During his speech at West Point Military Academy earlier this week, President Barack Obama described climate change as a creeping national security crisis that will require the armed forces to respond to refugee flows, natural disasters, and conflicts over water and food. The speech emphasised that US foreign policy in the 21st century is increasingly being honed in recognition of heightened risks of social, political and economic upheaval around the world due the impacts of global warming. A more detailed insight into US military planning could be seen in the report published a couple of weeks earlier by the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) Military Advisory Board, written and endorsed by a dozen or so senior retired US generals. Describing climate change as a not just a threat multiplier, but now - even worse - a catalyst for conflict, the study concluded that environmental impacts from climate change in coming decades: .... will aggravate stressors abroad, such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability and social tensions - conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence. To be sure, the link between climate change and the risk of violence is supported by many independent studies. No wonder, reports NBC News citing various former and active US officials, the Pentagon has long been mapping out strategies to protect US interests in the aftermath of massive floods, water shortages and famines that are expected to hit and decimate unstable nations. But the era of climate warfare is not laying in wait, in some far-flung distant future. It has already begun, and it is accelerating - faster than most predicted. Pentagon officials and the CNAs new study point to the Arab Spring upheavals across the Middle East and North Africa as a prime example. As Ive argued previously, violence and unrest in Syria and Egypt can be linked not just to the regional impacts of climate change in terms of water scarcity and food production, but also their complex interconnections with domestic oil and gas scarcity, neoliberal austerity, rampant inequality, endemic corruption, and massive political repression. Such cases show that climate change in itself does not drive conflict - but the way in which climate change interacts with multiple related factors like declining oil production, food prices, and overlapping political, cultural and economic processes is already generating wild cards that repressive states are ill-equipped to deal with. In that context, such states resort to the thing they do best in an increasingly uncertain world: more repression. theguardian/environment/earth-insight/2014/may/30/climate-change-war-conflict-military-industrial-complex-syria-egypt-uprising
Posted on: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 07:15:06 +0000
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