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5 Climate Events and National Security Outcomes
Pages 97-138

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From page 97...
... With the exception of events such as direct damage to military facilities caused by extreme weather, we believe the causal relationship between climate change and specific climate events and security outcomes is likely to be indirect, with complex and 97
From page 98...
... It is not possible in this study to examine all possible links, so this chapter examines a selection of some of the most commonly mentioned relationships. It begins with an examination of the connections between climate events and some of the major outcomes -- such as threats to water, food, and health security; humanitarian crises; and disruptive migration -- that are frequently cited in the policy literature, and it then discusses traditional security outcomes, such as political instability and interstate and internal conflict.
From page 99...
... Demand for water for domestic use will decrease as a percentage of total, from 14 percent today to 12 percent in 2030, although it will grow in specific basins, especially in emerging markets" (2030 Water Resources Group, 2009:6)
From page 100...
... Water and Conflict Disputes over water date back millennia; the Water Conflict Chronology List, for example, begins with an account of a Sumerian legend from 3,000 BCE that resembles the Biblical story of Noah. Five hundred years later two Sumerian city-states, Lagash and Umma, provided the first written record of going to war over water; the rulers of Lagash diverted water from boundary canals to deny supplies to neighboring Umma, setting the conflict in motion.4 The idea that water scarcity could be a direct source of violent internal or international conflict has produced a literature on "water wars" from both academic and policy sources (see, for example, Cooley, 1984; Starr, 3  The material in this section is taken from National Research Council (2012b:23–25)
From page 101...
... : where water resources or water systems are a major source of contention and dispute in the context of economic and social development. (Water Conflict Chronology List: see http://www.worldwater.
From page 102...
... . • Most shared water resources are governed by some sort of inter national agreement; more than 150 international treaties to govern fresh water were put in place between 1946 and 1999 (Yoffe et al., 2003)
From page 103...
... Bernauer and Siegfried (2012) focus on possible water conflict in the Syr Darya river basin in Central Asia, which they described as a zone that is "highly conflict-prone and [where]
From page 104...
... conclude that most of the current high-risk catchment basins are currently in North Africa or sub-Saharan Africa but that this will change in coming decades, with high-risk transboundary river basins developing in many other world regions. Famine and Severe Food Insecurity The international humanitarian community has a strict definition of "famine" along with set criteria for its declaration: At least 20 percent of households in an area face extreme food shortages with a limited ability to cope; acute malnutrition rates exceed 30 percent; and [attributable]
From page 105...
... Finally, because access to food is the crucial concept underlying entitlement and in most places price determines access or lack thereof, and because any real or perceived food supply problem will affect price, climate change impacts are likely to be a factor in -- or blamed for -- food price spikes and food security crises. Pandemics and Health Security An epidemic occurs when the number of cases of a particular disease substantially exceeds what is expected in a specified population over a given time period, and a pandemic is defined as an epidemic of infectious disease that has spread through human populations across large regions.
From page 106...
... This includes, but is not limited to, health outcomes associated with extreme weather and climate events, changes in air quality, infectious diseases, and malnutrition (Confalonieri et al., 2007)
From page 107...
... Evidence indicates that weather and seasonal to interannual climate variability influence the geographic distributions and seasonal variation patterns of many infectious diseases (National Research Council, 2001)
From page 108...
... . Influenza Unlike the familiar seasonal influenza epidemics, influenza pandemics occur irregularly and spread worldwide, infecting a large proportion of the human population and causing significant morbidity and mortality.
From page 109...
... . Yellow Fever Yellow fever, a viral hemorrhagic fever, has been one of the great scourges of mankind, periodically causing high mortality over at least the past 400 years (Weaver and Reisen, 2010)
From page 110...
... . Urban yellow fever results in large, explosive epidemics when travelers from rural areas introduce the virus into areas with high human population density.
From page 111...
... . Although Aedes aegypti has returned to more than its original range, yellow fever remains largely a zoonotic and rural disease in South America.
From page 112...
... 405) Given the general global decline in violent conflict since the early to mid-1990s discussed later in the chapter, there seems to be little likelihood, especially in the next 10 years, that climate change per se will generate the kinds of conflicts that lead to CHEs that require massive international community responses.
From page 113...
... further notes that most studies of this type emphasize predictions about potential future displacement or population movement based on estimates of populations that will be exposed to environmental stress such as storm surges and sea level rise (e.g., Biermann and Boas, 2010) rather than on documentation of the actual numbers of people displaced by past or ongoing environmental change.
From page 114...
... 114 macro micro meso FIGURE 5-2  Environmental drivers interact both directly and indirectly with other drivers of migration. SOURCE: Black et al.
From page 115...
... (2011b) suggest that environmental change may directly contribute to migration through mechanisms that contribute to changes in the reliability or availability of ecosystem services such as productivity of land; food, energy, and water security; and exposure to hazards.
From page 116...
... Another critical factor for migration decisions is the effectiveness of responses to climate events. As noted in the discussion of humanitarian crises, effective response is a key determinant of whether an extreme climate event becomes a humanitarian crisis.
From page 117...
... . SEVERE POLITICAL INSTABILITY AND STATE FAILURE Extreme political instability, particularly when it substantially weakens or causes the overthrow or collapse of a strategically important regime or when it results in the onset of civil war, may have significant security
From page 118...
... Its original task was to assess and explain the vulnerability of states around the world to political instability and state failure, focusing on events like the collapse of state authority in Somalia and the former Zaire and other onsets of disruptive regime change, civil war, genocide and mass killing, and onsets and terminations of democratic government. The task force uses open-source data and research to develop statistical models that can accurately assess countries' prospects for major political change and can identify key risk factors of interest to U.S.
From page 119...
... . This effort finds regional concentrations of risk in South Asia and in sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that unusual climate events in those regions are of particular concern in terms of exacerbating the potential for political instability.
From page 120...
... One literature that does provide a more detailed exploration of potential climate–security links is the literature on the potential political impacts of disasters. Its findings generally support the conclusion that climate events that trigger disasters of various types are associated with political instability, although not in a straightforward way.
From page 121...
... national security are in countries of security concern that have a significant likelihood of exposure to particular climate events combined with susceptible populations and life-supporting systems, weak response capacity, and underlying sources of potential political instability. Pakistan offers a case that illustrates these points particularly well, as described below.
From page 122...
... , mostly from the reservoirs also used for irrigation-water storage, creating competition for water resources between agriculture and energy, at least at some times of the year. Competition for water between the agricultural and power sectors is already intense and is likely to increase.
From page 123...
... projects lower annual average precipitation in the subtropics but also a greater incidence of high precipitation events, so that a greater concentration of total precipitation is expected to occur in extreme events and an even greater increase in dry periods is expected than implied by the drop in average annual precipitation.
From page 124...
... Press accounts and some technical reports indicate the country's increasingly stressed water resources (e.g., Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency, 2011) and its leaders' difficulties dealing with the problem.
From page 125...
... We return to the monitoring issues in Chapter 6. INTERSTATE AND INTRASTATE CONFLICT AND VIOLENCE Patterns of Violent Conflict As background for the discussion of research about climate–conflict connections, it is useful to note several general trends in global patterns of internal and interstate conflict since the end of World War II.
From page 126...
... . As shown in Figure 5-3,11 the UCDP data reflect two broad trends that also appear in the other major databases: • The decades since World War II have experienced a relatively small number of interstate armed conflicts, both in absolute numbers and, especially, relative to intrastate conflict.
From page 127...
... As discussed earlier in the chapter, the one area in which there is clear historical evidence of an effect -- disputes over shared water resources -- the evidence indicates
From page 128...
... Again, disputes over water resources are the one exception. A better understanding of how climate change or events might affect crisis dynamics, particularly in regions where there are other reasons to be concerned about the risks of interstate conflict, could contribute to an understanding of the potential for violence.
From page 129...
... Some scholars have questioned the basis for linking climate change so directly to probabilities of increased conflict, internal as well as international, and, more broadly, to social and political instability. They question the conceptual and empirical bases of the arguments as well as the methodologies employed.
From page 130...
... as well as population pressure exacerbated by migration, and it offers five "social effects of climate change [that] have been suggested as intermediating catalysts of organized violence": political instability, social fragmentation, economic instability, inappropriate response (possibly meaning inappropriate adaptation)
From page 131...
... and Kahl (2006) do not argue that environmental change gener ally and climate change specifically have a major impact on conflict -- the effect plays out in interaction with exogenous conflict-promoting factors (Buhaug, Gleditsch, and Theisen, 2008, 2010)
From page 132...
... Given data limitations and a perception that major, state-based conflicts carry greater potential for political instability and state collapse than small-scale in terethnic skirmishes, recent scholarship has focused almost exclusively on civil wars. This is reflected in the contemporary discourse on climate security, which is dominated by a state-centric approach.
From page 133...
... or geographic shifts, or at least an expansion of their areas of incidence, there has been a renewed interest in the possible link between such events and interstate and intrastate violence.13 Using a time series for 1966–1980, Drury and Olson (1998) provided the first quantitative attempt to test for a relationship between disasters and political instability and found "a direct and positive linkage between disaster severity and ensuing levels of political unrest" (p.
From page 134...
... The effects of climate on security in the coming decade are therefore likely to be indirect and contingent, operating through effects on systems that support human well-being (e.g., food, water, or health systems) or on specific events and circumstances (violent conflicts, disruptive migrations)
From page 135...
... Available evidence on several of these connections, however, points to the same general finding we reported in Chapter 4 regarding the causes of social and political stresses, namely, that the effects of climatic events on outcomes of security significance are contingent on a variety of specific social, political, economic, and environmental conditions in affected places. Thus, even with a more extensive body of climate experience to draw upon, it is unlikely that simple, straightforward conclusions will be found that reliably link a climate event of a particular type with a particular kind of effect on conflict or on key aspects of social well-being.
From page 136...
... As part of this effort, the intelligence community and other interested agencies should sup port research to improve understanding of the conditions under which climate-related natural disasters and disruptions of critical systems of life support do or do not lead to important security-relevant outcomes such as political instability, violent conflict, humanitarian disasters, and disruptive migration.
From page 137...
... This research will need to use various methods and approaches. For example, given the complex and contingent relationships between climate events and such consequences as socioeconomic stress and political instability, a systematic set of longitudinal case studies is needed of the effects of climate events, using an explicit and common conceptual framework.
From page 138...
... 138 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS not necessarily do so now. The recommended interagency process can help bring these communities of experts together, because they tend to associate with different groups of agencies.


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