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.
The doubters of global warming are emboldened by their new ability - as in the “climategate” affair - to put climate researchers on the defensive. But the experience of comparable assaults on the discipline of peace studies in the 1980s suggests that hostile scrutiny can have longer-term benefits for the target.
A new report from the US Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, for the House of Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has highlighted the regional impacts of climate change in his assessment of threats to US national security. In his public statement, Blair states that global climate change will have a wide-ranging implications for US national security interests over the next 20 years because it will aggravate existing world problems-such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weal political institutions- that threaten state stability.
