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Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security
By JOHN M. BRODER
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/09/science/earth/09climate.html?scp=1&sq=National%20Security%20AND%20
Climate%20Change&st=cse
August 9, 2009
WASHINGTON — The changing global climate will pose profound strategic challenges to the
United States in coming decades, raising the prospect of military intervention to deal with the
effects of violent storms, drought, mass migration and pandemics, military and intelligence
analysts say.
Such climate-induced crises could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize
entire regions, say the analysts, experts at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies who for the
first time are taking a serious look at the national security implications of climate change.
Recent war games and intelligence studies conclude that over the next 20 to 30 years,
vulnerable regions, particularly sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast
Asia, will face the prospect of food shortages, water crises and catastrophic flooding driven by
climate change that could demand an American humanitarian relief or military response.
An exercise last December at the National Defense University, an educational institute that is
overseen by the military, explored the potential impact of a destructive flood in Bangladesh
that sent hundreds of thousands of refugees streaming into neighboring India, touching off
religious conflict, the spread of contagious diseases and vast damage to infrastructure. “It gets
real complicated real quickly,” said Amanda J. Dory, the deputy assistant secretary of defense
for strategy, who is working with a Pentagon group assigned to incorporate climate change into
national security strategy planning.
Much of the public and political debate on global warming has focused on finding substitutes
for fossil fuels, reducing emissions that contribute to greenhouse gases and furthering
negotiations toward an international climate treaty — not potential security challenges.
But a growing number of policy makers say that the world’s rising temperatures, surging seas
and melting glaciers are a direct threat to the national interest.
If the United States does not lead the world in reducing fossil-fuel consumption and thus
emissions of global warming gases, proponents of this view say, a series of global
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environmental, social, political and possibly military crises loom that the nation will urgently
have to address.
This argument could prove a fulcrum for debate in the Senate next month when it takes up
climate and energy legislation passed in June by the House.
Lawmakers leading the debate before Congress are only now beginning to make the national
security argument for approving the legislation.
Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who is the chairman of the Foreign Relations
Committee and a leading advocate for the climate legislation, said he hoped to sway Senate
skeptics by pressing that issue to pass a meaningful bill.
Mr. Kerry said he did not know whether he would succeed but had spoken with 30 undecided
senators on the matter.
He did not identify those senators, but the list of undecided includes many from coal and
manufacturing states and from the South and Southeast, which will face the sharpest energy
price increases from any carbon emissions control program.
“I’ve been making this argument for a number of years,” Mr. Kerry said, “but it has not been a
focus because a lot of people had not connected the dots.” He said he had urged President
Obama to make the case, too.
Mr. Kerry said the continuing conflict in southern Sudan, which has killed and displaced tens of
thousands of people, is a result of drought and expansion of deserts in the north. “That is going
to be repeated many times over and on a much larger scale,” he said.
The Department of Defense’s assessment of the security issue came about after prodding by
Congress to include climate issues in its strategic plans — specifically, in 2008 budget
authorizations by Hillary Rodham Clinton and John W. Warner, then senators. The department’s
climate modeling is based on sophisticated Navy and Air Force weather programs and other
government climate research programs at NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration.
The Pentagon and the State Department have studied issues arising from dependence on
foreign sources of energy for years but are only now considering the effects of global warming
in their long-term planning documents. The Pentagon will include a climate section in the
Quadrennial Defense Review, due in February; the State Department will address the issue in
its new Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review.
“The sense that climate change poses security and geopolitical challenges is central to the
thinking of the State Department and the climate office,” said Peter Ogden, chief of staff to
Todd Stern, the State Department’s top climate negotiator.
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Although military and intelligence planners have been aware of the challenge posed by climate
changes for some years, the Obama administration has made it a central policy focus.
A changing climate presents a range of challenges for the military. Many of its critical
installations are vulnerable to rising seas and storm surges. In Florida, Homestead Air Force
Base was essentially destroyed by Hurricane Andrew in 1992, and Hurricane Ivan badly
damaged Naval Air Station Pensacola in 2004. Military planners are studying ways to protect
the major naval stations in Norfolk, Va., and San Diego from climate-induced rising seas and
severe storms.
Another vulnerable installation is Diego Garcia, an atoll in the Indian Ocean that serves as a
logistics hub for American and British forces in the Middle East and sits a few feet above sea
level.
Arctic melting also presents new problems for the military. The shrinking of the ice cap, which is
proceeding faster than anticipated only a few years ago, opens a shipping channel that must be
defended and undersea resources that are already the focus of international competition.
Ms. Dory, who has held senior Pentagon posts since the Clinton administration, said she had
seen a “sea change” in the military’s thinking about climate change in the past year. “These
issues now have to be included and wrestled with” in drafting national security strategy, she
said.
The National Intelligence Council, which produces government-wide intelligence analyses,
finished the first assessment of the national security implications of climate change just last
year.
It concluded that climate change by itself would have significant geopolitical impacts around
the world and would contribute to a host of problems, including poverty, environmental
degradation and the weakening of national governments.
The assessment warned that the storms, droughts and food shortages that might result from a
warming planet in coming decades would create numerous relief emergencies.
“The demands of these potential humanitarian responses may significantly tax U.S. military
transportation and support force structures, resulting in a strained readiness posture and
decreased strategic depth for combat operations,” the report said.
The intelligence community is preparing a series of reports on the impacts of climate change on
individual countries like China and India, a study of alternative fuels and a look at how major
power relations could be strained by a changing climate.
“We will pay for this one way or another,” Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a retired Marine and the
former head of the Central Command, wrote recently in a report he prepared as a member of a
military advisory board on energy and climate at CNA, a private group that does research for
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the Navy. “We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we’ll have to take an
economic hit of some kind.
“Or we will pay the price later in military terms,” he warned. “And that will involve human
lives.”
Water Wars Loom in a Nation of Parched Fields [India]
by Matt Wade
Published on Friday, September 25, 2009 by The Age (Australia)
http://www.theage.com.au/world/water-wars-loom-in-a-nation-of-parched-fields-20090925-g6au.html
BALAWAS, INDIA - Chatan Singh, a farmer in the village of Balawas in Haryana, India, has planted two
crops in his fields since June, but both have failed because of the scanty monsoon. A few years ago this
would have been unthinkable because tube wells and a nearby canal could have made up for any
shortfall in rain. But the canal recently ran dry and the wells are suddenly spewing out unusable saline
water. When this year's rains went truant, Chatan's crops withered, leaving the father of eight deep in
debt.
''This is new,'' he says. ''Once there was good water from the rains, the canal and the tube wells, but
now it's scarce.''
Chatan and his neighbours are being forced to drink the saline water that comes from the ground. Tests
by a local university have shown it is not fit for regular consumption, but the villagers keep drinking.
There is no alternative. It is a pattern being repeated around the subcontinent, says environmentalist
Vandana Shiva, who has studied the effects of modern agriculture in India for more than 20 years and
now believes her country is destined for water wars. ''In a decade, India could look like Darfur in Sudan,''
she says. ''When you run out of water, it's a recipe for killing. Water really makes people so desperate.''
A patchy monsoon on the subcontinent this year has hit crops, particularly rice, highlighting the region's
vulnerability to water shortages. But the problem is much bigger than one poor wet season.
In Haryana and Punjab, two states crucial to India's food security, farmers are drawing too much
groundwater. Dubbed the subcontinent's breadbasket, this region has been the heartland of India's
green revolution since the mid-1960s. The high-yielding crop varieties grown here have enabled the
country to feed its huge, fast-growing population. But the hybrid crops of the green revolution require a
lot of water as well as fertiliser and pesticides.
Farmers in Punjab and Haryana are now drilling deeper and deeper for water and the crop yields that
once rose year after year have stagnated.
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A new analysis of NASA satellite data for the north-west of India from 2002 to 2008 has found aquifers
are disappearing at an alarming rate. The study warns of the potential "collapse of agriculture" and
severe shortages of drinking water in the region unless things change.
Associate Professor Raj Kumar Jhorar, a soil and water specialist at Haryana Agricultural University, says
too many farmers have switched to water-intensive crops such as rice, wheat and cotton. His research
shows that the area of rice under cultivation in Haryana has risen by about 430 per cent since the late
1960s, cotton by 230 per cent and wheat by more than 200 per cent.
"This just isn't sustainable," he says.
A Punjab Government draft water policy published last year said the state's water resources were being
polluted by industrial waste, sewage and excessive pesticide use in agriculture. "This can adversely
affect the health of the populace and may cause diseases like cancer, skin diseases and miscarriage
cases."
These reports only confirm what local farmers already know.
According to Vandana Shiva, water shortages could split Indian communities along deeply entrenched
divisions of caste and religion. ''What we will start seeing is localised conflicts over water,'' she says. ''As
livelihoods evaporate, along with water, you will see all sorts of cracks opening up in society.''
Conflict is also possible between India's majority rural population and its bursting cities. "People with
power live in cities and, as the water crisis is deepening, what remains is being increasingly delivered to
the cities," says Shiva.
She is tracking eight major river diversions under way in India to provide cities with more water.
Farmers in Balawas don't quibble with Shiva's predictions of violent conflict over water. ''Our wives
already squabble over drinking water, so when it gets to agricultural water there will be a much bigger
fight,'' says farmer Jai Singh Sharma.
Sharma's family owns 16 hectares in Balawas, but he now plants crops on less than half a hectare
because of a lack of water. ''Our water is running out. Our tube wells are no longer giving us what we
need,'' he says. ''If our water supply keeps receding at this rate we will see violence.''
Sharma fears the stress over water will also trigger a wave of suicides among the district's deeply
indebted farmers. ''If this trend keeps going, some will leave ... but many will just kill themselves,'' he
says.
At Dauatpur village, about 50 kilometres from Balawas, the farmers are just as pessimistic. Kulbhushan
Sharma, whose family owns six hectares, says he has been forced to drill his wells deeper, especially in
the past five years.
''Slowly, slowly, year by year things are going from bad to worse,'' he says. ''If this goes on it will be the
end. Forget water for farming, we won't even have any to drink. The whole of India will be affected.''
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There have been bitter fights recently over the dwindling supply of canal water in Dauatpur. "The
violence has started," says Sharma.
Last month a gang of farmers at Aurangabad, in the poverty-stricken state of Bihar, gained nationwide
publicity when they took up arms to guard their watered fields.
The gun-toting villagers claimed water thieves from nearby were trying to divert water towards their
fields. They were ready to kill or be killed to protect their water.
"We don't want a fight, but if someone diverts the canal water then how will we irrigate our fields?'' one
of the armed men, Narendra Singh, said on local television.
Indian governments have been urged to manage water more effectively and to improve the patchy
maintenance of India's vast canal systems. Non-government organisations such as Gram Swarajya
Sansthan in Haryana are funded by official schemes to educate farmers about groundwater depletion
and to promote rainwater harvesting and other strategies to help replenish the water table. The Punjab
Government recently banned farmers from planting paddy rice until after the monsoon arrives, in a bid
to save water. There are also ambitious dam building and river diversion schemes.
However, political imperatives have stifled sensible reforms. Water is not priced appropriately and most
farmers enjoy free electricity to run their groundwater pumps. This encourages waste.
As if India's water problems were not enough already, global warming threatens to make them much
worse.
"We know that climate change will intensify the water crisis," says Shiva.
Scientists say the annual monsoon, on which about 40 per cent of India's farmers depend, is likely to
become more unpredictable. At the same time, the Himalayan glaciers that feed great rivers of the
subcontinent upon which hundreds of millions of people rely are receding at a worrying rate.
The World Bank says climate change alone could reduce the subcontinent's crop yields by 30 per cent by
the mid-21st century. Meanwhile, India adds more than 20 million new mouths to feed every year.