More than three dozen national security officials, members of Congress and military leaders are warning of the threat climate change poses to U.S. national security, the latest in an indicator that U.S. intelligence and national security circles are increasingly worried about a warming planet.
In a new bipartisan open letter, they stress the need for urgent action and call on both public and private support to address issues that included forced migration and the displacement of vulnerable communities, as well as the dangers related to food production during extreme weather events.
“We tried to accomplish two things: First, to make a call to action on the whole issue of climate change,” Lee Hamilton, a former member of Congress and a founder of the Partnership for a Secure America (PSA), a bipartisan Washington group that organised the letter, told IPS.
It’s very weird we’re getting '100-year floods' every five years.
“Many people are frustrated that the political system doesn’t seem to be able to deal with question of climate change. It’s not on the agenda – the president has mentioned it, politicians have mentioned it, but we really have no action taking place.”
Hamilton continued, “The second thing we did was put it in a national security context, which I think was a unique way to frame it, and hopefully it will provide an additional stimulus for action.”
Signatories to the letter include former secretaries of state (George Schultz and Madeleine Albright), secretaries of defence and homeland security (William Cohen and Tom Ridge), a former director of central intelligence (R. James Woolsey), several generals (Gen. Anthony Zinni, Gen. Wesley Clark) and others.
They join the State Department, Defence Department, National Intelligence Council and a growing number of other security voices here in emphasising the national security implications of climate change.
“Even if you’re sceptical about any single part of climate change, it’s hard to get away from the … combination of feedback loops together with population growth and increasing consumption, which lead to a number of national security concerns,” Woolsey said here Tuesday, referring to “millions upon millions of hungry, thirsty neighbours to the south [of the United States], looking for somewhere to go.”
Unless precautionary steps are taken, the letter warns that “climate change impacts abroad could spur mass migrations, influence civil conflict and ultimately lead to a more unpredictable world.” And “protecting U.S. interests under these conditions would progressively exhaust American military, diplomatic and development resources as we struggle to meet growing demands for emergency international engagement.”
The new letter also comes against the backdrop of unfulfilled promises of action from the White House and a highly polarised Congress on the issue.
For the complete article, please see Inter Press Service.
2019 has only just begun, but it is already hard to imagine that there will be other extreme weather events with disastrous consequences such as cyclone Idai happening again this year. In all likelihood, such events will continue to occur as 2019 rolls on. Idai is, once more, proof of how devastating and toxic the mix of climate change, extreme weather events and poverty can be: Mozambique, Malawi and Zimbabwe – countries that rank low in human development but contribute very little to global greenhouse gas emissions – suffer from some of the worst impacts of climate change.
adelphi has relaunched its exhibition Environment, Conflict and Cooperation (ECC) Exhibition to illustrate how unprecedented environmental changes interact with social, political, and economic risks to exacerbate conflict. We invite you to explore our online exhibition and to learn more about urgent issues of our time: climate, energy, migration, extractives, food and water.
Climate security risks are, by all interpretations, a global threat. But when it comes to setting a political climate security agenda, a handful of countries stand out. In an interview with Climate Diplomacy, Michaela Spaeth, Director for Energy and Climate Policy at the German Federal Foreign Office, highlights some of Germany’s goals and challenges in forwarding the issue during its 2019-20 membership in the UN Security Council.
The Planetary Security Conference 2019, which concluded on 20 February, saw a number of workshops being held on the Sahel region and specifically Mali, one of the Conference’s three spotlight regions. These workshops examined the region’s climate-water-security risks as well as the #doable actions and solutions to address these issues.