Climate wars
October 20, 2011
Soldiers usually pride themselves on leaving politics to the politicians. This week in London they spoke out. Senior European officers urged action on what remains a polarizing issue in the broader community: climate change.
"We've increasingly come to recognize that, as well as the environmental and socio-economic impact of climate change, there is the potential to increase the risk to global stability and national interests," said Neil Morisetti, a Rear Admiral in the Royal Navy.
The British Medical Journal invited Morisetti, who is also an envoy on climate change for the UK government, to speak on the health and security implications of global warming alongside other high ranking officers and senior physicians from across Europe.
Assembled security and health experts warned that rising global temperatures this century threaten food and water security, and could exacerbate tensions in some of the world's least stable regions.
Health warnings
A warming climate is expected to have a range of direct and indirect effects on human health.
"To me the biggest and most short-term threat is food security," said Anthony Costello, Director of the Institute for Global Health at University College London (UCL).
Costello said a study he directed two years ago for UCL and the medical journal The Lancet concluded that climate change presented "the greatest health threat of the 21st century." He pointed to the Russian heat wave of 2010 and the current floods in Thailand as examples of the kinds of events that will become more common place in future, menacing food security.
Last year, Russia lost 30 percent of its grain harvest as temperatures soared above their average for three weeks. The losses sent international grain prices skyrocketing.
"50-60 percent of all children who die in the developing world die from malnutrition-related problems," Costello told Deutsche Welle.
Climate change is also expected to spread the range and infectiousness of diseases like Malaria and drive migration, especially from coastal cities.
Urban centers pose a special problem, because around 60 percent of people will likely be living in cities by the middle of the century. Cities also tend to concentrate heat, making their residents more vulnerable to the ravages of heat waves.
"The clearest indication we have was the French heat wave of 2003, which was in many ways an unprecedented event in which at least 30,000 people died," said Sir Andy Haines, Professor of public health and primary care at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Drawn in
Some of the worst-affected regions will be in the tropics, but this will still pose security problems for other nations.
"Often we've seen conflict in the past there (the tropics)...Climate change is going to add to that problem," Morisetti told Deutsche Welle.
"One of the real challenges is that that belt around the equator is also where the world's trade routes run. Particularly energy, but also other goods that are moving around the world, and if there is instability and vulnerability in those parts of the world, it has a bearing for all of us."
Many countries on the equator are already facing economic and social hardships and further stresses could expand the world's list of 'failed states.'
"That's not to say that we think climate change is going to be a direct cause of conflict. More likely, it's going to act as a 'threat multiplier'," Morisetti said.
Other officers, speaking under the anonymity of Chatham House rules, described climate change as an "amorphous threat" that would change the "ranking order of states," creating new winners and losers.
Increased piracy, akin to that which takes place off the horn of Africa, will be one of the typical problems industrialized countries can expect to face.
One figure said "environmental security" had failed to figure among the typical pillars of human security concerns, to our detriment.
More voices
Europe's military has been slow to appreciate the security implications of climate change. United States defense forces haven't.
The Pentagon's 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review to Congress stressed the potential for climate change to contribute to "poverty, environmental degradation, and the further weakening of fragile governments."
Earlier this year Germany tabled climate change at the United Nations Security Council. It was the first time in four years that the Security Council formally debated the environment, and the first time a Council statement linked climate change to global peace and security.
Speaking in July, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said it was an appropriate venue to bring up climate change, as it would help promote the "interdisciplinary approach" needed.
Alejandro Litovsky - Director of the Earth Security Initiative, a forum that brings together scientists, politicians, businesses and the defense community - welcomed the Chancellor's initiative, but remains concerned about "securitizing" the problem.
"We need to be very careful how we frame the military contribution to this issue. Climate change is clearly an issue of resource scarcity, but it's also an issue of access - who is going to get access to resources?"
Hugh Montgomery, a professor of Intensive care medicine at University College London and Director of the Institute for Human Health and Performance, is pleased that doctors and soldiers are throwing their weight behind efforts to take action on climate change.
"[We] felt that climate messaging at the moment has been tarnished," he told Deutsche Welle.
"It gets labeled as something that's pronounced upon by wooly-minded thinkers, people who aren't very clever or well informed; people who are perhaps well-meaning or left-wing. I don't think it's easy to brand serving officers or senior physicians as stupid, ill-informed or actually left-wing."
Author: Nathan Witkop
Editor: Matt Hermann