Environment as a Peace Policy

© UNEP

Achim Steiner, the UN Under-Secretary General and United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) Executive Director, discusses the impact of climate change on global security. Countries must realise how climate change will effect their human and national security, and identify ways to increase their coping capacity.

With rising global temperatures, precipitation change, sea-level rise, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, climate change is emerging as a threat to peace and security.

Indeed, while political and military issues remain critical, conceptions of peace and security have broadened: economic and social threats including poverty, infectious diseases and environmental degradation are now also seen as significant undermining factors to peace. From an ecological perspective, the integration of environmental management into broader development and humanitarian frameworks is no longer an option but a security imperative.

In June 2008, Jan Egeland, the UN Secretary General’s Special Advisor on Conflict, together with UNEP experts, embarked on a mission to the Sahel region and concluded that the combination of environmental degradation and climate change is causing death, undermining livelihoods, and driving insecurity. As exemplified by the Sahel, climate change amplifies pre-existing resource scarcities and disproportionately affects vulnerable populations and states with weak adaptation capacities. Therefore, climate change cannot be easily classified, solely in terms of climate considerations and needs to be viewed as a threat multiplier that exacerbates current trends, tensions and instability.

Security Implications of Environmental Change

In line with the recent report of the Secretary General of the United Nations on climate change and its possible security implications, UNEP believes that the security implications of environmental change grouped into 5 main and interlinked dimensions:

• The first dimension is resource scarcity. With water, food, and energy security at stake, communities will struggle to manage increasingly scarce resources and protect their access to them. Struggles and tensions could mount. In Afghanistan for instance, where 80 percent of water resources originate from snowfall in the Hindu Kush mountains at altitudes above 2,000 meters, climate change represents a serious risk to water security. Without governance and other mechanisms in place to resolve access, disputes and equitable sharing of this vital resource, water issues could exacerbate the dramatic situation the country is currently facing.

• The second dimension is coastal vulnerability. Given that over a third of the world’s population lives in coastal zones, within 100 km of the shore, climate change, in particular rising sea levels could be catastrophic for human settlements, particularly considering inundation and shoreline erosion, freshwater shortages and disease outbreaks. In the case of small island developing states for instance, sea-level rise presents perhaps the ultimate security threat, jeopardizing the very existence of small low-lying countries. In economic terms, implications of sea-level rise could include the collapse of coastal fisheries and the tourism and recreation industries, and the loss of vital agricultural land and damage to critical ports, which could interfere with international trade, causing spill over cross-boundary flashpoints.
• Intensification of extreme weather events is the third dimension. Over the past 20 years, natural hazards have taken lives of more than 2 million people, have affected more than 200 million people annually, and have produced economic losses of over 1.2 trillion US dollars. The economic impact of hurricane Katrina lasting 24 hours was in the order of 125 billion dollars. No country can afford such a price tag year after year, in particular countries that are on the pathways towards development including least developed countries.

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The environmental and economic impact of climate change pose a threat to global security

• Migration is the fourth dimension. Forecasts on the number of persons that might have to migrate due to climate change and environmental degradation by 2050 vary between 50 million and 350 million. Environmental change will impact migration in three ways. First, global warming will decrease agriculture potential and undermine water availability. Second, the intensification of natural hazards such as flood, storm or drought, will affect more and more people with low adaptative capacity and generate uncontrolled large-scale human displacement. Third, densely-populated and low-lying coastal areas will be permanently flooded or damaged leading to relocation without return, recovery, and reintegration possible. A one meter sea level rise would result in the entire disappearance of the Maldives for example. Both Kiribati and the Maldives have ongoing resettlement plans.

• Transboundary and shared water resource competition is a final and very central dimension. Receding sea and land ice for instance could enable access to previously inaccessible resources such as oil and gas supplies in the Arctic, or newly viable agricultural land and transit routes like the North-West Passage, potentially triggering disputes over their ownership and control. For example, a number of Arctic countries are currently investigating options, including investment in military infrastructure, for securing ownership of Arctic territory, and thereby gaining access to untapped oil and gas fields.

The relationship between climate change and these five security dimensions is neither straightforward nor deterministic. In other words the severity of impacts depends in large part on states’ capacity to respond to security risks. However, it is clear that fragile countries or those already afflicted by conflict lack the capacity to deal with climate change. It is these states that will need particular help in addressing the security implications of climate change. In addition, those fragile states or those affected by conflicts have the potential to destabilize adjacent countries suffering from governance deficiencies.

Proposed Response Strategies

Identifying climate change, ecosystems management and the environmental dimensions of disasters and conflicts as priority issues, UNEP considers four response strategies as priorities:

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As the earth's temperature rises, communities will struggle to gain access to vital resources like water

• Ecosystem-based Adaptation: Building a country’s capacity to adapt to climate change is a prerequisite for addressing and preventing or reducing the impacts of environmental stressors from becoming triggers for conflict or resulting in deadly natural disasters.

  Investment in ecosystems can be a cost-effective way of building resilience to the impacts of climate change.

  Mangrove ecosystems for instance play a key mitigating role as physical barriers between communities and coastal hazards. Sound watershed management through anti-erosion control structures and monitoring local water consumption rates for instance will provide significant multiple benefits in terms of

• sustainable livelihoods for vulnerable communities depending on irrigation agriculture and fisheries,
• disaster risk reduction services in regions affected by frequent droughts, and
• conflict prevention mechanisms in zones experiencing tensions over scarce water resources such as the Lake Chad area bordering Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria.

• Green Economy: While mitigating climate change, preventing biodiversity decline and reducing threats of food, water and energy scarcity, the “green economy” can simultaneously create dynamic new industries, quality jobs, and income growth. Public policy can help markets accelerate the transition towards a “green economy” and to better assess the economic value of natural systems in order to address sustainable development and environmental challenges and opportunities including climate change mitigation and adaptation, and financing and technology transfer to developing countries.
• Strengthening national and regional governance: Vulnerable countries need to consider how climate change may impact their human and national security and identify ways to increase their coping capacity to address key security risks. To aid in this endeavour, vulnerable countries could work in partnership with the appropriate UN agencies to research, monitor and assess the country- and region-specific security implications of climate change. These assessments need to be integrated into national and UN development plans, early warning systems and disaster risk reduction strategies.

• Strengthening global governance: At the global level, efforts could be made to focus the attention of the international community on the security risks of climate change and enhance international cooperation on the early warning, identification and monitoring of security threats. This is particularly relevant for post-crisis countries where climate change represents a long-term challenge to reconstruction and peacebuilding.

Example: The Environment and Security Initiative

UNEP has been addressing vulnerability to conflicts and disasters from environmental factors around the world since the early 1990s. The Environment and Security Initiative is in this respect a good example of UNEP’s work in this field.

As a first international answer to the environmental security (or insecurity), NATO has joined five other international agencies – UNEP, UNDP, OSCE, UNECE and REC - in the Environment and Security Initiative (ENVSEC). By nature, this unprecedented partnership can offer countries a combined pool of expertise and resources to assess and address environmental problems, which threaten security, societal stability and peace, human health and sustainable livelihoods. ‘Environmental stress’ generates a plethora of complex questions, which require multifaceted answers that only such a joint programme may develop.

NATO, as an associated member, contributes to the ENVSEC both in capacity building and awareness raising, using its standard mechanisms for cooperative grants under the Science for Peace and Security programme. NATO works hand in hand with the partnership on environmental activities with a clear objective in mind: enhancing the security in vulnerable regions and bringing its scientific and technical expertise to the partnership.

South Eastern Europe, the Southern Caucasus, Eastern Europe and Central Asia are the four regions where ENVSEC is developing programmes to reduce tensions and avoid conflicts. While conducting assessments, the partners constantly have in mind that the destruction and over-exploitation of natural resources and ecosystems can indeed threaten the security of communities and nations. This international partnership is key to supporting countries in their efforts to manage environmental risks through international dialogue and neighbourly cooperation.

To conclude, environmental change is a growing and multi-faceted threat to security for which the consequences of inaction are expected to have dramatic repercussions for human civilization. The outcomes of the Copenhagen, United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2009 will in this respect be crucial and UNEP very much hopes that a necessary common and ambitious vision will be agreed regarding climate change and security in order to holistically address the main security challenge of the 21st Century.

As Margaret Beckett, former UK Environment secretary, said in 2007, "Climate change is a threat that can bring us together if we are wise enough to stop it from driving us apart."

Achim Steiner is the UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director