The Human and National Security Implications of Climate Change

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released four reports. To prepare these reports, thousands of scientists from around the world pored over all of the peer-reviewed research conducted since 2001, when the last assessment was published. The scientists synthesized the findings of this complex literature, and presented them to the world with careful estimates of how much certainty we can attach to each claim. Commentators are in wide agreement that these reports are extremely well done—they tell us exactly what scientists are discovering about human impact on the planet’s climate system.

What they are discovering is that climate change—or global warming—is significantly the result of people burning vast quantities of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels create greenhouse gases. These trap solar heat in the earth’s atmosphere. The oceans warm up. The land warms up. Glaciers melt. Polar ice melts. Big changes start to take place across the earth’s surface. Climate change scientists are not surprised by any of this. They have been sounding louder and louder alarms since the first IPCC report was published in 1990. What surprises scientists the most, is that we have done so little in the past two decades to mitigate our impact on the global climate system.

The reasons for concern extend far beyond the severity of the storms and droughts that will afflict much of our country in the years ahead. In April 2007 a prestigious military board of retired generals and admirals released a study entitled National Security and the Threat of Climate Change. Their conclusion? “Projected climate change poses a serious threat to America’s national security.” Climate change, the authors of the report argue, will multiply instability in the world’s most volatile regions and add tensions even to the world’s stable nations.

The relationships are not complicated to understand. Drought, for example, undermines agricultural activity, which is the main occupation of people in volatile areas like Afghanistan, much of South Asia and large swaths of Africa. In response to drought, some people migrate in search of jobs. But sudden influxes of poor people from another country or region can trigger or amplify ethnic violence, introduce new diseases, place pressure on local resources, and lead to higher levels of criminal and gang activity. Other people turn to the drug or sex trade to survive. Some people take up arms and turn against their neighbors in a mad effort to control the land and water that remain viable. And still others have no choice but to escape despair and violence by moving into refugee camps.

We cannot ignore this set of relationships. In our interconnected world, our interests and values are affected when people turn to crimes like internet fraud, drug trafficking and human trafficking. We can and do find ourselves and our allies the targets of violence when desperate people are mobilized into terrorism and other forms of political violence by extremists. And, as a Western superpower, the United States has moral obligations to care about those in need.

Links to More Information

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

• Climate Change and Security - TISS

• “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” CNA Corporation

• Global Climate Change: National Security Implications

For more information about this project, please contact:

Center for Unconventional Security Affairs
University of California, Irvine
Social Ecology I
Irvine, CA 92697-7075
Phone: (949) 824-8804
E-mail: cusa@uci.edu