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 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.

“The impact of climate change is going to be most likely so harmful that it would threaten governments,” said 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner and chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Rajendra K. Pachauri in an interview with Reuters earlier this week. Pachauri focused his remarks on Africa, whose one billion people are among the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change and whose governments frequently lack the capacity to adapt to the impending changes.

“If the situation in Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world, then if the world has a conscience it has to remove that scar,” Pachauri said. While a number of high-profile conflicts in Africa’s recent history have revolved around natural resources, Pachauri warned that environmental change could soon eclipse the so-called “resource curse” as a driver of conflict, citing research predicting that by 2020, climate change could leave between 75 million and 250 million additional Africans without access to water and could reduce the yields of farmers who depend on rain-fed agriculture by half. “Climate change has the potential to be a problem for the maintenance of peace,” he said.

The rapidly worsening global food crisis has hit certain parts of Africa particularly hard—instigating riots in Egypt and Burkina Faso, for example—and with food and water becoming increasingly precious commodities, dire outcomes seem increasingly likely. “The answer,” Pachauri said, “is for developed nations to realize that we are living on one planet. We are all inhabitants of spaceship earth.” But, he conceded, “we are nowhere close yet.”

Meeting with world economic ministers in Washington, DC, this past weekend, International Monetary Fund (IMF) Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said that IMF and World Bank officials “now need to devote 100 percent of our time” to ensuring political and democratic stability in the countries hit hardest by the global spike in food prices. He added that development gains made in the last five or ten years are in danger of being “totally destroyed.” Recent unrest in a number of developing countries—including Haiti, where the president was ousted last week, partially due to anger over food prices—underlines the urgency of this crisis.

Asian countries like the Philippines and Vietnam, which have spent the last decade working to strengthen their economies, may see their significant gains erased under this new economic strain. And they may be among the relatively lucky countries, with government ministries in place to provide subsidies and shield their populations from the worst effects of sky-high prices. In contrast, many sub-Saharan African countries have no safety net beyond reliance on international organizations like the World Food Program.

In many developing countries, where families typically spend between half and three-quarters of their total budget on food, World Bank President Robert Zoellick says that there “is no margin for survival.” Citizens in developing nations may abide corrupt governments while they are at least marginally able to feed their families, but when even that becomes impossible, “normally passive citizens can very quickly become militants with nothing to lose,” reports Time magazine. “What Haiti’s riots show,” argued an op-ed in the Jamaica Gleaner, “is that there cannot be a secure democracy without food security.”

The Brookings Institution recently released the Index of State Weakness in the Developing World, which finds that extreme poverty and recent experience with conflict correlate strongly with state weakness or failure. Topping the index are Somalia, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Iraq, all current or recent hosts to severe conflict. The report, co-authored by Brookings Senior Fellow Susan E. Rice and Center for Global Development (CGD) Research Fellow Stewart Patrick, is intended to serve as a tool for policymakers.

Rather than focusing exclusively on a single measure of performance or attempting to sharpen the often-murky distinction between “effectiveness” and “legitimacy,” as many rankings do, Rice and Patrick evaluate every developing country across 20 indicators—each a proxy for a core state function—in four “baskets” of government performance (economic, political, security, and social welfare).

Eight countries appear in the top (i.e., worst) 10 of both the Brookings index and the well-known Failed States Index published annually in Foreign Policy magazine. However, Rice and Patrick employ—uniquely, they say—fully transparent metrics, introduce policy prescriptions, and assess a broader-than-usual swath of government performance in the hopes of creating a more precise and practical description of current circumstances.

Since September 11, 2001, the security community has paid increasing attention to the threats that weak or failed states pose to the United States. The 2002 National Security Strategy asserted that weak and failing states “pose as great a danger to our national interest as strong states.” A 2004 Christian Science Monitor op-ed by two CGD experts on weak states declared that “where poor states lose control, it’s often Americans who pay the price.” Weak or failed states are susceptible to “a host of transnational security threats,” argue Rice and Patrick, “including terrorism, weapons proliferation, organized crime, infectious disease, environmental degradation, and civil conflicts that spill over borders.”

Tucked in with the report’s policy implications is a recommendation that the United States support multi-sector aid programs that simultaneously address security issues and other drivers of state weakness, including lack of access to water and sanitation. The Environmental Change and Security Program recently hosted a panel discussion exploring the efficacy of a multi-sector approach to development.

Indigenous groups from 11 countries met in Manaus, Brazil, last week to develop a plan by which developing countries would be compensated for preserving designated forested areas. The plan, officially known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), could be an important step in distributing both the costs and benefits of tropical forest preservation. It could be a significant boon to indigenous peoples, especially in the Amazon, where native groups have permanent rights to 21 percent of the territory—some 49 million acres. An international carbon-trading plan has been on the table since last year’s climate conference in Bali, and this recent meeting demonstrates indigenous peoples’ commitment to keeping their collective knowledge, voice, and needs on the table.

The vast experience of indigenous people in adapting to changing climates “will not be sufficient—they also need better access to other information and tools,” says Gonzalo Oviedo, a contributing author for the IUCN report Indigenous and Traditional Peoples and Climate. Indigenous groups are often most vulnerable to climate change’s impacts, but their expertise in adapting to climate change has long been overlooked by policymakers. These oversights could prove disastrous, the report warns, as the adverse effects of climate change may overwhelm their capacity to adapt, especially given the marginalization of many indigenous communities. The report describes an “urgent need to help indigenous peoples living in tropical forests to prepare for different climate change scenarios.”

Indigenous groups have already seen the effects of climate change. The frequency of forest fires has increased in Borneo, the Congo basin, and vast tracts of the Southern Amazon basin, while indigenous communities in the Arctic have been affected by changes in the “migration patterns, health, and range of animals” on which they depend for their livelihoods. The IUCN report cautions that while plans like REDD are steps in the right direction, they may benefit corporations and large landowners as much as or more than indigenous peoples.

To address the heavy burdens that climate change will place on indigenous communities, the report makes a number of recommendations, including:

• Actively involving indigenous communities in formulating policies to protect their rights and entitlements;
• Supporting further research of the impacts of climate change on vulnerable cultures;
• Promoting collaboration between indigenous peoples and scientists; and
• Raising awareness of traditional adaptation and mitigation strategies.

“Washington must awaken to the broader economic and security implications of climate change,” writes Scott G. Borgerson, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former lieutenant commander in the U.S. Coast Guard, in an article in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs that explores the consequences of a melting Arctic. “Being green,” emphasizes Borgerson, “is no longer a slogan just for Greenpeace supporters and campus activists; foreign policy hawks must also view the environment as part of the national security calculus.”

“Images of overpopulation tend to reinforce racist stereotypes of the world’s poorest people, demonizing those who are the least responsible for global warming” and obscuring important questions about how well family planning and other policies actually combat climate change, argued Hampshire College professor Betsy Hartmann in a lively roundtable discussion on population and climate change hosted by The Bulletin Online.

Because one-third of all pregnancies are unwanted, and because some 200 million women desire family planning services but lack access to them, contributor Frederick A.B. Meyerson, an ecologist at the University of Rhode Island, argued that policies to reduce unwanted pregnancy must be a chief global priority. He called for the international community to “restore the goal of universal access to family planning as a top-tier priority, to protect both the climate and human wellbeing.”

Joseph Chamie, research director for the Center for Migration Studies, called this a “delay tactic” that would do little to slow climate change, and said the international community should instead focus on decreasing consumption in the developed world, noting that the average American creates nearly 20 times as much carbon dioxide as the average Indian. He added that the 200 million women Meyerson mentioned live primarily in regions of Africa and Asia where per capita emissions are so low that changes in fertility will have negligible impact on climate. Increasing access to voluntary family planning services could have greater effects in India or China, he said, where economic development has resulted in continually increasing per capita emissions levels.

John Guillebaud, emeritus professor at University College London, and Martin Desvaux, trustee of the Optimum Population Trust, resisted Chamie’s assertion, writing, “It’s not difficult to understand that one less person born into poverty is one less person who needs to be helped out of poverty—a development process that cannot occur without increased energy consumption and (in the medium term) more carbon-dioxide emissions per person.” They wondered whether the international community would be better off focusing on reducing absolute emissions or providing for a more equitable distribution of emissions by reducing it in more-developed areas and allowing it to increase in less-developed areas as a result of improved standards of living.

Pointing out that some credit smaller landholdings (the result of a growing population) with higher investment in soil conservation and better-managed tree densities in Rwanda, Hartmann highlighted the complexity in forecasting the consequences of population growth. Seemingly counterintuitive findings like this one pepper the debate, encouraging us to carefully analyze the mathematical models and projections we rely on.