“Climate change may well be a predominant national security challenge of the 21st century, posing a range of threats to U.S. and international security,” said Sharon Burke, vice president for Natural Security at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Her remarks at a July 21 Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on climate change and security—along with those of two retired vice admirals and former Senator John Warner—amplified the growing chorus of national security experts and military personnel urging Congress to act promptly to address the security implications of climate change.

Vice Admiral Lee Gunn, USN (Ret.), called climate change “a clear and present danger to the United States of America,” while Burke cited a 2007 report from the Center for Naval Analysis that defined climate change as a “threat multiplier.”

Security Link Could Push Senate Climate Bill

Senator John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, scheduled last week’s hearing on climate’s security links in a bid to bolster support for congressional action on climate change, which is currently stalled in the Senate. “Just as 9/11 taught us the painful lesson that oceans could not protect us from terror, today we are deluding ourselves if we believe that climate change will stop at our borders,” he said.

Former Senator John Warner echoed this sentiment, noting that the hearing was an opportunity to “educate the American public on these potential risks to our national security posed by global climate change.”

“Leading military, intelligence, and security experts have publically spoken out that if left unchecked, global warming could increase instability and lead to conflict in already fragile regions of the world. If we ignore these facts, we do so at the peril of our national security and increase the risk to those in uniform who serve our nation,” stated Warner, who recently launched the Pew Project on National Security, Energy, and Climate with the Pew Environment Group.

Pentagon Looks to Reduce Reliance on Oil and Drive Innovation

Burke explained that the phenomenon will not only pose “direct threats to the lives and property of Americans” from wildfires, droughts, flooding, severe storms, the spread of diseases, and mass migrations, but will also have “direct effects on the military,” including problems with infrastructure and the supply chain.

As a massive consumer of energy—110 million barrels of oil and 3.8 billion kilowatts of electricity in 2006 alone—the Pentagon has recognized its vulnerability to disruptions in fossil fuel supplies, as well as its potential to develop alternative technologies. As ClimateWire’s Jessica Leber writes in the New York Times: “The long logistics ‘tail’ that follows troops into the war zone—moving fuel, water and supplies in and waste out—risks lives and diverts major resources from fighting.”

According to Leber, two-thirds of the tonnage in Iraq convoys was fuel and water. To mitigate such vulnerability in the future—not to mention in arid, mountainous Afghanistan—DoD has begun testing ways to turn waste into energy, distribute power through “microgrids,” develop jet fuel from algae, desalinate water using little energy, and purify wastewater on a small scale.

“While the military by itself won’t make a market for plug-in vehicles or algae-based jet fuel,” notes Leber in an earlier ClimateWire article, “its investment power can bump emerging climate-friendly technologies onto a larger commercial stage.”

At the hearing, Burke warned against the possible knock-on effects of switching dependence from fossil fuel to other resources like lithium for lithium-ion batteries in electric cars.

The Military Must Manage Uncertainty

Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, USN (Ret.), a member of the CNA’s Military Advisory Board, dismissed the argument that climate data and projections are too uncertain to form a solid basis for action. “As military professionals,” he told the Senate committee, “we were trained to make decisions in situations defined by ambiguous information and little concrete knowledge of the enemy intent. We based our decisions on trends, experience, and judgment, because waiting for 100% certainty during a crisis can be disastrous, especially one with the huge national security consequences of climate change.”

“The future has a way of humbling those who try to predict it too precisely,” Kerry said at the hearing. “But we do know, from scientists and security experts, that the threat is very real. If we fail to connect the dots—if we fail to take action—the simple, indisputable reality is that we will find ourselves living not only in a ravaged environment, but also in a more dangerous world.”

Photo: A convoy of the U.S. Army’s 515th Transportation Division moves fuel around Baghdad, Iraq. Courtesy Flickr user heraldpost.

MORE

“The natural resources are being depleted at an alarming rate, as population pressures mount in the Arab countries,” says the 2009 Arab Human Development Report, which was published this week by the UN Development Programme. A launch event in Washington, DC, features New York Times columnist Tom Friedman and Wilson Center scholar Robin Wright.

A special issue of IHDP Update focuses on “Human Security in an Era of Global Change,” a synthesis report tied to the recent GECHS conference. Articles by GECHS members, including Karen O’Brien and Alexander Lopez, address water and sanitation, the global financial crisis, poverty, and transborder environmental governance in Latin America.

An op-ed by Stanley Weiss in the New York Times argues that the best way to bring water–and peace–to the Middle East is to ship it from Turkey. A response by Gabriel Eckstein in the International Water Law Project blog argues that “transporting water from Turkey to where it is needed will require negotiations of Herculean proportion.”

CoCooN, a new international program sponsored by The Netherlands on conflict and cooperation over natural resources, recently posted two powerpoint presentations explaining its goals and the matchmaking workshops it will hold in Addis Ababa, Bogota, and Hanoi. The deadline for applications is August 5.

Two new IFPRI research papers focus on the consequences of climate change for poor farmers in Africa and provide policymakers with adaptation strategies. “Economywide Impacts of Climate Change on Agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa” analyzes two possible options for the region. “Soil and Water Conservation Technologies: A Buffer Against Production Risk in the Face of Climate Change?” investigates the impact of different soil and water conservation technologies on the variance of crop production in Ethiopia.

Three people died in the city of Bhopal, in north-central India, in a battle between neighbors for scarce water, The Guardian reported this past week. Fights regularly broke out when the water tankers that serve 100,000 of the city’s residents make their deliveries.

The monsoon this year produced less rain than usual, exacerbating a drought. In addition, the number of people in Bhopal’s slums is growing. “The population has increased, but the water supply is the same,” a local committee chairman told The Guardian.

The northern parts of India were hardest hit, but much of India experienced similar conditions, including the city of Mumbai. Officials there cut water supplies for the city by 30 percent when the levels of the five lakes that serve as Mumbai’s primary sources of water dropped dangerously low.

But while heavy rains in the last few days mostly restored supplies, they also shut down the waterlogged city, reviving fears of 2005’s deadly floods. According to a new book and exhibit by University of Pennsylvania architects, the sprawling city has paved over the mangrove wetlands that protect it from flooding.

Pollution, climate change, population growth, urbanization, and industrialization in the world’s developing countries continue to increase demand for its finite water supplies. Today, 700 million people live in countries experiencing water scarcity or stress; by 2035, that figure is expected to have reached 3 billion people, or almost half of the world’s population. Asia, with 60% of the world’s population but only 36% of the world’s freshwater, will be particularly hard hit.

The problems vary across South Asia. The rivers around Dhaka, Bangladesh, are so polluted from industrial dumping that specialists are saying the situation is beyond repair. Lack of access to clean water and knowledge about hygienic sanitation practices leads to thousands of preventable deaths from diarrhea every year in Nepal. In Karachi, Pakistan, stealing public water out of pipes and tankers is a $500 million industry, “a mark of the state’s decreasing capacity to provide for its own,” reports Bill Wheeler in a special report in GOOD magazine.

The Indus Waters Treaty of 1960 between India and Pakistan has long been hailed as an example of the cooperation that can result from the necessity of sharing such an essential resource across borders. But with climate change causing the Himalayan glaciers that feed the Indus River to melt at a faster pace, some experts warn that balancing the water needs of both countries across their contested border could be a trigger point for conflict—particularly for two nations that cannot provide many of their citizens with access to safe drinking water under normal circumstances.

South Asian governments will be called upon more and more to balance the water of needs between different users at the local level and work with other governments to share and conserve water at the international level. But as Ashok Jaitly of New Delhi’s Energy and Resources Institute told Wheeler, both India and Pakistan share a “mentality that obscures the need to manage demand with conservation, water tariffs, and an end to destructive but politically popular practices in both countries.”

Despite the recognition of water as a growing security issue by the international community, it is difficult to improve what is a symptom of deeper-set problems. But they must try, if only for their own security. As Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari warned in a Washington Post op-ed, “The water crisis in Pakistan is directly linked to relations with India. Resolution could prevent an environmental catastrophe in South Asia, but failure to do so could fuel the fires of discontent that lead to extremism and terrorism.”

By Comparative Urban Studies Project intern Elizabeth Hipple and edited by Meaghan Parker

Photo: The Ganges River in Varanasi, India. Courtesy flickr user Denver Pam

MORE

The strategic minerals debate is back—but starring some new rocks. One that has received much recent attention is lithium, which is used in cell phone batteries, as well as those under development for electric cars.

Turns out lithium isn’t found in too many places. Around 50 percent of known reserves are in Bolivia, underneath some very dramatic and desolate salt flats. Worldfocus has a terrific news story that gives a glimpse of the place, the politics, and the battle over lithium extraction. Talk of an OPEC-like lithium cartel with China and Chile suggests that the politics at the international level will be just as contentious as the Bolivian domestic scene.

The prevalence of armed conflict in areas of high biodiversity is alarming, though not entirely surprising. According to “Warfare in Biodiversity Hotspots” (abstract online), which was published earlier this year in Conservation Biology, 80 percent of the major armed conflicts between 1950 and 2000 took place in biodiversity hotspots. While natural resources are rarely the principal causes of conflict, their allocation and ownership are frequently among its drivers.

Climate change will have serious impacts on fragile states. To effectively address the potential for instability, the climate community must communicate and collaborate with the development and peacebuilding communities.

In an interview recorded in Washington, Dan Smith of International Alert makes the case for extending this dialogue: “This is not just an environmental issue, not just a development issue, it’s not just a peace and conflict issue, if we don’t understand the connectivity and the interactions between all of these categories, we’re going to get it wrong.”

The second day of the Global Environmental Change and Human Security conference in Oslo illustrated the evolution of the environment, conflict, and security debate. The key discussion came from a panel entitled “Environmental Change, Conflicts, and Vulnerability in War-Torn Societies” that featured Ken Conca of the University of Maryland; David Jensen of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP); and Arve Ofstad of the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.

“I don’t know of an armed conflict that has got a single cause,” said International Alert Secretary General Dan Smith at an event sponsored by the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program on June 10, 2009. “Our argument is simply that climate change adds another major variable into that mix.” Smith was joined by Shruti Mehrotra, a senior consultant to International Alert on climate change, for a nuanced discussion of climate change’s potential impacts on global stability.

The Netherlands and Bangladesh: Capacity Matters

Both the Netherlands and Bangladesh are low-lying coastal countries vulnerable to sea-level rise and extreme weather events. Yet the Netherlands is “a wealthy country with stable government that’s transparent and accountable to the people,” said Smith. “A country like Bangladesh which is poor, which has got democracy but it’s a very iffy democracy—it’s really still in a state of transition—and which does not itself have the resources to handle those problems” could experience “great social pressure as a consequence of climate change,” he said.

Cascading Impacts: Water, Food, Livelihoods

Four hundred million people depend on the glacier-fed Ganges-Brahmaputra river system for water, food, and industry, said Smith. “A very large number of people’s livelihoods are going to be affected if water management in the Ganges-Brahmaputra area is not adequate to the task” of adapting to changing precipitation patterns and melting glaciers.

Seventy percent of Peruvians depend on glacial runoff for their water needs, according to Smith. But the Andean glaciers will essentially melt and disappear by 2015, meaning that an initial excess of water will be followed by a terrible deficit, said Smith. The impacts on Peruvian society will largely depend on how well the government, the private sector, and civil society mobilize to manage their water supply.

Scarce Resources: Migration and Conflict

Scarcer resources may lead to mass migration and conflict, said Smith, but he urged the audience to be wary of the “factoids and guesstimates being thrown around about how many people will migrate under the pressure of climate change.”

People sometimes move to avoid conflict, but “very often, unwittingly, they become the vector of conflict themselves,” said Smith. Most climate-induced migration is likely to be within a country or within a region, so “a lot of that migration is going to be people moving from areas which are no longer viable to areas which are barely viable—indeed, where their arrival threatens the viability of the area into which they’re moving,” he said.

According to International Alert’s report A climate of conflict: The links between climate change, peace and war, there are 46 countries that will be at high risk of violent conflict due to the intersecting impacts of climate change and economic, political, and social problems.

Envisioning Adaptation

No matter what happens at the December 2009 Copenhagen climate conference, people will need to adapt to the changes already underway in the climate system. But if adaptation is seen as a purely technical process, it will fail, said Smith. It is a cultural process that will only work if people have the chance to express their opinions and misgivings—and then buy into it.

“Most of development discourse is not being taken into account in these environmental negotiations,” said Mehrotra. Most climate negotiators are climate scientists or diplomats, not development practitioners. But in low-income countries, climate change will primarily be a development issue. “There is a potential that huge amounts of money will be put into this [adaptation], using a way of thinking about development from the 1970s,” warned Mehrotra.

Photos: Dan Smith and Shruti Mehrotra. Courtesy of David Hawxhurst and the Wilson Center.

MORE