In the annual threat assessment he presented last week to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, new Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair named the global economic crisis—not terrorism—the primary near-term threat to U.S. national security, prompting accusations of partisanship from the Washington Times. Yet as the U.S. Naval War College’s Derek Reveron notes, “the economic turmoil of the early 20th century fueled global instability and war,” and today’s economic collapse could strengthen extremists and deprive U.S. allies of the funds they need to deploy troops or increase foreign assistance to vulnerable regions.

Further down the list of potential catastrophes—after terrorism, cybersecurity, and the “arc of instability” that stretches from the Middle East to South Asia—the assessment tackles environmental security threats. The four-page section, which likely draws on sections of the recent National Intelligence Council report Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, summarizes the interrelated natural-resource and population challenges—including energy, food, water, demography, climate change, and global health—the U.S. intelligence community is tracking.

The world will face mounting resource scarcity, warns Blair. “Access to relatively secure and clean energy sources and management of chronic food and water shortages will assume increasing importance for a growing number of countries. Adding well over a billion people to the world’s population by 2025 will itself put pressure on these vital resources,” he writes.

Drawing on the conclusions of the 2008 National Intelligence Assessment on the impacts of global climate change to 2030, Blair portrays climate change as a variable that could place additional strain on already-stressed agricultural, energy, and water systems: “We assess climate change alone is unlikely to trigger state failure in any state out to 2030, but the impacts will worsen existing problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions.” Direct impacts to the United States include “warming temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns, and possible increases in the severity of storms in the Gulf, increased demand for energy resources, disruptions in US and Arctic infrastructure, and increases in immigration from resource-scarce regions of the world,” writes Blair.

Africa, as usual, is the last of the world’s regions to be analyzed in the assessment. Blair notes that “a shortage of skilled medical personnel, deteriorating health systems, and inadequate budgets to deal with diseases like HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis” is threatening stability in sub-Saharan Africa, and explains that agriculture, which he rightly calls “the foundation of most African economies,” is not yet self-sufficient, although some countries have made significant improvements in infrastructure and technology. He highlights ongoing conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Sudan, and Somalia as the most serious security challenges in Africa. He fails to note, however, that all four have environmental/natural resource dimensions (see above links for details).

Conflicts among pastoralists over water and land have increased in drought-stricken northeastern Kenya, reports IRIN News.

Country for Sale, a report by Global Witness, alleges that Cambodia’s oil, gas, and mineral industries are highly corrupt.

Foreign Policy features an interview with General William “Kip” Ward, the commander of the new U.S. Africa Command. The New Security Beat covered General Ward’s recent comments on civilian-military cooperation.

Healthy Familes, Healthy Forests: Improving Human Health and Biodiversity Conservation details Conservation International’s integrated population-health-environment projects in Cambodia, Madagascar, and the Philippines.

Double Jeopardy: What the Climate Crisis Means for the Poor, a new report on climate change and poverty alleviation, synthesizes insights from an August 2008 roundtable convened by Richard C. Blum and the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development Program at the Aspen Institute.

“Although the long-term implications of climate change and the retreating ice cap in the Arctic are still unclear, what is very clear is that the High North is going to require even more of the Alliance’s attention in the coming years,” said NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer at a seminar on security prospects in the High North hosted by the Icelandic government in Reykjavik.

“I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It is the ghost at the table. We have all these big issues that everybody is looking at and then you don’t really hear anyone say the “p” word,” says UK Sustainable Development Commission Chair Jonathon Porrit, speaking about population’s impact on the environment. Porrit has drawn criticism for his remarks.

A local priest has warned that a Norwegian company’s proposed nickel mines will threaten food security on the Philippine island of Mindoro.

Critics have warned that the new unified U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) could threaten the sovereignty of African nations and encroach on the portfolios of other U.S. agencies like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). But in an interview with USAID newsletter FrontLines, General William E. “Kip” Ward, head of AFRICOM, went out of his way to dispel these fears. Some of the most interesting parts of the interview:

On AFRICOM’s humanitarian efforts:

“We know that our piece is only a very small part of the totality of humanitarian assistance that’s being performed by USAID and other agencies. We would not look to take those roles over.”

On civilian-military cooperation:

“We are learning to understand one another better and truly, as [USAID] Administrator [Henrietta] Fore and [Defense] Secretary [Robert] Gates said, we are seeing with greater clarity the importance of all these efforts working as cohesively together as they can. Security and development go hand-in-hand to produce stability that we all seek.”

On coordinating with USAID and host countries:

“We would get involved where those development projects complemented the work being done by developmental agencies, USAID, in very close coordination with the country team, the ambassador, and representatives from USAID that are there on the ground. We want to ensure that we don’t do things that conflict with the work being done by others. This might include a school being built so we can complement each other’s efforts. Or, at the request of a country, we might conduct an exercise and we may need to build a road to get to a training area. And if building the road in one place or another could help the population, then we would look to work with the country team and the ambassador so it provides benefits to the population.”

Photo: Comoran Defense Chief of Staff Salimou Mohamed Amiri (left) talks with General William E. Ward, commander of U.S. Africa Command (right), on January 21, 2009. Ward met with Comoran government officials as part of his first official visit to the island nation. Courtesy of by Kenneth Fidler, U.S. Africa Command.

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Ten years of negotiations over a new pact governing the use of the Nile River have come to a halt, due to Egyptian and Sudanese reluctance to relinquish their near-total control over the distribution of water resources. “The technocrats had worked out all the paper work for a good protocol but the politicians have thrown a clean piece of cloth in the mud,” Professor Afuna Aduula, chair of the Nile Basin Discourse Forum, told IPS News. “Since Egypt must consent to other nations’ use of the Nile’s water, most of the other basin countries have not developed projects that use it extensively. Not surprisingly, over the years other basin countries have contested the validity of these treaties and demanded their revocation to make way for a more equitable system of management,” explains Patricia Kameri-Mbote in “Water, Conflict, and Cooperation: Lessons From the Nile River Basin.” Decreasing water levels in Lake Victoria, the Nile’s source, have also added to upstream countries’ concerns about water allocation.

Despite the political tensions between many of the 10 Nile Basin riparians—which also include Burundi, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda—and the critical importance of water to agriculture, health, and economic growth, analysts think it is unlikely that tensions over water will lead to war. All 10 countries belong to the Nile Basin Initiative, a ministerial-level body that has conducted the negotiations, as well as other cooperative and confidence-building measures. “While formally framed as a development enterprise, these efforts also implicitly serve as a means to prevent conflict predicated on environmental interdependence,” notes ECSP Director Geoff Dabelko in “An Uncommon Peace: Environment, Development, and the Global Security Agenda.”

Photo: Satellite image of the northern Nile River. Courtesy of Flickr user thevoyager.

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“The countries in which terrorism could gain a foothold contain vast areas that are poverty-stricken and lawless. The common denominator within these areas is the absence of human security for the local population,” argues Major John Bellflower in “The Soft Side of Airpower” in the Small Wars Journal. “[A]dopting a human security paradigm as a counterinsurgency strategy could generate positive effects in the war on terror, particularly within AFRICOM,” and the Air Force could play a significant role in bringing human security to vulnerable populations, he claims.

When we picture the Air Force as an instrument of soft power, we tend to think of planes airlifting humanitarian aid into impoverished or disaster-stricken areas. But Bellflower argues that the Air Force could also help fulfill the longer-term health, food, economic, environmental, and community aspects of human security. For instance, the Air Force currently provides short-term health care in Africa through MEDFLAG, a biannual medical exercise. Bellflower suggests MEDFLAG “could be expanded to include a larger, centrally located field hospital unit that could serve a number of dispersed clinics.”

Bellflower also advocates deploying the Air Force’s Rapid Engineer Deployable Heavy Operational Repair Squadron Engineers (REDHORSE) into impoverished, unstable areas to build airstrips, drill wells, and employ local labor to construct “clinics, schools, police stations, community centers, or whatever is needed for a particular area. Additionally, these units could repair existing facilities to allow electricity, water, and other needed life support systems to become functional or construct earthen dams or the like to protect against natural disaster and meet environmental security needs.” Employing young men to build this infrastructure “results in a lower chance of these individuals succumbing to the lure of terrorist group recruiting tactics,” asserts Bellflower.

Bellflower joins a growing cadre of academics and practitioners arguing that the Department of Defense (DoD) should be more involved in peacebuilding and international development. He makes an original contribution in detailing how the Air Force—typically viewed as the most hands-off branch of the armed forces—could help stabilize poor, volatile regions. Yet his vision would likely attract objections from both sides. Many humanitarian aid groups would resist what they view as DoD’s repeated incursions into an area in which it lacks expertise and has ulterior (i.e., national security) motives. On the other side, many military personnel would view this as an example of mission creep, and would hesitate to send soldiers into risky areas simply for humanitarian reasons.

Photo: A U.S. Air Force Europe airman from the 793rd Air Mobility Squadron moves humanitarian supplies into position for loading in support of the humanitarian mission to Georgia in August 2008. Photo courtesy of Captain Bryan Woods, 21st TSC Public Affairs, and Flickr user heraldpost.

“Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said that there can be no development without security—and no security without development,” says the miniAtlas of Human Security, a global atlas illustrating international and civil conflicts, as well as human rights abuses. The atlas explains that human security comprises the broader pillar of freedom from want (for basic necessities like food, water, shelter, education, employment, and health care) and the narrower pillar of freedom from violence. Although freedom from want is vital to sustainable development and long-term security, the atlas only maps instances where freedom from violence has been marred by inter- or intrastate conflict.

While the atlas openly admits its exclusion of the broader pillar of human security—which notably includes environmental issues—it nevertheless misses the opportunity to acknowledge that the environment can span both pillars of human security. Though the atlas notes that the environment can be used as a weapon of violence—by poisoning wells, for instance—it never explains the role of the environment as a cause of violent conflict—in land disputes, local conflicts over water, or by spurring climate change-induced migration.

The authors of the miniAtlas of Human Security argue that today, most violent conflicts are rooted in poverty and politics. “Poor countries, unlike rich ones, lack the resources to address the grievances that can spark armed uprisings,” the report explains, and “poor countries tend to have weak security forces and so find it difficult to deter rebellions and to crush those that cannot be deterred.” In addition, dictatorships and “anocracies—regimes that are neither dictatorships nor full democracies—are the most prone to armed conflict” and human rights abuses. Though generally speaking, both of these statements are true, there are other causes of violent conflict that are just as important and have serious implications for human security.

For instance, the environment has helped spark conflict in many parts of the world. Competition over natural resources—whether diamonds in Angola and Sierra Leone, timber in Liberia, or coltan in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo—has been a source of violent conflict between warlords, governments, and civilian populations. Getting policymakers to recognize that the environment is a cause of violent conflict is an essential step to preventing conflict, as well as conducting successful post-conflict environmental and disaster management. Until we recognize that the environment can increase the risk of violence, global security itself will suffer.

Photo: The Zambezi (Chobe) River borders eight African states: Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In an effort to improve governance and prevent violent conflict from erupting, these eight states are working for the establishment of a commission to govern this vital water resource. Courtesy of Flickr user Mara 1.

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From climate change to coltan, poverty to population, and water to war: These are the 10 most popular New Security Beat stories of the year. Thanks for your clicks, and we’ll see you in 2009!

1. Desertification Threatening China’s Human, Economic Health

2. PODCAST – Climate Change and National Security: A Discussion with Joshua Busby, Part 1

3. In the Philippines, High Birth Rates, Pervasive Poverty Are Linked

4. Climate Change Threatens Middle East, Warns Report

5. Population, Health, Environment in Ethiopia: “Now I know my family is too big”

6. Guest Contributor Colin Kahl on Kenya’s Ethnic Land Strife

7. Coltan, Cell Phones, and Conflict: The War Economy of the DRC

8. “Bahala na”? Population Growth Brings Water Crisis to the Philippines

9. Population Reference Bureau Releases 2008 World Population Data Sheet

10. Guest Contributor Sharon Burke on Climate Change and Security

Zimbabwe’s current cholera epidemic has killed more than 1,100 people and sickened nearly 24,000, prompting the United States, the United Kingdom, and some African nations to press for sanctions on—and the resignation of—President Robert Mugabe. The impoverished country ranks 151 out of 177 on the UN Human Development Index and has an average life expectancy of 34 for women and 37 for men. Although it has suffered yearly cholera outbreaks since 1998, this year’s epidemic dwarfs previous ones. The epidemic is being aggravated by severe food shortages and the country’s high prevalence of HIV/AIDS, and is expected to continue through the end of the rainy season in March.