In May 2018, the Brazilian Institute for Climate and Society and the German Embassy in Brazil hosted an event on international climate and security in Rio de Janeiro. The meeting, joined by experts from the public sector, civil society and international think tanks, reflects Latin America’s increased interest in the international dimension of climate fragility risks.
Latin America is no stranger to the security implications of climate change. Natural disasters and resource scarcity in the region’s arid zones have driven populations to move and shaped the continent’s urban centres for decades, leading to resource depletion and aggravating urban fragility. But the continent is now also starting to pick up on the global dimension of climate security, e.g. geopolitical impacts, and is looking into how to prepare for a changing international scenario.
On 18 May 2018, the Institute for Climate and Society hosted an event on International Climate and Security in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where adelphi’s Alexander Carius highlighted climate impacts as a stress multiplier with high conflict-inducing potential. He drew attention to the Lake Chad situation and stressed how this climate security hotspot is crucial for understanding and addressing global security threats arising from regional climatic pressures.
In his intervention, Carius addressed how climate impacts as well as adaptation strategies might influence regional power relations and fundamentally change the global geopolitical scenario. “What will happen if Germany meets its target of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050 and reduces its dependency on Russian oil and gas?” questioned Carius, as an example of how far-reaching the consequences of international climate governance can be. He also emphasized the need to prepare cities for the inevitable strain on infrastructure that will arise from growing climate migration to urban centres, a well-known problem in the Latin American continent.
The event is part of the Sustainable Future Dialogues initiative and gathered experts and academics from the German Embassy in Brazil, the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), the United Nations Population Fund Brazil (UNFPA Brazil), the Fondación Futuro Latinoamericano (FFLA), the Center for Climate & Security, the Climate Change Division of the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (DCLIMA), the Brazilian Defence Ministry, the International Institute for Sustainability (IIS) and Conectas Human Rights.
To fight illegal coca plantations and conflict actors’ income sources, Colombia’s president wants to loosen the ban on aerial glyphosate spraying. However, considering the dynamics of organised crime, the use of toxic herbicides will not only fail to achieve its aim, it will have many adverse effects for the environment and human health, fundamentally undermining ways to reach peace in the country. International cooperation and national policy-makers need to account for this peace spoiler.
As India grapples with the worsening impacts of climate change, the need to strengthen its adaptation efforts has become more significant than ever. Climate diplomacy and mainstreaming climate adaptation into the most vulnerable sectors could provide some solutions to overcoming barriers, such as the lack of sustainable funding.
“Climate Security risks will materialise in very different ways and forms, whether we talk about Lake Chad or about the Arctic, Bangladesh and the Small Island Developing States,” said the EU’s Ambassador to the United Nations in New York, Joao Vale de Almeida, in his opening remarks. “But for the EU, there is no doubt, as underlined in 2016 in our Global Strategy, and reaffirmed by the 28 Ministers of Foreign Affairs, that climate change is a major threat to the security of the EU and to global peace and security more generally,” he said.
The challenges facing the international community are growing while the willingness to cooperate seems to be waning. Foreign policy must help bridge this gap. One way to accomplish this is by pushing forward a major achievement of multilateralism: the 2030 Agenda and its 17 Sustainable Development Goals. At a side event during the 2019 High-Level Political Forum, diplomats and policy experts discussed the role of foreign policy in the global sustainability architecture.