Competition over resources

In a three-month investigation, a team of Northwestern University graduate students has found that the US security establishment is not adequately prepared for many of the environmental changes that are coming faster than predicted and that threaten to reshape demands made on the military and intelligence community. The Medill School of Journalism graduate student team has just begun publishing its findings on the national security implications of climate change with a series of print, video and interactive stories at Global-Warning.org. 

Image source: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

As we turn a watchful eye toward COP16 it’s tempting to get sidetracked by other major events going on around the world. There are, after all, a host of developments which stand to have an impact on security in the immediate future and arguably, many of us have become perhaps too accustomed to placing economic and energy woes ahead of the environment on our individual lists of urgent priorities. We are, after all, in the middle of the worst global financial meltdown since the Great Depression and as banks stop lending, governments cut spending, unemployment rises, public outcry gathers momentum and as we’ve already seen in Ireland and Britain recently, even in highly-developed economies social unrest can translate into violence toward governments. We’re also running out of cheap and easy access to oil, which is “the lifeblood of modern civilization,” according to the 2005 Hirsch Report - not to mention modern militaries - and as developing countries continue to rapidly industrialise, Western governments grow weary of asymmetries in energy demand per capita as well as huge demographic shifts in population size and age, which tend to favour the East. That said, it helps to be reminded that economic and energy woes go hand-in-hand when it comes to addressing climate change. Therefore, in order for activists and government representatives alike to find common ground on which to build lasting and constructive partnerships for addressing major security threats, an interdisciplinary approach is needed that can help to elucidate how environmental, energy and economic dilemmas are deeply intertwined.