E3G

Security trends and threat misperceptions

By Nick Mabey

Fears about energy security continue to drive military planning for intervention in oil-producing regions and protection of strategic assets and transit routes, and increasingly also investment in more secure energy alternatives such as coal, biofuels, renewables and nuclear energy.

Countries such as China, India and the USA are turning to coal to satisfy their energy security, and the lifetime greenhouse gas emissions of all planned coal power stations would equal total global emissions from the Industrial Revolution to 1970. If these investments go ahead without carbon sequestration, the world will be committed to over 6°C of global temperature rise by the second half of the century, with devastating impacts on global prosperity and security.
The alternative of investing in more nuclear power raises serious issues over nuclear proliferation. Experts estimate that an aggressive programme of new nuclear build would see a tripling of global installed nuclear capacity over the next 40 years – half of which would be in developing countries, many of which are unstable, such as Nigeria and Indonesia. This would only have a modest impact on reducing climate change (about 10% of total carbon reduction needed by 2050), but a major impact in the spread of nuclear technology and fuels.

In the medium term, the costs of energy insecurity will be dwarfed by the impacts of climate change, which could produce impacts of 5-20% of GDP from 2050 – with negative effects highest for poor people in poor countries, who are least able to adapt. However the security and stability impacts of a changing climate will arrive much earlier than major economic disruptions. Average global temperatures may only have risen by 0.7°C owing to climate change, but the impact on marginal areas has been large. Major droughts in Sahelian Africa have been linked to climate change and El Niño events.

These abnormal conditions have pushed traditional resource management regimes beyond breaking point, resulting in a wave of migration and low-intensity conflict across the region. The roots of the Darfur conflict in part lie with the communalisation of conflicts between pastoral and agricultural groups over access to scarce resources. Even without climate change, increased population and industrial demand means that by 2025 over 60% of the global population will be living in countries with significant water stress.

Among those areas where water supply is vulnerable to early climate change, where the natural resource base is weak, where governance is poor and where communal tensions already exist over resources, several areas stand out as highly at risk, including North and Sahelian Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and several small island states. More severe climate changes, including rapid sea level rise from the melting of major ice sheets, would severely affect major coastal populations in South Asia and Africa, especially Bangladesh. The water supply of over 1 billion people is at risk from declining Himalayan glaciers which feed the major rivers in India and China. Sea fisheries which provide primary protein for 800 million people are already being disrupted by climate change. These large events will produce mass migration, including across international borders, and severe conflict over remaining access to water basins and other resources.

Adaptation to help cope with these changes will require expenditure of between $10 billion to $40 billion per year, and increased humanitarian costs from natural disasters and environmental refugees estimated to be between $30 billion and $60 billion by 2015. This compares to current total aid expenditures of round $100m, climbing to $150m by 2015. The peacekeeping costs of responding to endemic instability from climate change would be far higher, as would be the consequent impacts on security.

Reducing the Risks of Instability and Conflict

Though the negative trends above pose growing security threats to the UK, they are neither inevitable nor entirely without positive features. The growth of the global economy, fuelled by global trade and investment, is also raising people out of poverty, strengthening managerial and governance systems and providing state resources to ensure stability and security.

However, for many countries the negative factors outweigh any positive trends, and are compounded by destabilising demographic trends increasing the proportion of young men, by economic transformation and by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. HIV/AIDS disproportionately affects working-age and professional people, reducing the capacity of the country to manage tension peacefully; in many African countries 80% of the armed forces are HIV positive compared to 5-10% of the general population. Many weak governments have few resources to manage these threats and reduce the risk of instability and conflict. State weakness is particularly correlated with the incidence of “grand corruption”, much of which is related to industrialised country investment, and which imposes annual costs of between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion on the world economy.

The impact of global instability on UK security, as opposed to humanitarian or poverty reduction goals, is never straightforward, but these threats should not be dismissed on the grounds that the countries concerned are far away and that future conflict and instability can never be exactly predicted. The major driver of asylum seekers moving into the UK has been internal conflict and state failure, and refugee camps have provided ideal recruitment camps for extremist movements globally. The UK’s long term strategy to engage and foster moderate Islam, especially in the European neighbourhood, would be fatally undermined by the emergence of endemic instability and economic decline in these countries; a scenario which is highly likely given current trends and an absence of serious economic and political reforms.