Climate and Social Stress Implications for Security Analysis (2013) / Chapter Skim
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2 Climate Change, Vulnerability, and National Security: A Conceptual Framework
2 Climate Change, Vulnerability, and National Security: A Conceptual Framework
Pages 35-52
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From page 35... ...
Climate events, which may be acute or slowly developing, include physical events such as droughts, heat waves, and extreme storms; the ecological consequences of physical changes, such as crop failures and disease outbreaks; and events that may have both physical and biological causes, such as fires in unhealthy forests. Depending on other socioeconomic, political, and environmental conditions and on societal reactions to the disruption caused by climate events, a given climate event may ultimately result in large-scale social and political outcomes that have the potential to affect U.S.
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From page 36... ...
. Disaster: a consequence of hazardous physical or biological events inter acting with vulnerable social conditions, leading to widespread adverse human, material, economic, or environmental effects that alter the normal functioning of CONNECTIONS BETWEEN CLIMATE EVENTS AND NATIONAL SECURITY Figure 2-1 shows our general conceptual framework for thinking about climate–security relationships that involve vulnerabilities to climate events.
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From page 37... ...
Response: the provision of emergency services and assistance, typically by formal organizations such as police, hospitals, and governmental or international organizations during or immediately after a disruptive event in order to save lives, reduce health impacts, ensure public safety, and meet the basic subsistence needs of the people affected (adapted from United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, 2009a)
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From page 38... ...
. Many of these links involve causation in both directions; however, some of the causal links are much more important than others on time-scales that are important for security analysis.
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From page 39... ...
Disaster is defined as "severe alterations in the normal functioning of a community or a society due to hazardous physical events interacting with vulnerable social conditions, leading to widespread adverse human, material, economic, or environmental effects that require immediate emergency response to satisfy critical human needs and that may require external support for recovery"
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From page 40... ...
The term response connotes more formal activities and is generally taken to mean "the provision of emergency services and public assistance during or immediately after a disaster in order to save lives, reduce health impacts, ensure public safety, and meet the basic subsistence needs of the people affected" (United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction, 2009a)
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From page 41... ...
Climate conditions, including averages and variations in climate parameters such as temperature and precipitation, have always generated potentially disruptive events. Some extreme climate conditions have been occurring more frequently in recent decades (Hansen et al., 2012; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2012)
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From page 42... ...
Climate science is the main source of knowledge for foreseeing climate events; social science and knowledge of local conditions are the main sources of knowledge for foreseeing exposures, susceptibility, and the likely effectiveness of coping, response, and recovery. We discuss the determinants of future climate events in Chapter 3 and the determinants of exposure, susceptibility, coping, response, and recovery in Chapter 4.
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From page 43... ...
One is by creating social or political stresses or inducing policy actions within or between foreign countries that pose security risks for the United States. Another is by developing into major humanitarian crises that directly create U.S.
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From page 44... ...
When this is the case, the rate of change in the risk of disruption from climate events may be more dependent on changes in the conditions affecting exposure and vulnerability, including actions taken to reduce susceptibility and prepare for disasters, than on changes in climate. Changing Exposures to Coastal Storms and Floods A simple example is the growing risk to human populations in coastal areas from storm surge and sea level rise.
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From page 45... ...
This trend will decrease these populations' vulnerability to extreme climate events affecting local crops and meat supplies. At the same time the dependence of low-income populations on imported food supplies provided by global markets may increase their vulnerability to climatic or economic events in other parts of the world that sharply increase the prices of the foods they have come to depend upon.
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From page 46... ...
For decades water supplies had been increasingly appropriated to irrigate crops and provide electric power, but this situation did not create a crisis for livelihoods until these slow changes combined with the much decreased water flows in the Indus River to create a situation in which the agricultural and energy systems were highly vulnerable to drought. The Indus water commissioner's claim that the cause of the water shortage was climate change may or may not have been accurate; ordinary climate variation may have been the trigger.
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From page 47... ...
. The ecological change did not become seriously disruptive to human populations until the increased prevalence of dead trees combined with drought and hot weather to produce major wildfires that affected populated areas.
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From page 48... ...
We discuss these issues further in Chapter 4. STRATEGIES FOR SECURITY ANALYSIS As the discussion so far makes clear, there are many plausible scenarios by which climate change, climate events, and their interactions with nonclimate environmental conditions and socioeconomic and political changes might set processes in motion that create national security concerns for the United States.
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From page 49... ...
One takes a forecasting approach: Analysts project the likelihoods of disruptive events and bring the high-risk forecasts to policy makers' attention. Applied to climate change, this approach would need to involve the forecasting of climate events as well of as societal conditions that alter exposure and susceptibility to harm from those events and that affect the ways that governments, societies, and other social institutions respond when climate events create social disruptions.
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From page 50... ...
Social conditions and social changes affect the exposure and vulnerability of human populations and societies to climate events and thus the risks associated with these events. They also shape the responses of social systems when such events occur, further influencing the risks of political and social stress.
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From page 51... ...
The "stress testing" that we recommend in Chapter 6 mainly follows this approach. A fourth approach emphasizes policy vulnerability analysis.
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From page 52... ...
Analysis of system vulnerabilities requires the monitoring of regime capacities and capabilities, but it also requires monitoring the various climatic and socioeconomic factors that might make climate events stressful for the system. Similarly, policy vulnerability analysis requires the monitoring of U.S.
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