Climate change: Experts issue imminent security risk warning
Print Edition
Climate change threats — from worsening water shortages in Iraq to harsher hurricanes in the Caribbean — are a growing security risk and require concerted action to ensure they don’t spark new violence, security experts warned.
“Climate change is not about something in the far and distant future. We are discussing imminent threats to national security,” said Monika Sie Dhian Ho, general director of the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think tank.
The drying of Africa’s Lake Chad basin, for instance, has helped drive recruitment for Islamist militant group Boko Haram among young people unable to farm or find other work, said Haruna Kuje Ayuba of Nigeria’s Nasarawa State University.
“People are already deprived of a basic livelihood,” the geography professor said at a Hague conference on climate and security. “If you give them a little money and tell them to destroy this or kill that, they are ready to do it.”
Iraq, meanwhile, has seen its water supplies plunge as its upstream neighbors build dams and climate change brings hotter and drier conditions to Baghdad, said Hisham al-Alawi, Iraq’s ambassador to the Netherlands.
“Overall we are getting less by nearly 40 percent of the waters we used to get,” he told the conference.
Shoring up the country’s water security, largely by building more storage and cutting water losses, will take nearly US$80 billion through 2035, he said.
Faced with more heat and less rain, “we need to be wise and start planning for the future, as this trend is likely to continue,” he said.
The threat of worsening violence related to climate change also extends to countries and regions not currently thought of as insecurity hot spots, climate and security analysts at the conference warned.
The Caribbean, for instance, faces more destructive hurricanes, coral bleaching, sea-level rise and looming water shortages that threaten its main economic pillars, notably tourism.
“We’re facing an existential crisis in the Caribbean,” said Selwin Hart, the Barbados-born executive director of the Inter-American Development Bank.
Ninety percent of the region’s economic activity — like tourism, fishing and port operations — takes place on the threatened coastline, he said.
Hurricanes have flattened the economies of some Caribbean nations, with Hurricane Maria in 2017 costing Dominica about 225 percent of its GDP, according to World Bank estimates.
But as the global emissions that drive climate change continue to rise, “there’s not a realistic chance of achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement.”
The agreement calls for a rapid shift away from fossil fuels to hold the global average temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius.
The failure to cut emissions means the Caribbean, while doing what it can to become more resilient to the growing risks, also needs “to plan for the worst-case scenario,” Hart said.
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