E3G

Climate Security: Asia in the spotlight while opinions differ in Canada

By Chris Littlecott

Not a Security Threat?

The international discussion of climate security hasn’t been all in favour of its growing influence. One particular target has been whether the UN Security Council was the right place for debate – a theme picked up in a recent editorial in the People’s Daily in China.

Going one step further this week was an editorial in the Vancouver Sun entitled Fobbing off human atrocities on the weather is absurd. This stridently criticised John Ashton for apparently suggesting that climate change was responsible for the Darfur conflict.

If only they had read his remarks more closely (as reported by fellow Canadian newspapers last week), they would have seen that his actual quote was the opposite of what they would have us believe:

Like most conflicts, it’s complex. It results from an interplay of a lot of social and political and possibly ethnic factors”

Rather than suggesting that climate change causes conflict all on its own, the climate security perspective views the physical impacts of climate change as aggravating factors that exacerbate existing sources of tension. That applies whether the impacts stem from droughts, desertification, floods or hurricanes.

Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions aren’t proposed as a means of solving conflicts here and now. That is obviously still the job of the ‘tough sanctions’ and ‘military force’ that the Vancouver Sun would like to see in the case of Darfur. Instead, action to secure a stable climate is required to reduce the growing likelihood of future conflict.

Serving as an antidote to that wrong-headed perspective, a much more rounded Canadian view of the climate security debate was provided this week by Thomas Homer-Dixon. Writing in the International Herald Tribune, his article Terror in the weather forecast serves as an excellent introduction into the way that climate change will act as a ‘threat multiplier’ impacting global security.