Climate of risk: climate warming demands fresh thinking about security policy.

AuthorRenner, Michael

Climate change may very well be the biggest challenge our civilization has ever faced. Left unaddressed, the effects on natural systems, biodiversity, food security, and habitability will likely be calamitous and the economic penalties severe.

And in the absence of increased cooperation, runaway climate change may well trigger a whole new age of conflict. We live, after all, in a world marked by profound inequalities, unresolved grievances, and tremendous disparities of power. Ruled by competitive nation-states and rootless global corporations, our planet bristles with arms of all calibers. Under such circumstances, the additional stress imposed by climate change could have tremendous repercussions for human well-being, safety, and security.

Nations around the world, but particularly the weakest countries and communities, confront a multitude of pressures. Many face a debilitating combination of rising competition for resources, severe environmental breakdown, the resurgence of infectious diseases, poverty and growing wealth disparities, demographic pressures, and joblessness and livelihood insecurity. Climate change is certain to intensify many, if not all, of these challenges. More frequent and intense droughts, floods, and storms will play havoc with harvests and weaken food security. Extreme weather events, sea-level rise, and spreading disease vectors could conceivably undermine the long-term habitability of some areas. Together with reduced economic viability, the result could be escalating social discontent and large-scale involuntary population movements, severely testing national and international institutions. Possible conflict constellations revolve around resource access, natural disaster impacts, and refugee and migrant flows (see figure below).

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RESOURCE ACCESS

Growing depletion and scarcity of fresh water, arable land, and forests could lead to conflicts over access and distribution. Almost one-third of the world's population--estimates vary between 1.4 and 2 billion people--already lives in water-scarce regions (defined as less than 1,000 cubic meters per capita per year). Most affected are swathes of North Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South Asia; parts of China, southeastern Australia, southern Africa, southwestern Latin America; and parts of the U.S. West. Population growth alone will increase the affected number of people. And depending on the climate scenario that comes to pass, an additional 60 million to 1 billion people could be affected by 2050 (while 700 million to 2.8 billion people already affected by water stress now would see their situation worsen).

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The repercussions of climate change for food production--reduced water availability, higher temperatures, greater drought, etc.--will vary enormously from region to region, and some populations may indeed benefit. But a study by scientists at the University of Washington and Stanford University found that half of the world's population could face severe food shortages by the end of this century. In the tropics and subtropics, harvests of rice, corn, and other staples could fall by 20 to 40 percent as a result of higher temperatures alone. And a heightened risk of drought could cause even greater crop losses.

In what is perhaps a preview of a growing scramble for resources, a number of wealthy but food-insecure nations (including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, China, Japan, and South Korea), as well as private investors, have purchased or leased substantial tracts of land abroad, mostly in poor African and Asian countries, in order to produce crops for export. There have been at least 180 such transactions, which have come to be known as "land grabbing," involving somewhere between 15 million and 20 million hectares of farmland. But as the moniker suggests, these deals have also triggered intense fears that they will promote export-oriented monocultures that exploit poor countries, jeopardize food security, and ultimately undermine political stability in "host" countries.

Whether and how rising resource stress translates into conflict is not easy to predict. Different population groups experience the effects of resource depletion and environmental degradation unevenly. These divergences can reinforce existing social and economic inequities or deepen ethnic and political fault lines. Growing hardships may reinforce the perception of a "zero-sum" game. This is especially the case where economies are heavily geared toward agriculture, where large portions of the population are directly dependent on the health of the natural resource base, and where land distribution is highly unequal or otherwise contested.

Farmers and nomadic herders in the Sahel region of Africa, for instance, increasingly clash as droughts and desertification processes intensify, magnifying contradictory needs and interests. The influx of arms has made such strife more deadly in a number of cases. But nowhere has the situation been more severe than in Sudan's Darfur province, where the government has deliberately stoked hostilities among different communities in a cold-blooded strategy designed to suppress a regional insurgency. Darfur suggests that it is not resource and environmental...

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