Climate change
Climate change is high on both domestic and international political agendas as countries face up to the huge environmental challenges the world now faces. Whilst this attention is welcome, less energy is being focused on the inevitable impact climate change will have on security issues. The well-documented physical effects of climate change will have knock-on socio-economic impacts, such as loss of infrastructure, resource scarcity and the mass displacement of peoples. These in turn could produce serious security consequences that will present new challenges to governments trying to maintain stability.
Roger Howard writes, exclusively for sustainablesecurity.org, that:
The Human Security Report Project has published a new book exploring the links between climate change and conflicts over natural resources across Africa.
A Policy Briefing from the University of Sussex's Institute of Development Studies claims that the debate on the relationship between climate change and conflict has reached an impasse. The paper argues that it is time for a more measured view of vulnerability to climate change and a better understanding of the causes of conflict.
This Working Paper by SAFERWORLD presents a framework for analysis that may go some way towards accommodating the complexity and variability of modelling the linkages between climate change and conflict. It does not cover all dimensions of the relationship between climate change and conflict, but focuses upon how it plays out a local level and what this means for policy and programming.
