Climate Change and Security - 9780313380068

"There are two overriding concerns for any national government: economy and security. Climate change threatens both. It is no surprise that both finance ministers and military chiefs take an interest in climate change, once the compound of scientists and environmentalists. Irrespective of the debate over the quality of some of the climate change science, the top brass know all too well that trouble lies ahead if climates do change. Christian Webersik has given us all a great service in covering the many features of climate change and security with a detailed analysis of one of the most imperiled `failed states,' Somalia. This is a magisterial narrative which bears reading and assimilating by everyone who acts for a peaceful planet."---Professor Timothy O'Riordan, OBE, DL, FBA Emeritus Professor of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

"Will climate change produce more security threats? Climate study scholars easily answer `yes' in their natural wish to be more alarmist, whereas security study scholars are hesitant to revisit what have been long established as causes of conflict. This marvelous book critically assesses both scientific sides and attempts to identify links, as numerous and problematic as they could be, between climate change and security."---Dr. Vesselin Popovski Senior Academic Officer, Institute for Sustainability and Peace, United Nations University, Tokyo

The strategic U.S. military base on the Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia faces submergence by rising sea level. Himalayan glaciers are shrinking, cutting the flow of the critical rivers shared by India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China and exacerbating military tensions. Changing rainfall patterns in Africa and the Middle East are driving drought famine, disease, ethnic conflict, national destabilization, readicalism, and international terrorism.

Alarms about the expanding role of climate change as a force maultiplier of existing threats to national international, and human security structures studies are being raised at all levels of governance and intelligence---national including the U.S. Senate, the Director of National Intelligence the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon transnational including the European Union and the United Nations and private (such as the Central News Agency and the American Security Project Climate Change and Security. A Gathering storm of Global Challenges focuses on the three major feedback effects of human induced climate change on human and international security resources scarcity natural disasters and sea level rise.

Decreasing per capita availability of renewable resources due to such regional effects of climate change as drought and desertification leads to intensified competition for these resources and may result in armed violence---especially when compounded by conditions of rapid population growth, tribalism, and sectarianism as in Darfur and Somalia. The increase in the frequency and intensity of meteorological disasters associated with global warming weaknes already debilitated tropical societies and makes them still more vulnerable to political instability, as in Haiti. Sea-level rise will lead to disruptive mass migrations of climate refugees as dense littoral populations are forced to abandon low-lying coastal regions, as in Bangladesh.