André Brie, 2 September 2008, Contribution to “LA GAUCHE 8“


Hot-house gases and Darfur – the effects of climate change on international security and stability


Actually, the world should have listened when the British government this spring presented its new National Security Strategy.i The kingdom, so it said in there, was no longer immediately threatened by any particular state. However, there were now other risks that might undermine Great Britain's security and stability. In there belonged international terrorism and regional conflicts, mass weapons of destruction and international criminality, demographic change and energy crisis, poverty and pests – as well as climatic change, to which there is devoted, for the first time, a separate subpoint.


Nicolas Sarkozyii, for a good year president of France, only very few months after his introduction into office did not mince works, when he gave a speech on environmental problems last November: “Our citizens should not reduce climate change to the melting of ice on ski runs“, the head of state said. “Climatic change – that is hundreds of millions of climate refugees, climate change also means: an acceleration of the great catastrophes, the dry periods, the floods, the cyclones, and to a certain extent also Darfur, where millions of poor people driven by hunger and thirst flood to other regions where they enter into conflict with the population settled there for hundreds of years. Climatic change means: new epidemics, it means: heavy conflicts over the access to water and food.“ Even if Sarkozy – see the clinging of his state leadership to the civil uses of nuclear energy – draws questionable consequences from climatic change, he described rather pertinently some of its consequences on international security and stability, on détente or the exacerbation of regional and socio-economically motivated conflicts, on the enlargement or containment of social crises. In his film “An uncomfortable truth“, former U.S. vice-president Al Gore correcty pointed out that the incomprehensibly bloody war in Darfur is already closely linked with the consequences of climatic change. The only large lake in the region had dried out. The existential struggle for distribution for the very few remaining water sources and pastures belongs among the causes of the conflict.


New territory in conflict research

Indeed the consequences of climate change on peace and security up to now have been inadequately explored and are little discussed or at most abused in the official security concepts of the West for the justification of bigger military efforts. It is clear that the effects are only seldom direct and are reinforced by a multiplicity of factors. This also results from the very few available investigations typically directed at individual sectors – among others by the US-American Centre for Naval Analysesiii and the Scientific Advisory Council of the Federal Republic – Global Environmental Changes.iv It is assumed to be equally certain that crises related to climate change appear at first in the national or regional context, however, they may then (for instance by massive increases in migratory flow) have an effect on multilateral stability and security.


To me, there appear three central aspects of the relationship between climate change and international security: on the one hand, it is a matter of questions of energy and raw material supply as well as the related effects on climate. On the other hand, it is these consequences themselves – and in that context especially the dwindling of resources such as water, the advance of deserts and the erosion of agricultural cultivation areas as well as the increasing curtailment of food availability resulting from that – that result in conflicts or can exacerbate existing ones, especially if for example the EU and the USA in answer to climate chance and the limited oil resources propagate and promote fuel production out of sugar cane, corn and other agricultural products. Third, for instance, the connection between climate change and the apparently growing share and severity of natural catastrophes becomes ever more apparent.


The first aspect recently became apparent again by way of the Caucasus conflict. Certainly it was and is in the confrontations between Georgia and its Western allies on the one hand, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Russia on the other, a matter of a failed nationality policy of the past and its unhealed wounds, of national possessive thinking, of demonstration of political power and military strength. Last but not least, however, it is a a matter of energy and of the attempt by the USA and the EU to obtain a direct access to the oil reserves of the region and to push back the Russian influence on them. Therefore, the International Energy Agency (IEA) in its monthly report of August 2008 warned against the effects of the conflicts in the Caucasus on world-wide energy supply. The combats between Russia and Georgia “threaten important oil and gas pipelines that lead through Georgia“, thus the IEA. Not least for this reason, NATO immediately took charge of the Caucasus crisis. And that, to mention an example still graver in its consequences, the war of the USA against Iraq is not about democracy and the fight against terrorism, but esentially about oil and power positions in the whole Near and Middle East is not seriously disputable.


Wars on oil – and around water

“The wars of the future will be waged around water“, - the former UN General Secretary Boutros Boutros Ghali prophecised already in the 1980s. And in 1995, the vice-president of the World Bank, Ismail Serageldin, announced that the wars in this century would no longer be fought over oil, but over water. However, conflicts around the elixir of life are not at all new: For decades, almost a dozen states have been fighting for Nile water; among the countries along the Euphrate and the Tigris, there is ever again conflict over the right to draw on these rivers; the Israeli dominance over the water resources of the Jordan and Lake Genezareth fuels the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.


At no time, however, have water resources receded as rapidly as now. In fact, already today in almost 100 countries, there is acute shortage of water; according to estimates by the UN, until 2030, 5.4 billion people overall might be threatened by them. The increasing desertification due to drought and lack of water also causes a threat to cultivation and farming that can hardly be overestimated. Kofi Annan, successor to Boutros Ghalis at the head of the UN warned that up to 135 million people might flee from dryness in their home countries in the next couple of years – to areas, where they might enter into competition with the indigenous people for the water supply there. Struggles for water resources were already reported from the Sahel zone and North Africa, from Kenya, Somalia, Tchad, Niger, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and Mali. The world won't even know about many “smaller“ such conflicts. It is dramatic, however, that these conflicts usually break out in so-called “weak states“, to whom the exercise of basic control functions causes great problems already now and who barely dispose of any capacities and mechanisms to manage such crisis development.


Last but not least, climate change places the military, security and rescue forces as well as catastrophe aid before new, and hardly predictable tasks. The big German insurance Munich reinsurance, who seizes natural catastrophes, as is typical for insurances, mainly in dry numbers, in its look back to the year 2005v, sounds an unusually dramatic note: “Munich Re has pointed out for a long time that in the case of increasing global warming, extraordinary weather catastrophes will multiply and that, therefore, the damage potentials to be counted with are correspondingly larger. Our fears have proven true in 2005.“


Military “crisis management“?

The approaches to at least limit climatic change are manifold and have been described in more detail in other places. The EU in the meantime also reacts to the dangers to peace and stability from climate change – in its usual patterns and the recipes already several times proven unsuitable. In March of this year, EU foreign commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, and the high representative of the Council for foreign and security policy, Javier Solana, presented a position papervi that maybe described the position and the challenges correctly, which, however, drew questionable consequences from that. For instance, it says: “The EU, because of its leading role in environmental policy and global climate policy as well as the broad spectrum of the instruments at its disposal is equipped in a unique way to react to the effects of climatic change on international security. In the security challenge, moreover, there come to bear Europe's strengths, because Europe disposes of a comprehensive concept for conflict prevention, crisis management, and post-conflict care and belongs to the main advocates of an effective multilateralism.“ At least in the past, however, the EU did not use this potential in cases of crisis or conflicts, at least not positively. On the contrary: peaceful conflict resolution was neglected criminally (see, for instance, the factual inaction in the Near East quartet); the military flank by contrast was continually expanded. In their security strategy of 12 December 2003 “A secure Europe in a better world“vii, the EU governments referred to poverty, diseases and dramatic environmental problems and came to the following evaluation: “The competition for natural resources – in particular for water -, that will still increase by global warming in the next decades, is likely to provide for additional turbulences and migratory movements in various regions of the world. Energy dependence gives Europe a special cause for worry.“ The conclusion, indeed, is very worrisome: “In the case of the new threats, the first line of defence will often lie abroad.“ The Lisbon Treaty, up to now not in force, does not only foresee the duty to constant rearmement but also world-wide missions for crisis management. How these look like is shown almost daily by the behaviour of the European frontier guard FRONTEX in the rejection of migrants, woman and men, who with this form of “crisis management“ often meet their death in the waves of the Mediterranean. If the EU were to assume a leadership role, such as Ferrero-Waldner and Solana emphasise it, in the management of the security consequences of climate change, this would need to be followed suspiciously; most of all, however, it requires the decisive dispute over a fundamentally different policy of the EU. The one pursued up to now not only does not represent an adequate contribution to the limitation of climate change and to a real ecological alternative, but threatens to exacerbate the world-wide dangers to security and peace.


ihttp://interactive.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/documents/security/national_security_strategy.pdf


iihttp://www.premier-ministre.gouv.fr/de/information/presse_880/rede_von_staatspraesident_nicolas_57904.htm


iiihttp://securityandclimate.cna.org


ivhttp://www.wbgu.de/wbgu_jg2007_kurz.html


vhttp://www.muenchener-rueck.de/publications/302-04771_de.pdf?rdm=88798


vihttp://www.consilium.europa.eu/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressdata/DE/reports/99391.pdf


viihttp://consilium.europa/eu/uedocs/cmsUpload/031208ESSIIDE.pdf