More Security Agencies Calling Climate Change a Threat

Earlier this week, I discussed the US Department of Defense's writing about climate security in its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), where it said "climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked."

I've seen two more examples of major security agencies give in-depth analyses of how climate change will affect security.  Yesterday and today, the US Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair (and former IISS-US Council Member), has given Congress the annual threat assessment of the US Intelligence Community.  In the testimony, he says: "Climate change will have wide ranging implications for US national security interests over the next 20 years." Here is a link to his statement for the record. Although news articles about this testimony focused almost exclusively on al Qaeda, DNI Blair's statement for the record gave significant analysis to how climate change will affect national security, going out to 2030.  Last year, he made a similar statement, which I blogged about, but this year's included significantly more regional analysis, including expected impacts on Russia, China, India, Southeast Asia, and Central America.  I'll give a more detailed explanation of the climate section tomorrow. 

Also new today, is the UK Ministry of Defense's (MoD) report, "Global Strategic Trends – Out to 2040".  This is a comprehensive report that goes through a litany of real threats to the UK over the next 30 years.  The report devotes significant space to the impacts of climate change, as well as other issues of environmental degradation.  Like I was discussing in yesterday's post about Bin Laden, the report calls grievances about global inequality a significant threat.

Bin Laden and Climate Change

Late last week, Osama Bin Laden came out with a new audiotape accusing the US for causing climate change.  He says: "Speaking about climate change is not a matter of intellectual luxury - the phenomenon is an actual fact." The following statement could as easily have been spoken by Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, or other anti-capatalists:
One of the themes that ran through the Copenhagen Conference was the global divide between rich and poor, north and south.  As many studies have borne out, climate change will do greater harm to the poorest countries.  Because these countries also have the least responsibility for historical emissions, they feel they yet again being harmed by forces beyond their control.  This theme links climate change to a series of other grievances that the poor world holds against the rich, like agricultural protectionism, globalization, colonialism, and others. 

"However, George Bush junior, preceded by [the US] congress, dismissed the [Kyoto] agreement to placate giant corporations. And they are themselves standing behind speculation, monopoly and soaring living costs. They are also behind 'globalisation and its tragic implications'. And whenever the perpetrators are found guilty, the heads of state rush to rescue them using public money."

Taken to its extreme, this leads to a sort-of conspiracy theory of climate change, whereby the emissions of the US and the rich world has purposefully doomed the poor world to an unending series of disasters.  Any attempts by the US to push binding emissions targets on poor countries (even China) is said to be a conspiracy to keep the developing world poor in an effort to pre-empt competition.  We saw this argument used at the end of Copenhagen by the Sudanese negotiator Lumumba Stanislas Di-Aping when he said:
“It is asking Africa to sign a suicide pact, an incineration pact in order to maintain the economic dependence of a few countries, tt is a solution based on values that funneled six million people in Europe into furnaces.”

For the last several years, when analysts have discussed the security threats of climate change, we've talked about it “as an accelerant of instability or conflict” or as a new competition over scarce energy, water, or food resources.  Perhaps we should now begin to look at it as a new area of grievance between the rich and the poor.  If droughts in Sudan are blamed on global warming, and Sudanese blame the US for the emissions that caused global warming, then a logical next step would be for the Sudanese to engage in action that would cause the US to stop emitting.  Potential actions could include taking oil company workers hostage or even direct acts of terrorism.  A good way to defuse this animosity would be for the rich world to fully engage in a global climate treaty that is seen as fair, equitable, and just around the world.  
 
But -- we shouldn't wait for Osama to then throw down his weapons if the Copenhagen Accord turns out to work: he'll just find something else.

US Department of Defense: Climate Change is "an accelerant of instability or conflict"

Today, the Defense Department released its Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR).  The QDR lays out the anticipated policies and priorities of the Department of Defense for the next four years.  It is a strategic document, that paints broad strokes about future plans, force structures, and anticipated global threats.  This is in contrast to the annual budget (also released today), that gives hard numbers and entails real spending.    Under legislation authored in 2008 by then Senators Clinton (D-NY) and Warner (R-VA), the QDR was mandated to look at how climate change will impact the military.  The QDR states:

Climate change and energy are two key issues that will play a significant role in shaping the future security environment. Although they produce distinct types of challenges, climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked. The actions that the Department takes now can prepare us to respond effectively to these challenges in the near term and in the future.

According to the QDR, climate change will affects the military in several ways: first, the effects of global warming (espeically sea level increases and more sever weather) will directly threaten military bases and deployed forces, second, it will  it will “act as an accelerant of instability or conflict” that could cause the military to fight and deploy in more unstable areas around the world, and third, the Arctic will emerge as a new theater of operations.

After the jump, a clip of Undersecretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy talking about how the QDR addresses climate change.

Chile's Constitution: Water to be a Matter of National Security

A proposal by Chile's outgoing President, Michelle Bachelet would put an amendment to the Chilean Constitution saying that acces to fresh water is a matter of national security.  According to the article "CHILE: Water a Matter of National Security" by Daniela Estrada, from the Inter Press Service:  

The legal text recognises that freshwater, which is lacking in the Chilean north and abundant in the south, has become a "scarce good" and that its availability is "a matter of national security," much more than fossil fuels, which can be imported from other countries.

The proposed amendment would undo a law of 1981 (the Water Code) which effectively privatised Chile's fresh water reserves.  The government's proposal states: "with the implementation of a new Water Code, an imbalance resulted between the common good and the interests of a few individuals, an imbalance that must be corrected."  Therfor, this reform seems to be more about a conflict between public and private use of water.  Apparently, under Chilean constitution, once a good is declared a priority of national security, then the government can break contracts or expropriate private property to more effectively or equitably distribute that good. 

Talking about the economic or social impacts of such a policy are beyond the scope of this blog.  However, it leads to some interesting conceptual possibilities, if climate change alters the Chile's water supplies.  The article states: "Chile is a world leader when it comes to freshwater reserves in the form of glaciers. According to the latest inventory by the government's water agency, there are more than 3,500 glaciers, covering some 20,000 square kilometres." If those glaciers all melt (I won't venture to say a date: that has gotten some in trouble recently), then you could see the government (and military) taking charge of water supplies in order to ration them among competing groups: mining, hydro power, agriculture, sewage, and drinking water would all have claims on scarce resources.  If the government does not fairly apportion rights to water, its fairly easy to see how conflict could develop over these water rights, either against the government or between these stakeholder groups.  Just labeling water as a 'matter of national security' does not make these decisions any easier.

An Analysis of Copenhagen

Just to start: I'm back to blogging on climate change and security issues, after an extended hiatus over the holidays. 

The IISS recently published an analysis, which I wrote, in our Strategic Comments web-based magazine called: "Copenhagen Accord faces first test".  Overall, my assessment from a few weeks after the conference is decidedly more upbeat than my 'first assessment' written the day after the event concluded in a cloud of acrimony. 

As I write in the article:

"The Copenhagen Accord should not be judged by the events in two weeks in December. Its success will be judged by national responses over the next decade."

The first test for whether countries are serious about addressing this issue will come on January 31, when national commitments are due to the UN.

Though some bemoan that Copenhagen did not produce a binding treaty, I think that's a good thing.  US Senators, much like Chinese Communist Party Officials and members of India's parliament, do not like international bodies telling them what they can or cannot do. I would contend that the only countries where you may have members of legislative assemblies asking to be bound by a supranational treaty are Europeans, because they've gotten used to it.  I contend that the Copenhagen Accord, because it is non-binding and calls for voluntary commitments will be more effective than a binding treaty with mandatory commitments (a-la Kyoto) could be.  James Bacchus, writing in Forbes notes that this was how the GATT began in 1948, and it succeeded in its goals of dramatically increasing international trade. 

Instead of a long-term binding treaty, negotiations can continue to adjust to changing scientific, climactic, and political realities under the Copenhagen Accord.  These can be negotiated through processes like the G-20 and the Major Economies Forum.  Ronald Bailey at Reason magazine contends that this closely resembles the program that the Bush administration followed, and I would contend that by 2007, the Bush Administration actually had a pretty good climate policy in place.  The trouble was, nobody stopped to notice by then: the narrative had already been written.