Yesterday afternoon President Obama announced a new Presidential Memorandum on climate change and national security. The policy directs 20 federal agencies to consider the national security implications of climate change and establish a working group that will develop a Climate Change and National Security Action Plan for the federal government.
On 9 August 2016, India’s Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), Anil Madhav Dave, informed the Lok Sabha (lower house of the Indian Parliament) that, according to an Oxford University study, approximately 136,000 climate change-related deaths are projected in India. This is primarily due to decreased food production. He went on to quote figures from a World Health Organisation (WHO) report, published in 2014, which pins the principle causes of death between 2030 and 2050 on malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress.
„The water crisis and climate change are closely interlinked and the impact of global climate change is clearly visible in the water resources and poses a serious risk to poverty reduction and threatens to undo decades of development efforts.”

In June 2010, The New York Times published a front page story trumpeting a Pentagon announcement of roughly $1 trillion worth of mineral resources in Afghanistan. Officials said the discovery was “far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself.” Then-President Hamid Karzai soon inflated the figure to $3 trillion and then again to $30 trillion, enough to transform the country into the “Saudi Arabia of lithium.”
The Nile River is shared by 11 countries, for which it is vital for food and energy production, freshwater, and as a means of transportation. Sharing the resources of the Nile has, however, been politically difficult. Recently, the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has caused a major dispute with downstream Egypt which fears the dam will affect water flow in its own territory.
Approaches developed in Mali, Senegal, Kenya and Tanzania offer insights for building resilience in areas facing risks of climate change, disasters and conflict.
A paper published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences tests the hypothesis that climate related natural disasters may be part of the cause of conflict in countries with high ethnic fractionalization.