The Security Impact of Climate Change
| UNITED NATIONS, July 20 - It is becoming harder, if not impossible, for governments to deny a link between climate change and human activity. However, in some circles, it is still possible to talk about catastrophic climate change as environmental and economic concerns while ignoring the political insecurity that would inevitably follow the lose of vital resources and the destruction of ecosystems. Over several years, the UN General Assembly, Security Council and Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon have worked to put the security framing forward in the climate change debate. The Security Council debate on July 20 on the international security impact of climate change was the latest example of this. A litany of existing and emerging threats founded in climate change are causing shortages in the most basis of human needs: food, water, shelter. Ambassador Peter Wittig of Germany, the Council President for July, said “quite a few” of the conflicts on the Council’s agenda “are - already today – driven by desertification, lack of water and increased transborder migration. We have no doubt that the environmental degradation due to climate change very often acts as a driver of conflict.” Speaking on behalf of numerous small island states – the states most vulnerable to climate change – President Marcus Stephen of Nauru said, “This is not a hypothetical exercise. Many of our countries face the single greatest security challenge of all from the adverse impacts of climate change: our survival.” President Stephen added, “Our islands face dangerous and potentially catastrophic impacts that threaten to destabilize our societies and political institutions.” Rising sea levels are threatening food and fresh water supplies and infrastructure. “Eventually, some islands may disappear altogether, and so with it thousands of years of cultural heritage,” he said. In a grim overview of the global situation, the Executive Director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), Achim Steiner, drew on UN and other studies to outline not only how climate change could impact on human security later in this century but also how it has already occurred. Estimates are that more than 20 million people were displaced in 2008 due to “sudden on-set of weather-related disasters” and such disasters displaced 42 million people in 2010, he noted. “Many experts argue that climate change will aggravate or amplify existing security concerns and give rise to new ones, especially but not exclusively in already fragile and vulnerable nations,” he said. Steiner outlined several cascading phenomena that could realistically impact on hundreds of millions of people. “Consumption of several key natural resources could triple by 2050 to 140 billion tonnes unless that consumption is decoupled from economic growth. This gives rise to security concerns in its own right as witnessed by the public protests in countries such as Argentina, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Egypt, Haiti, India, Indonesia, Mauritania and Peru in 2008 when a range of factors coalesced including price spikes in food allied to shortages in some places.” A one-meter rise in global sea levels by the end of the century (which the IPCC considers possible) could affect 84 developing countries, according to the World Bank. A one-meter rise could “flood 17 per cent of Bangladesh's land area; threaten large parts of coastal cities such as Lagos, Cape Town and elsewhere and overwhelm, along with storm surges, small island developing States from the Maldives to Tuvalu,” said Steiner. The release of “old carbon” trapped in the Arctic and northern permafrost “would have a warming affect equivalent to 270 years of carbon dioxide emissions at current levels.” Warming ocean temperatures will impact on the already-strained sea food chain. “500 million people in developing countries rely on fisheries and aquaculture for livelihoods.” He continued, “In total, 145 countries share one or more international river basins. Changes in water flows, amplified by climate change, could be a major source of tension between States, especially those that lack the capacity for co-management and cooperation. Changing glacial melt patterns will have major implications for populations living downstream of mountain regions like the Hindu-Kush, the Pamirs and the Andes, while key river systems such as the Nile, Mekong and the Tigris-Euphrates could all be affected by changes in water supply.” “While a changing climate has already become an inevitability as a result of historical emissions, our ability to manage its consequences and avoid its most dangerous possibilities will depend on a proactive strategy of evolved and perhaps new international platforms, mechanisms and institutional responses: Ones which both anticipate security concerns and facilitate cooperative responses,” said Steiner, “Indeed there is no reason why the international community cannot avoid escalating conflicts, tensions and insecurity related to a changing climate if a deliberate, focused and collective response can be catalyzed that tackles the root causes, scale, potential volatility and velocity of the challenges emerging.” President Stephen said the international response “must be comprehensive.” The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the General Assembly and the Security Council all have responsibilities in addressing the issues, he said. “It is a threat as great as nuclear proliferation or terrorism, and carries the potential to destabilize governments and ignite conflict. Neither have ever led to the disappearance of an entire nation, though that is what we are confronted with today.” At a minimum, he said, the Council should request the appointment of a special representative on climate and security whose “primary responsibility should be to analyze projected security impacts of climate change” in order to “understand what lies ahead” and to request an assessment of the capacity of the UN system “to respond to these impacts, so that vulnerable countries can be assured that it is up to the task.” He added, “Let me be absolutely clear, the security risks of climate change are all the more reason to reach a legally binding agreement under the UNFCCC with urgency.” In the end, the result did not match the impassioned rhetoric. The Council did not pass a resolution but rather issued its opinion in a presidential statement in which the Council expressed “its concern that possible adverse effects of climate change may, in the long run, aggravate certain existing threats to international peace and security” and asked the Secretary-General in his reporting to the Council include “contextual information” on “possible security implications of climate change.” The lack of a substantive response to the pleas of UN officials and many governments is due to the divisions on the Council between states (including the United States) that want climate change on the Security Council agenda and those (including Russia) that do not believe this should be a Council issue, preferring to deal with these questions in the General Assembly and the UNFCCC. |
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