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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. -
Princeton Project Outlines New National Security Strategy
›March 29, 2007 // By Sean PeoplesAcademics and policymakers alike appreciate the complexity of new threats to national security like non-state actors and global terror networks. But a report released in September 2006 by the Princeton Project on National Security (PPNS) warns that ignoring unfashionable, but long-established geopolitical threats can endanger U.S. foreign policy. Billed as a bipartisan initiative, PPNS is ultimately an academic affair, with members of its group including such luminaries as Francis Fukuyama, G. John Ikenberry, Laurie Garrett, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Tod Lindberg, and Walter Russell Mead, among many others. The initiative engaged these experts to develop a basic framework of principle threats to U.S. national security and potential responses.
The old and new geopolitical dynamics are worth elucidating, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, gives us something to consider:“Old geopolitics has not gone away. China and Asia are rising rapidly, industrially, and economically. However, we are now just as threatened by the inability of governments to address terrorists within their country, prevent spread of disease and take care of the environment.”
The report cites energy independence and increased consumption as the dominant new challenges, particularly as U.S. consumption of oil increases, and in turn increases our dependence on foreign nations (featuring a who’s-who along the continuum of unpredictability). Rightly, the report supports incentives for energy alternatives. It also supports a gasoline tax and stricter fuel efficiency standards as ways to promote smarter approaches to increasing climatic changes.
Promoting these changes is a good start, but convincing policymakers to adopt them may be a greater challenge. -
Seeing is Believing: Environment, Population, and Security in Ethiopia
›March 27, 2007 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoThe vista of Ethiopia’s ancient Rift Valley, speckled with shimmering lakes, stretches before me as our motorized caravan heads south from Lake Langano, part of a study tour on population- health-environment issues organized by the Packard Foundation. Sadly, the country’s unrelenting poverty and insecurity are as breathtaking as the view—Ethiopia currently ranks 170 out of 177 countries on the UN Development Programme’s Human Development Index. These numbers become quite personal when child after child sprints alongside the truck, looking for any morsel. Here, I don’t need to read between the lines of endless reports to see the country’s severe population, health, and environment challenges—they are visible in the protruding ribcages of the cattle and the barren eroding terraces in the nation’s rural highlands.
When analyzing environment, conflict, and cooperation, scholars and practitioners most often focus on organized violence where people die at the business end of a gun. We commonly set aside “little c” conflict where the violence is not organized. However, while the Ethiopian troops fighting the Islamic Courts in Somalia garner the most attention, we should not miss the quieter—yet often more lethal—conflicts. For example, Ethiopia, like much of the Horn of Africa, continues to be beset by pastoralist/farmer conflicts over its shrinking resource base—increasingly exacerbated by population growth, environmental degradation, and likely climate change. In today’s globalized world, these local conflicts may also have larger “neighborhood” effects, contributing to wars and humanitarian disasters, as in Sudan’s Darfur region.
Another classic example of local environmental conflict lies in Ethiopia’s national parks, which successive governments carved from inhabited land in the mid-1960s and 1970s. Those disadvantaged by the parks often took their revenge on the state by burning buildings, cutting trees, and hunting wildlife. Some resettled the parks, bringing cattle and cultivating sorghum. This conflict presents a terrible dilemma, but also an opportunity: if the government and its partners can offer residents secure livelihoods tied to sound environmental practices, “parks versus people” might be transformed into “peace parks.”
These intertwined environment-population-security challenges are daunting and sometimes difficult to grasp. Driving past mile after mile of Ethiopia’s treeless “forests” gave me a dramatic snapshot of the scope of the problem. While no weapons were evident, I could see that the lack of sustainable livelihoods produces plenty of casualties without a single shot. Despite these sobering sights, the people I met gave me hope—particularly the energy and imagination of a small farmers’ support group outside Addis Ababa. With some initial technical assistance from the Ethiopian NGO LEM and the Packard Foundation, this 32-member group is undertaking reforestation projects, producing honey as an alternative livelihood strategy, providing health and family planning services, and employing a more sustainable farming strategy. More efforts like these—and better awareness and promotion of them—could help turn deadly environments into safe, sustainable neighborhoods. -
Climate Change and Non-Pro: One of These Things is Not Like the Other
›March 27, 2007 // By Alison WilliamsWhat do climate change and non-proliferation have in common? Not much, Carnegie Endowment President Jessica Mathews said yesterday at a remarkably frank and insightful discussion at the Wilson Center. Yet climate change and non-proliferation are often lumped together as the “ultimate global issues” and approached similarly, she said:“With non-proliferation, the world is vulnerable to the smallest, poorest, most miserable country on the planet—North Korea.… Climate change is totally different. There are really only seven political actors that matter, and only two that really matter.”
Those two, of course, are the United States and China, whose combined carbon emissions add up to 39 percent of the world’s total. Given this fact, Mathews believes the solution to climate change is anything but global. It is incumbent upon the biggest emitters to take the first steps. With them in the lead, the world will follow suit, she thinks. But without them, no real change can occur.
In contrast, United Nations Foundation Senior Fellow Mohamed El-Ashry argued for a more diplomatic track, in which the United Nations would harness its convening power to bring the necessary parties to the table. The skeptic in me wonders whether the UN has this much power. El-Ashry himself, when asked whether UNEP would have more authority if it were upgraded to the status of an agency, said, “You wake up one morning and think of your cat as a tiger, but it is still a cat.”
The UN is a bit of a cat itself right now. Does it have the credibility, legitimacy, or sway to bring all the necessary actors to the table? I’m not so sure. And the former U.S. Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, certainly didn’t help. The man did once say that the United Nations does not exist, and that “there is only the international community, which can only be led by the only remaining superpower, which is the United States.”
Whether the solution should be global or local, yesterday’s debate was utterly refreshing. Representatives from the U.S. Department of State, EPA, and other organizations were on hand to debate the relative merits of multilateral and bilateral agreements, unilateral action, and global commitment. While little may have been resolved, this was the sort of open and honest dialogue about climate change that we hope to see more of. Take the time to watch the webcast. -
Environment, Population, Conflict Scholar to Washington
›March 26, 2007 // By Geoffrey D. DabelkoThose of you following the new analysis of environment, conflict, and security will know Dr. Colin Kahl’s work, principally his 2006 book States, Scarcity, and Civil Strife in the Developing World. Those of us in the Washington, DC area were pleased to learn recently that Colin will take up an appointment this fall at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program in the School of Foreign Service. He has been a regular writer and speaker for the Environmental Change and Security Program.
Using Kenya and the Philippines as cases, Colin has pushed ahead our understanding of environmental scarcity and conflict links in a number of ways. He showed how top-down exploitation of environment and population linkages pitting one group against another (Moi in Kenya) must be added to our traditional conceptions of bottom-up grievance-based causal connections. He proposed a notion of “groupness” to explain why Moi in the early 1990s was able to use environmental (land) and population concerns to stir up violence in rural areas where tribal affiliations were stronger while lower levels of tribal affiliations or “groupness” in urban areas meant that violent conflict was largely absent between the same groups. Colin also presents a strong critique of the alleged “scarcity versus abundance” dichotomy when explaining resource connections to conflict. His review of Paul Collier et al’s oft-cited treatise on the abundance side of the ledger forcefully argues for viewing scarcity versus abundance as a false dichotomy while taking to task Collier’s operationalization of abundance.
Perhaps a bit of insider baseball but let me just urge those interested in really understanding these links to check out Colin’s work and say those of us working in DC welcome the opportunity to call on him as a local. -
Climate Change Possible Culprit of Darfur Crisis
›March 15, 2007 // By Karen BencalaWhile the crisis in Darfur is often characterized as an ethnically motivated genocide, Stephan Faris argues in April’s Atlantic Monthly (available online to subscribers only) that the true cause may be climate change. Severe land degradation in the region has been blamed on poor land use practices by farmers and herders, but new climate models indicate that warming ocean temperatures are the culprit behind the loss of fertile land.
Faris says:“Given the particular pattern of ocean-temperature changes worldwide, the models strongly predicted a disruption in African monsoons. ‘This was not caused by people cutting trees or overgrazing,’ says Columbia University’s Alessandra Giannini, who led one of the analyses.”
Furthermore, Faris points out that the violence is not necessarily merely between Arabs and blacks, but between farmers (largely black Africans) and herders (largely Arabs). Historically, the two groups shared the fertile land. Now, however, farmers—who once allowed herders to pass through their land and drink from their wells—are constructing fences and fighting to maintain their way of life on the diminished amount of productive land.
If climate change is the real cause of the conflict, Faris concludes, the solution must account for this reality and address the environmental crisis in order to make peace. And he calls on all of us to accept some of the blame for the crisis:“If the region’s collapse was in some part caused by the emissions from our factories, power plants, and automobiles, we bear some responsibility for the dying. ‘This changes us from the position of Good Samaritans—disinterested, uninvolved people who may feel a moral obligation—to a position where we, unconsciously and without malice, created the conditions that led to this crisis,’ says Michael Byers, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia. ‘We cannot stand by and look at it as a situation of discretionary involvement. We are already involved.’”
That said however, researchers at the African Centre for Technology Studies an international policy research organization based in Nairobi, Kenya, say that while environmental changes have decreased agricultural production, these problems must be examined within the wider context of a long history of discrimination and governance problems: “The legacies of colonialism, political discrimination, and lack of adequate governance in Darfur should not be underestimated in favor of an environmental explanation-particularly as it serves the interests of some actors to use environmental change as a non-political scapegoat for conflict.” (forthcoming ECSP Report 12)
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