarcity. It’s going to make desertification worse, increase resource competition, and produce, undoubtedly, large-scale migration and refugee problems and increase border tension.” Citing the CNA report, he called climate change a “threat multiplier for instability in volatile parts of the world.” He also quoted Sir Nicholas Stern’s claim that climate change has the potential to cause “economic disruption at a scale of the Great Depression and the wars of the last century.” Clinton will establish a National Energy Council (à la the National Security Council), form an “E8” of major emitters, and increase R&D; efforts—including creating a government agency for energy R&D; modeled on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). No proposals, however, on how to mitigate the existing impacts on our current security situation.

Quoting McCain, former CIA Director Jim Woolsey said climate change was “a serious and urgent economic, environmental, and national security challenge.” Taking a harder security stance, Woolsey linked U.S. oil dependence to terrorism not only because it increases “our vulnerability to cutoffs, to terrorist attacks in Middle East” on energy infrastructure, but also because oil fuels oil fuels “Saudi Arabia’s spreading of its hateful Wahhabi doctrine, into madrasas and religious schools around the world”—and funds Iran’s belligerence as well. Unlike Clinton’s representative, Woolsey did not focus on environmental degradation’s links to conflict. He supports market-based incentives to encourage the commercialization of existing technologies—such as plug-in hybrids, flex fuel vehicles, new lighter car body construction, alternative liquid fuels—that could end the “oil monopoly on transportation” and thus fight terrorism at same time. Somewhat cynically, he promoted this vastly oversimplified argument as a politically practical way to convince climate change skeptics to back mitigation efforts.

Like his boss, Obama’s representative Jason Grumet took a big-picture approach, telling the crowd that Obama “gets it”; he recognizes that energy “affects our national security in a dramatic way” and thus requires “dramatic change”—a fundamental transformation of our energy policies to “make us safe and secure.” However, he offered few specific details. Obama supports the development of clean coal (he’s from Illinois, putative site of the now-stalled FutureGen project) and advanced nuclear power, but says we must solve the existing problems with nuclear technology before beginning new development.