E3G

Climate Change: International Security and the example of Darfur

By Marina Brutinel

It’s been a busy week on the climate security front, with the culmination of several important processes which we’ve been following closely over recent months.

On Monday, a panel of distinguished US Admirals and Generals launched their report on National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.

The same evening, UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett gave a speech entitled Climate Change: ‘The Gathering Storm’ as the Annual Winston Churchill Memorial Lecture in New York.

These events took place on the eve of the historic UN Security Council debate on Climate Change, called by the current UK council presidency to put Climate Change on the global security agenda.

Reporting ahead of the debate, Canadian newspapers quoted the thoughts of E3G Founding Director John Ashton, who had been participating in a conference call organised by US conservation group the National Environmental Trust in his capacity as Special Representative for Climate Change of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

John Ashton presented evidence that global warming is putting world security at risk, illustrating this view with reference to the conflict in Darfur.

The example of Sudan, he explained, gives us a serious warning of the kind of instabilities that could be triggered at a much larger scale by climate insecurity in a resource-constrained world, concluding that:

“It’s another early sign of what we’re in for to a much larger degree unless we get the mitigation side of this right”.

Earlier this month, the second part of the IPCC fourth assessment report, confirmed that developing countries are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.

E3G analysis on these issues also suggests that unless climate change is urgently tackled through mitigation and adaptation, soaring humanitarian crisis are expected to hit developing countries, including in the short term. Climate change impacts represent a severe aggravating factor which would combine with existing social, political and possibly ethnical factors responsible for outbreaks of conflict in developing countries. Such a mix would pose a considerable menace to world stability.

John Ashton emphasized this idea in his remarks on the Darfur conflict, adding:

“there is absolutely no doubt that it’s a more difficult conflict to deal with, because … you’ve had a 40 per cent fall in the rain fall in northern Darfur over the last 25 to 30 years again in a way that’s entirely consistent with what the climate models would have told you to expect.”

The discussion at the Security Council debate suggests that this view is rapidly gaining international acceptance, not least by developing countries themselves. We look forward to seeing if this approach will have an impact on the post-2012 climate regime negotiations.