Visiting Garmisch, Germany, is not exactly hardship duty. The snowy peaks of the German Alps are visible well before arriving at this Bavarian skiing haven, located 88 kilometers south of Munich. But this is no typical vacation paradise: Garmisch is home to the joint U.S.-German George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies, a leading security and defense educational institution, and its College of International and Security Studies (CISS). For the past 15 years, the Center has brought together security officials from militaries, intelligence services, and ministries for dialogue and education. These collaborative programs help security experts develop and maintain crucial personal connections with their counterparts in other countries.

At the Fall 2007 “Program in Advanced Security Studies” course at CISS, representatives from 34 countries met in the classroom during the day, and, perhaps just as importantly, in the local watering holes at night. The 12-week course, filled with traditional topics such as nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and asymmetrical warfare, ended with a curveball this December: The capstone lectures, meant to provoke students to look beyond traditional security concerns, focused on climate change. On December 3, 2007, three of us—Wolfgang Seiler of the Fraunhofer Institute for Atmospheric Environmental Research in Garmisch, Alexander Carius of Adelphi Research in Berlin, and I—did our best to mix things up.

Seiler led off with an energetic and sweeping presentation on the latest climate science, and proceeded to outline the likely social, economic, and agricultural effects of higher temperatures, intensified storms, changing precipitation patterns, and rising sea levels. He urged Europeans to start addressing this fundamental challenge by recognizing the inadequacy of their own climate change mitigation activities, rather than simply pointing fingers at the United States.

Carius unpacked the findings of a major climate and security study by the German Advisory Council on Global Change. He used the case of Central Asia to walk the more than 160 students through climate change’s expected impacts on regional water supply and their larger social, economic, political, and security implications. For the next few decades, melting glaciers will provide Central Asia with adequate water. But as they continue to recede, this water supply—so critical for agriculture and energy in the region—will diminish greatly. Any government—let alone the relatively new countries of Central Asia, which consistently fall in the World Bank’s lowest quartile of governance rankings—would struggle to prepare for and adapt to this impending water scarcity.

In my remarks, I urged security officials around the world to abandon the stereotype that climate change and other environmental issues are the preserve of tree-hugging environmental activists. In fact, climate change poses real threats that security officials have a responsibility to examine. To address concerns that climate science is too uncertain, I cited the parallel drawn by retired U.S. Army General Gordon Sullivan between making battlefield decisions with incomplete information and tackling climate change without precise predictions.

At the same time, I warned against overselling the links between climate change and violent conflict or terrorism. Climate change is likely to exacerbate conditions that can contribute to intra-state conflict—for instance, competition over declining resources such as arable land and fresh water, or declining state capacity or legitimacy—but it is neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause of conflict. Labeling the Darfur genocide a “climate conflict” is both wrong and counterproductive: It lets the regime in Khartoum off the hook and ignores proximate political and economic motivations for fighting. In the case of Darfur, examining climate change’s role in desertification, the long and deep drought, declining soil moisture levels, and declining agricultural productivity provides a fuller understanding of how conflict between Sudanese pastoralists and agriculturalists has reached this extreme.

I also suggested analyzing whether policy responses to climate change—such as the increased use of biofuels—could create new social conflict. The surge in palm oil cultivation in Indonesia, for example, is arguably accelerating deforestation rates and increasing the chances of conflicts between the owners of palm oil plantations and people who depend on forest resources for their livelihoods.

Small-group discussions ranged widely: European border control officials took great interest in potential increases in South-to-North migration flows from Africa and South Asia. Naval officers focused on the implications of an ice-free Northwest Passage in the Arctic, as well as sea-level rise that may swamp harbors and low-lying island bases.

As with all classes—whether constituted of military officers or not—some students couldn’t get enough of the discussion, while others were less inspired. I left with the impression that, like most military audiences, they did not welcome climate change as a new mission for security institutions. They perhaps recognized the need to study the potential impacts of climate change that may influence their traditional security concerns, even as they remained skeptical that climate change is as critical as some policymakers and researchers claim.

The Population Institute’s annual Global Media Awards (GMAs) honor journalists covering the numerous connections between population issues and development. Each year, GMA honorees visit Washington, DC, to present their award-winning projects to inside-the-beltway audiences and network with policymakers, NGOs, and each other. I had the chance to chat with two of this year’s GMA winners: Melclaire Sy Delfin, winner of the Best Individual Reporting category, and Jim Motavalli, winner of the Best Magazine Article award. Delfin is a television reporter with the Philippines’ GMA Network, Inc., and was recognized for her two in-depth investigative reports, “The Forbidden Games Filipino Children Play” and “When Wells Run Dry: A Tragedy Looming Large.” Motavalli is the editor of E/The Environmental Magazine; his winning article showed that falling birth rates are largely confined to developed countries, and that population growth remains high in many African and Asian countries.

U.S. President George W. Bush signed a $550 billion appropriations bill into law on December 20, 2007, which included $300 million to improve water and sanitation in the developing world under the Senator Paul Simon Water for the Poor Act. Inter Press Service investigates the dangers of fetching water in Malawi, which include crocodiles and cholera.

On December 26, 2007, the Chinese government issued “Energy Conditions and Policies,” a white paper outlining the country’s energy use and plans. The government maintains that China’s history of greenhouse gas emissions gives it the right to grow its economy on fossil fuels, as did most of today’s developed countries, but also pledges China’s strong commitment to renewable energy sources.

Pope Benedict XVI called for better environmental stewardship in his Christmas homily this year, delivered during the traditional Midnight Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. According to The New York Times, “He expanded on the theme [of environmental protection] briefly by saying that an 11th-century theologian, Anselm of Canterbury, had spoken ‘in an almost prophetic way’ as he ‘described a vision of what we witness today as a polluted world whose future is at risk.’”

Along with other experts, Fred Meyerson, a professor of demography, ecology, and environmental policy at the University of Rhode Island—and a former Wilson Center Public Policy Scholar—is currently participating in an online discussion of population and climate change for The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit organization that focuses on nuclear proliferation and other global security threats.

The World Bank recently released a Poverty Assessment Report for Yemen, which it produced with assistance from the UN Development Programme and the government of Yemen. IRIN News summarizes the findings.

“We are indeed at a cooperation versus conflict nexus,” said Rob Huebert, associate director of the University of Calgary’s Centre for Military and Strategic Studies, at a December 11 meeting sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute. Huebert was joined by fellow Arctic expert Michael Byers, the academic director of the University of British Columbia’s Liu Institute for Global Issues, in a discussion of the potential security threats introduced by a rapidly melting Arctic.

Globalization and Environmental Challenges: Reconceptualizing Security in the 21st Century: Still searching for a Christmas gift for that serious reader on your list? Consider this comprehensive 1,148-page volume on the dual challenges of post-Cold War security: globalization and environmental degradation. Edited by Hans Günter Brauch, the book contains an unusual section examining security’s philosophical, ethical, and religious contexts, as well as more traditional sections on theories of security and the relationships between environment, security, peace, and development. You can see the table of contents here.

Landon Lecture (Kansas State University): U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently called for a significant expansion of the United States’ non-military instruments of power. “What is clear to me is that there is a need for a dramatic increase in spending on the civilian instruments of national security—diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action, and economic reconstruction and development….We must focus our energies beyond the guns and steel of the military, beyond just our brave soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen. We must also focus our energies on the other elements of national power that will be so crucial in the coming years,” said Gates.

“Global climate change, war, and population decline in recent human history”: Lead authors David Zhang and Peter Brecke argue that during the pre-industrial era, climate change was frequently responsible for war, famine, and population decline. “The findings [of our analysis] suggest that worldwide and synchronistic war-peace, population, and price cycles in recent centuries have been driven mainly by long-term climate change,” write the authors in this article, which was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“War and the Environment”: This month’s World Watch Magazine cover story explores the ecological effects of violent conflicts around the world. “Several recent wars in varied environments and different parts of the world reveal that the ecological consequences of war often remain written in the landscape for many years. But the story is not always straightforward or clear. Instead, the landscape is like a palimpsest—a parchment written on, scraped clean, and then written over again—on which the ecological effects of war may be overlain by postwar regeneration or development,” writes Sarah Deweerdt.

UN World Youth Report 2007: According to this report, opportunities for the 1.2 billion young people aged 15-24 have expanded in recent years. However, this cohort, especially in developing countries, still faces significant challenges, including overcoming poverty and attaining adequate education and health care.

Henrik Urdal, a senior researcher at the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO), spent several weeks at the Woodrow Wilson Center this autumn as a visiting fellow. At PRIO, Urdal researches the relationships between demography and armed conflict, focusing particularly on population pressure on natural resources. ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko sat down with Urdal to discuss his current research interests, including the implications of a rapidly urbanizing global populace, sub-national demographic trends in India, and the extraordinary Iranian fertility decline.

Climate change could increase instability in the Middle East, says “Climate Change: A New Threat to Middle East Security,” a new report by Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME). Written in preparation for this month’s UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, the report focuses on how climate change could harm the region’s already-scarce water supply. Climate change’s likely impacts on water in the Middle East include reduced precipitation and resulting water shortages; more frequent extreme weather events, such as droughts and floods; and rising sea levels.

ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko and I recently attended “Population, Health, and Environment: Integrated Development for East Africa,” a conference held in November in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The conference was attended by more than 200 development practitioners from around the world, including many from Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

Throughout the conference, organizers, presenters, and participants all professed the many benefits of integrating population, health, and environment (PHE) initiatives. President Girma Wolde-Giorgis and Ethiopia’s ministers of health, environment, and agriculture and rural development opened the conference by praising the comprehensive basket of services that PHE offers. All that said, perhaps the best evidence that this conference was a success, and that PHE’s integrated approach is both necessary and valued in countries like Ethiopia, came in comments from Glenn Anders, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Ethiopia Mission Director, during the closing ceremony:

I myself have been in development for over 25 years. I know first-hand the challenges that arise from addressing a development issue as one problem with one cause and one solution. Sometimes it might seem like a more simple approach, but we know that development—and life—is much more multi-faceted and complex. The only way to find a common ground, common solution, and common funding is to recognize the interconnectedness between people and their surrounding environment.

Integrated programs touch more lives, improve program efficiency, and strengthen cross-sectoral collaboration. We see better, measurable results from an integrated approach, and that is something we certainly all want …

Let me share with you how USAID in Ethiopia is utilizing this holistic approach. We support the government of Ethiopia’s community health extension workers, who work on the ground in communities addressing much more than just health. There have been over 18,000 workers deployed to date across the country. All of the community health workers are women and they are empowered to educate their neighbors. The workers are immunizing children and providing family planning services in the community. The program is also improving water and sanitation, introducing clean water and hygiene practices. The community health extension workers in Ethiopia are combining development solutions to address environment, health, population, and gender issues. We applaud Ethiopia’s vision to prioritize this program, and we will continue to support its implementation.

As I wrote in my previous post, it is rare that a conference galvanizes such momentum and captures the imagination of so many people from so many countries. It’s good to know that policymakers are listening.