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

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 trends in isolation, but their interplay with political dynamics, that may be most worrisome in terms of potential conflict.

Conflicting claims over water resources have been cited as a possible cause of violent clashes in regions like the Middle East and in Central and South Asia. But water cooperation, rather than conflict, has so far been the norm in international river basins. Water agreements have been about benefit-sharing (that is, shared exploitation of water resources). As climate change heightens water scarcity, the question is whether countries will still be able to reconcile competing interests. Will water diplomacy be able to shift from benefit-sharing to burden-sharing? This is also an important question within national boundaries. Already, internal disputes revolve around water allocation among different communities and regions, and between local sustenance needs and export crops.

AFTERMATH OF DISASTERS

A second pathway toward conflict is found in the context of disasters. A combination of resource depletion, ecosystem destruction, population growth, and economic marginalization of poor people (who often have no choice but to settle in marginal, vulnerable locations or in poorly constructed housing) has already led to more frequent and more devastating disaster events.

The number of natural disasters (excluding geological events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions) has risen from 233 per decade in the 1950s to more than 3,800 in the decade 2000-2009. Though there are considerable variations year-to-year, the number of people affected by such disasters has grown from less than 20 million to 2 billion during the same time frame.

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The pace is likely to accelerate as climate change translates into more intense storms, flooding, and heat waves. In addition to sudden disasters, there is also the "slow-onset" degradation of ecosystems through drought and desertification processes, which in some cases is sufficiently extreme to compromise habitability.

Disasters undermine human security by exacerbating poverty, deepening inequalities, and straining the social and economic fabric of affected communities. Disasters often widen existing fault lines within societies--between rich and poor, urban and rural communities, and different ethnic groups. In divided societies, conflict may arise if the provision of relief and reconstruction aid is inadequate or uneven among different groups and communities. Slow or incompetent disaster response can also lead to growing opposition to the government and unrest, particularly where popular dissatisfaction is already widespread.

One analysis found that out of 171 storm and flood disasters with at least 1,000 victims, in at least a dozen cases a clear connection existed between a disaster event and an intensification of conflict, violent unrest, and/or political crisis. Among these were hurricanes in Haiti (1954 and 2004), several flooding events in India and China, and typhoon and flooding events in Bangladesh (1970, 1974, and 1988).

POPULATION DISPLACEMENT

Disasters, along with environmental and resource pressures, are increasingly a contributing factor to displacement. But it is not always easy to categorize the displaced by single, separate causes. Warfare, human rights violations, poverty, inequality of land ownership, as well as resource disputes and environmental problems, can be closely intertwined.

Some 42 million people were officially recognized as either international refugees or internally displaced persons (IDPs) in 2008, having fled war or persecution. In addition to the narrow reasons recognized in international law, there are additional reasons why people decide to seek refuge elsewhere. Some 25 million people are thought to have been uprooted by natural disasters. And London-based NGO Christian Aid estimates that as many as 105 million people have been made homeless by a variety of so-called development projects--which typically inflict substantial environmental damage--including dams, mines, roads, factories, plantations, and wildlife reserves.

Environmental degradation is already leading to sizable population movements (see table). In the mid-1980s, Essam El-Hinnawi of the UN Environment Programme coined the term "environmental refugees" and offered the following definition: "People who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption ... that jeopardized their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life."

Examples of Environmentally Induced Population Movements

    Country                         Observation

Mexico            Desertification affecting drylands is leading some
                  600,000 to 700,000 people to migrate annually.

Brazil            Between 1970 and 2005, repeated drought has led some
                  60 million people to migrate from rural to urban
                  areas, mostly from the northeastern Sertao region.

Senegal           In the Tambacounda area, badly affected by soil
                  erosion, 90 percent of all men aged 30 to 60 have
                  migrated (temporarily) at least once in their
                  lifetimes.

Africa            Over the last two decades, an estimated 10 million
                  people have moved due to the effects of environmental
                  degradation and climate change.

Burkina Faso      Before the outbreak of instability and violent
                  conflict in Cote d'lvoire in 1999, farmers from
                  drought-plagued Burkina Faso had regularly and in
                  large numbers migrated there. Their remittances
                  helped to finance schools, hospitals, and irrigation
                  systems back home.

Papua New Guinea  The country's Carteret Islands may be completely
                  submerged by 2015 as a result of sea-level rise. In
                  2005, the population of 2,600 was resettled to
                  Bougainville.

United States     Of the 1.5 million people displaced by Hurricane
                  Katrina in 2005, some 300,000 may never return.

Source: International Organization for Migration (IOM), "Migration,
Climate Change, and the Environment," IOM Policy Brief (Geneva: May
2009), pp. 2-4.

Forecasts of the number of people that may have to move due to climate change and environmental degradation vary enormously. Projections for 2050 range from a low of 25 million to a high of 1 billion. Because no one knows how severe climate disruptions will be and how resilient governments and communities are, these numbers must be understood as no more than educated guesses. For instance, how many of the more than 630 million people living in low-lying coastal zones worldwide might one day be displaced by sea-level rise, storm surges, and rising salinity of coastal aquifers?

People Forcibly Displaced, 2008

Refugees                  16.2 million
Disaster-displaced        25 million
Internally displaced      26 million
Development-displaced    105 million

Sources: See www.worldwatch.org/ww/climaterisk

Note: Table made from pie chart.

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Further complicating assessments is the possibility that some people will be displaced temporarily, rather than permanently. And people do not move only because they are pushed out, but also because they sense opportunities elsewhere. (There are an estimated 200 million longterm migrants worldwide.) Hence, some people may depart well before habitability and economic viability are too compromised. Others may migrate seasonally to supplement local incomes made more meager or precarious by climate impacts. It may be more meaningful to speak of climate migrants than of climate refugees.

Environmental refugees and migrants may be seen as unwelcome competitors for land, water, jobs, and social services. In the poorer states of northeast India, for instance, Bangladeshi migrants have been met by violence. North African cities (either as destinations or as stops on the way to Europe) are increasingly magnets for migrants from the Sahel region, but in some cases the influx has led to social unrest and attacks on migrants.

Whether violent conflict ensues depends on the scale and speed of population movements, as well as the mix of social and economic conditions and the presence of unresolved grievances in host areas. Likewise, governance

capacities and political stability play a critical role. Some political leaders (or would-be leaders) may find they can capitalize on stirring up resentments against migrants and refugees.

CONNECTING THE DOTS

Environment--conflict linkages have for some years worked their way onto the agendas of various national government ministries, including the environment, development cooperation, foreign, and military portfolios. Intergovernmental bodies like the World Bank, a range of UN agencies, the OECD, OSCE, European Union, and NATO have developed policy guidelines, commissioned research and strategy papers, and convened meetings to assess the consequences for conflict prevention and post-conflict peace-building efforts.

On April 17, 2007, the United Nations Security Council discussed, for the first time ever, the security implications of climate change', including border disputes, migration, societal stress, humanitarian crises, and shortages of energy, water, arable land, and fish stocks. The discussion covered such potential consequences as increased competition for food, water, and energy in the face of widespread drought and crop failures; an unprecedented rise in the number of people seeking to escape flooding, disease, and famine; and the possibility of climate-related economic disruptions on a scale not seen since World War II.

Recognition of such linkages and repercussions is welcome and overdue. But much of this discussion remains solidly within the national security mindset, steeped in traditional perceptions of "threats" (as opposed to common vulnerabilities) and is thus likely to cement the power of military institutions. There is, for instance, frequent reference to climate change acting as a "threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world," as a much-cited 2007. report commissioned by the Center for Naval Analyses, a U.S. Navy-financed group, put it. The report expressed concern that climate change will make military operations and preparedness more difficult, and that chaos in climate-destabilized states may complicate Western access to oil and mineral resources.

The result could be a militarization of environmental and humanitarian challenges, rather than a fundamental re-evaluation of a suitable security policy in a climate-disrupted era. An August 2009 front-page New York Times article argues that climate change raises "the prospect of military intervention to deal with the effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics." Reflecting the views of U.S. military and intelligence agencies, the article warns: "Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements, or destabilize entire regions."

Clearly, two very different paths emerge from the intersection of climate and security. One is primarily concerned with preserving the status quo of international relations. Thus, rich and powerful nations may focus on unwanted instability to the extent that it threatens their own privileges. At times, this may find expression in policies to shut borders in the face of an "onslaught" of migrants and refugees from countries collapsing due to environmental calamity. At other times, it may lead to military intervention to shore up their own interests--such as the preservation of access to resources.

The other path emerges from a recognition that adopting greener economic and technological policies not only reduces the likelihood of catastrophic climate disruptions but also represents smart security policy. It entails dramatically different foreign and security policies, flowing from a concern for human rights, equity, and justice. Transformative in nature, it requires strengthening the civilian institutions that can address the roots of insecurity and promote cooperative rather than adversarial thinking. This path is ultimately about a profound transformation of culture--moving away from the warrior culture that always sees new enemies lurking, and toward an understanding that different nations and communities need to make peace not only with each other but also with nature.

MILITARY VERSUS CLIMATE BUDGETS

Government budgets are a good indicator of where priorities lie and how much progress is being made in this regard. Although change is in the air, traditional security perspectives continue to be well represented in most national budgets.

Driven largely by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, military spending by the United States is now at the highest level since the end of World War II. Although the Obama Administration has adopted a far more positive attitude toward climate policy than its predecessor, it still proposes to spend US$65 on the military for each dollar devoted to climate programs. Just the nuclear weapons budget for 2010, at $9.9 billion, is almost as large as the entire climate budget, and almost three times as much as the $2.3 billion requested for renewable energy and energy efficiency programs. Only if one includes spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act--the one-time stimulus measure passed in early 2009--does the gap temporarily shrink to less extreme proportions.

Though the United States is a far bigger military spender than any other nation on Earth, lopsided though less extreme priorities are found elsewhere as well. In FY 2008, the German government provided [euro]3.3 billion ($4.7 billion) for climate policy. While that was more than double the [euro]1.5 billion provided in 2005, it is still a small sum compared with the [euro]29.5 billion ($42 billion) allocated to the Ministry of Defense. The military-to-climate-budget ratio thus came to about 9 to 1. In the fiscal year starting April 2009, Japan planned to spend about [yen]432 billion ($4.6 billion) on climate-related programs. While this expands FY 2008 spending by about [yen]100 billion, it is dwarfed (11 to 1) by the [yen]4,774 billion ($50 billion) military budget.

U.S. Federal Government Allocations for Climate Change and Military
Programs

                             2008      2010     2010 plus ARRA

                              (billions of U.S. dollars)

Climate Budget                 7.37     10.6     79.47
Military Budget              647.1     687.2    690.5
Military to Climate Ratio    88: 1     65: 1     9: 1
Of which: R&D spending       20: 1     16: 1     4: 1

Source: Miriam Pemberton, Military vs. Climate Security. Mapping the
Shift from the Bush Years to the Obama Era (Washington, D.C.: Institute
for Policy Studies, July 2009).

Funds to assist developing countries with climate mitigation and adaptation also involve rather limited resources, compared both to the need at hand and to other governmental priorities. Announced bilateral funds, as of late 2009, tallied about $13 billion and pledged multilateral funds add another $7 billion. Most of these funds will likely be spent over five years or so, thus averaging roughly $4 billion per year. This is about a third of what the United States alone spends on military aid to other countries, or less than a quarter of the value of world arms transfers to developing countries.

Available data are too incomplete to permit anything near a complete tally of military and climate budgets worldwide. It is especially difficult to tally climate funds, which are either in flux or still at an early stage of being established. But there is no doubt that funding priorities are severely slanted in favor of military programs. In 2008, the world spent almost $1.5 trillion for military purposes. Even generously assuming that worldwide climate budgets run to $50 billion a year, that would imply a 30 to 1 gap.

               Bilateral and Multilateral Climate Funds

                 Fund                                 Amount


                                             (millions of U.S. dollars)

Cool Earth Partnership (Japan)                 10,000 *

International Window of the Environmental       1,593
Transformation Fund (UK)

NORAD Rainforest Fund (Norway)                    560

MDG Fund (Spain)                                  143

Global Climate Change Alliance (European           79
Commission)

International Climate Initiative (Germany)        634

Global Initiative on Forest and Climate           188
(Australia)

Total, Bilateral Funds                         13,197

UNFCCC Funds under the Kyoto Protocol             320 [dagger]

Forest Carbon Partnership Fund (World Bank)       165

Tropical Forest Account (Global Environment        60
Facility, GEF)

Earth Fund (GEF/lnternational Finance             200
Corporation)

Clean Technology Fund and Strategic             6,141 [double dagger]
Climate Fund (World Bank)

Total, Multilateral Funds                       6,985

Grand Total                                    20,182 *

* The bulk of this fund--$8 billion--will be in the form of
concessional loans; only $2 billion will be in grant form.
[dagger] Amounts pledged as of 2008.
[double dagger] Pledged as of mid-2008. Amount actually received by
then was $201.7 million.
* Rough figure, premised on a five-year period.
Sources: Gareth Porter, Neil Bird, Nanki Kaur, and Leo Peskett, New
Finance for Climate Change and the Environment (Washington, DC: WWF and
Heinrich Boll Stiftung, July 2008), pp. 24-25; United Nations, UNFCCC,
Investment and Financial Flows to Address Climate Change (Bonn: 2007);
Manish Bapna and Heather McGray, Financing Adaptation: Opportunities
for Innovation and Experimentation, (Washington, D.C.: World Resources
Institute, 2008); World Bank, "Climate Investment Funds (OF),"
www.worldbank.org/cif/.

RESILIENCE TO THE RESCUE

If the term "security" is to have any meaning in the twenty-first century, governments will need to accord far higher priority to climate stabilization. Massive climate disruptions threaten to make a mockery of food security, expose hundreds of millions to dangerous storms and other weather extremes, cause havoc to the economy and jobs, and trigger a whole new range of conflicts.

Mitigation measures--reining in future greenhouse gas emissions--are critical, whether they result from a grand bargain at the December 2009 Copenhagen UN climate conference or from cumulative national measures. But too much carbon has already been put into the atmosphere to avoid adaptation measures. Helping communities and nations strengthen their resilience in the face of an inevitable degree of climate change is thus essential--so that they are less prone to resource conflicts, less exposed to the disasters and other repercussions, and less likely to confront massive population displacements.

Resilience has at least four major dimensions. Ecological resilience is about protecting or resurrecting natural buffers such as healthy forests or coastal wetlands, promoting drought-resistant farming, and so on. Social resilience is about reinforcing community coherence, reducing social inequality, and shoring up livelihood rights. Economic resilience is concerned with diversifying the economy and sources of income to limit the impacts of climate disruptions. Finally, good governance, and capable and inclusive institutions, create political resilience.

Instead of preparing for future climate wars or the type of interventions presaged in the New York Times article mentioned above, it is time to get serious about what Geoffrey Dabelko of the Woodrow Wilson Center and Ken Conca of the University of Maryland call "environmental peacemaking." The concept is simple (though translating it into real-world policies is often not): Identify shared environmental vulnerabilities and interests among different countries, and undertake joint projects to manage cross-boundary environmental resources that provide mutually recognized rights and tangible benefits, enhance mutual trust, and establish cooperative habits (on both the governmental and civil society levels). Among the existing initiatives are transborder peace parks, shared river basin management plans, and joint environmental monitoring programs. But such initiatives will have to multiply. And in addition to cross-border initiatives, similar efforts can be beneficial among different communities and regions within given countries. These are the sorts of initiatives the new climate of the twenty-first century requires.

Michael Renner is a senior researcher at Worldwatch Institute and director of the Institute's Global Security Project.

For more information about issues raised in this story, visit www.worldwatch.org/ww/climaterisk.