Thursday, July 07, 2011

"When the Pentagon and Greenpeace are on the same page, you know things are getting serious."

"Picture a map of the world. Picture the areas we’re most concerned about; where poverty, instability, and conflict meet. Parts of the Middle East and North Africa. Pockets of sub-Saharan Africa. Delicate borders on the Asian subcontinent. Now picture the areas where climate change will strike hardest. The overlap is uncanny – and unnerving."
Chris Huhne, UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, gave an speech today in which he pointed out the systemic nature of the threats posed by climate change. Rather than directly causing problems, climate change exacerbates existing threats, making food more difficult to grow, water more difficult to distribute, public health more difficult to manage, infrastructure and lives more vulnerable to extreme weather events and, crucially, where tensions already exist in the geopolitical system, generally taking us closer to violence. It was not a ground-breaking address, but summarises why climate change is not "just" an environmental problem.

Huhne concludes with these words:
"Desperate people take desperate measures. Instability is now a national problem; soon it will be a regional one. Migrants surge outwards, searching for survival.

"This is the nightmare scenario. Yet it is already tragically familiar. We have already seen civil wars compounded by water stress, in Darfur. Regional conflicts fuelled by resources in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Food prices prompting riots in Bangladesh.

"Climate change is the force that threatens to unify and magnify these pressures. It will focus and concentrate existing tensions, fracturing states and destroying societies. So far, we have not done enough to stop it. We still have time to mobilise: but that time is rapidly running out. Doing nothing is not an option."
Full speech available here.

7 comments:

byron smith said...

CP: Prevention is cheaper than cure - at least when it comes to wars. Why the Pentagon is going green(er).

byron smith said...

Centre for a New American Security: Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change (2007). A report that imagines the geopolitical implications of three plausible climate scenarios (mild, bad and catastrophic).

byron smith said...

DailyClimate: Military sees threats in climate change.

byron smith said...

US DoD maps future climate turmoil in Africa.

""The CCAPS program sought to identify which areas in Africa are most vulnerable to climate change--and why--at the most detailed scale possible," according to the program’s researchers (PDF). "It is not enough to say ‘Ethiopia is vulnerable’ without explaining which parts of Ethiopia are particularly vulnerable and why."

"The program visualizes multiple dimensions of climate vulnerability and risks in a single map. Data about conflicts, aid, governance, and climate are overlaid to give a dynamic view of the continent’s risk factors,"

byron smith said...

Guardian: New US security report again places climate change as major threat to geopolitical stability.

byron smith said...

Colin Butler et. al. on climate-related instability and public health.

byron smith said...

Guardian: Fight climate change for global stability, say US defence and diplomacy elite.