open Democracy News Analysis - A global threat multiplier, Paul Rogers - Comments

spamlet on "A global threat multiplier"

spamlet — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 20:30:09 +0000

Phew!

Only time to scan through, but I see not a mention of population growth throughout.

What is the point of writing this stuff if you leave out one whole side of the equation ( and probably the only one that we really can do anything about in the long run)?

rudisafari on "A global threat multiplier"

rudisafari — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 06:41:30 +0000

The environment and the very existence of the Human race is at stake, but those responsible are not acting in a proper manner, and obviously they will be hold accountable wherever they might be. As a matter of fact, more then have a century the UNEP and various others international organizations are working, and it seems that the funds allocated to them for that protection, disapeared like if you feel water in a bottomless keg. So the biggest poluter are those who started and developed the industrial revolution, like the UK, Germany, the US, most of the members of the EU, then the former Soviet Union/Russia,China,Indonesia, India,Taiwan, Saudia Arabia, the GCC,and all others who have gone and are going the path of extensiv industrialization. So the UN and its spesialized bodies should intervene and act immediately if necessary even go to the INternational court of Justice, that would be a novum, but a necessary, long over due step, or only in a few years we will face the same situation as the fight of the international community against the production and dissemination of drugs, namely in the early nineteen seventees, gues whos has been the largest drug producer Afghanistan. MOst of the money as prooved by UNITAR in its information meetingsand by the UN organization to fight illegal drug production, has gone to programms to stop that trend in Afghanistan and change the whole situation in that part of the Workd. Guess who was sthe biggest drug producer in 2007? Afghanistan, and what had changed? Nothing but the money is gone. So its high noon that a different type of Organization to protect the environment developes, which will achieve something and hold governments and personalities accountable, only then we will succede, not only in environment protection, but also in many other fields, which seem today unsolvable.Buddy

douglas-jones on "A global threat multiplier"

douglas-jones — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 06:32:23 +0000

douglas-jones
The world leaders and industry have had before them the results of people like Amory Lovins and his look alikes in Europe pointing to the value of energy efficiency and indeed some notice was taken in the oil shortage of 1973 but then forgotten. Recently but pre the world focus on climate change, the climate lobby was succeshul in counter hype, findings of change with profit. These were shown to be useful in countering greenhouse,extending the useful life of oil ad offering opportunities for corporate profit. This profit was subsequentlybut in my view to late to beuseful, taken up. In themain a tunnel visoiln of profit and manipulation with the American century at hand and the Britis trailing alomng with glad heart. Minor countries such as Australia had to say me too!

douglas-jones on "A global threat multiplier"

douglas-jones — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 06:25:21 +0000

douglas-jones
Prof. Rogers has a more optomistic view of human behaviour than I think history or at least and certainly, recent history suggests.
It seems to me that very broadly there are two camps.
One in which people with a degree of altruism and good knowledge, thus allowing also a measure of self interest, work hard to make the world a fair and liveable place.
The other group more self deluded think they can manipulate at will, as recently exemplified in the Iraq debacle (hideous war crime) by use of the media and by using the knowledge that insufficient people make themselves informed for society to be other than manipulatable.
This group exemplified by a self centred view probably is not bothered by melting glaciers and food threats resulting in the third world (and less so in the first world). Sure there is the danger of damage similar to 9/11 or more substantially WMD threat probably nuclear, but even nuclear on the scale likely to be obtained, will not destroy civilisation. Once again of course like any bully when hit, particularly one who has not been hit before as most of Europe has, there will be lots of hype, wringing of hands (to an effect equal at least to the response to the recent flooding),and further loss of liberty in the ensuing controls.
Apart from that armed might is presumed effective and provides profit to the arms manufacturers and defence structure for which they will be duly thankfull.
Added to which devestation may offer the opportunity to make useof the capital currently flowtung round seeking a return, to find such return.
If the worst of the scientists forecasts prove correct then even the condominiums construted by the elite will not save them.
So far their self confidence allows them to make grand pronouncements with little action even minor echoes of the devious effort to counter climate change by bribery and lies, remain.

Azzz on "A global threat multiplier"

Azzz — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:54:51 +0000

Perhaps this is just more Western-centrism, but there are new things being tried in terms of bringing protection to people in developing countries - I can think of two immediately.

The first was a pilot project where donors actually bought "drought insurance" for the country of Ethiopia. You can read about it on the World Food Program website here.

This is an interesting development, allowing donors to lever their giving and to push some of the risks associated with rainfall onto the private markets. There was no payout that year, but it is an interesting example that other companies and donors could follow, build on, and improve.

For example, there is already a massive wealth of information and knowledge about "Catastrophe Risks", but most of the existing modelling is focussed on assets such as buildings and infrastructure. More needs to be done to model the damage a typhoon does to subsistence farmers in South East Asia, for example, and governments around the world can help by building up meterological capacity and making the data readily available to all.

The second is an organisation called Forum for the Future (no association, I just like their work) who are a UK based charity that is engaging big business in tackling climate change in developing countries: after all, if sea levels rise, important investments made by the big guys internationally could well end up underwater.

Most people seem to think of big business as only being part of the problem. That businesses often ignore the climate impacting externalities associated with their businesses is true, but it's not the whole picture.

We must find ways to engage the powers of business to help slow climate change and to help deal with its consequences if we are serious about helping those who are most vulnerable.

A global threat multiplier, Paul Rogers

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:32:12 +0000

A European Union study on the problems of global climate change, leaked to the press four days before its official launch on 14 March 2008, contained the sobering assessment that a failure to take radical action now to address global warming would create the likelihood of severe conflict over resources in the decades ahead. Two days later, on 16 March, data from the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) reveals that the rate of shrinking of glaciers across the world - a key marker of climate change - has accelerated; this more than doubled between 2006 and 2007, and the 2007 figure was five times the average for the 1980-99 period. These two documents, taken together, present governments and citizens in the leading emissions-producing countries in particular with an unavoidable test.

Paul Rogers is professor of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England. He has been writing a weekly column on global security on openDemocracy since 26 September 2001.

UNEP's data - included in its report Meltdown in the Mountains, based on research conducted by the World Glacier Monitoring Service (WGMS) - is significant for two quite different reasons. The first is that in a number of key parts of the world, glaciers are essential parts of the crop-support system. Winter snow and ice locked up in massive glaciers in mountain ranges (the Andes, the Karakorams and especially the Himalayas, for example) store water which is slowly released during the spring and early summer, providing water for irrigation as much as a 1,600 kilometres away from the glaciers themselves. If the glaciers melt more quickly, or if what would normally be late winter snow falls as rain, then the rivers flowing off the mountain ranges will no longer provide water for crops during the growing season.

The second reason why the Unep study is important is that it provides one more indication that climate change is speeding up and therefore more evidence for the argument that decisive policy-shifts are urgently needed to address the crisis. Yet the spread of such is not yet having the impact on government policy that it should; too many influential people and interest groups (including the governments of many oil-producing states and some transnational oil-and-gas companies) still reject the evidence and block progress.

Moreover, as the problems intensify the scale of measures needed to address them also expand. The evidence that existing carbon emissions will have their severest impact over at least the next three decades mean that plans for a 50% cut in global carbon output by 2050 - which, it is true, go beyond what was proposed barely five years ago - have already become woefully inadequate. Analysts may differ on the details of what is really required, but a consensus is beginning to emerge that 80% cuts are needed a long time before 2050 - including deep cuts by 2012-15, i.e. in the next five to seven years.

A global focus

It is in this context - of an unfolding emergency - that the European Union document - Climate Change and International Security - is so interesting. It must also be read in relation to three specific aspects of climate change (see “Climate change: a window to act”, 22 November 2007):

* positive-feedback processes, including summer melting of polar sea-ice, and methane release from melting permafrost, mean climate change is likely to intensify

* climate change will (against projections common in the early 1990s) affect many of the poorest parts of the world, mainly through severe droughts

* global climate-change estimates are necessarily consensus documents, intended to keep climate specialists from scores of countries on board; they are inevitably and naturally conservative in their assessments.

In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here

Paul Rogers’s most recent book is Why We’re Losing the War on Terror (Polity, 2007) - an analysis of the strategic misjudgments of the post-9/11 and why a new security paradigm is needed.

The EU report - prepared for the European commission by Javier Solana (the union’s lead foreign-policy coordinator) and Benita Ferrero-Waldner (its commissioner for external relations), and presented to the European council’s climate-change summit on 13-14 March 2008 - reflects these features, yet it also has a sense of urgency that is largely lacking from the equivalent documents or reports produced by its own member-states or other national governments. Indeed, one of its most compelling arguments concerns the impact of climate change on weaker states beyond the global north: "Climate change is best viewed as a threat multiplier which exacerbates existing trends, tensions and instability. The core challenge is that climate change threatens to overburden states and regions which are already fragile and conflict prone."

The document anticipates a number of severe outcomes if this challenge is not properly met: conflict over food and water resources as rainfall diminishes; risks to the infrastructure of coastal cities and fertile river deltas; strains from environmentally-induced migration and to radicalisation as marginalised peoples react to their exclusion. It also cites the potential for conflict over energy resources inside some of the world’s most energy-rich regions, as they too experience physical and social stresses due to climate change.

The tone of the entire report is downbeat, with an unusual (in such official products) awareness of the inescapable immediacy of what lies ahead. Its main emphasis is on the consequences of climate change and how Europe might best address them - especially by cutting carbon emissions. It also recommends putting far more research effort into understanding the regional effects of climate change, and more development resources into countering these (see “Climate change: threat and promise”, 2 November 2006).

An elite lens

For all its value and importance, however, there is a problem with the report: it is unable to transcend what is essentially a Eurocentric view. In this sense, it has much in common with the report published in January 2008 by five former defence chiefs from the United States, France, Britain, Germany and the Netherlands (see "The New Atlantic Century?", 24 January 2008). This document - Towards a Grand Strategy for an Uncertain World: Renewing Transatlantic Partnership - is straightforward and unashamed in seeing global threats in terms of a north Atlantic dimension. The authors’ concern is with the lands from Finland to Alaska; they insist on the need for a revitalised and strengthened Nato in parallel with far closer collaboration between north America and the European Union than at present. The report’s imaginary “other” is the new adversary of an unstable and uncertain world whose millions of inhabitants are metaphorically gathering outside the walls of civilised Europe, Canada and the United States.

This view of the world is essentially about protecting the status quo, making climate change a security problem for the elite states rather than an issue for the whole global community. As such, it fails and is bound to fail: since it embodies no recognition that climate change is part of the much wider issue of a deeply and increasingly divided world. This division is both socio-economic and (again) imaginary: for improvements in education, literacy and technology produce the consequence that what remains essentially the marginalised majority of the world's people are - from the “other” side - far more knowledgeable of that very condition than ever before.

The logic of the "climate-change-as-threat" paradigm is, at heart, to create the need for more forms of physical security: that since Europe's biggest problem is likely to come from "militant migration" (especially from north Africa and the middle east), the land borders in southeast Europe must be controlled and the Mediterranean seen as a barrier, with the necessary military forces constructed and deployed to help keep Europe safe.

The reality of an interconnected, globalised, technologically distributed world in which small groups of determined people can (for example) use civil aircraft to attack New York skyscrapers and the world's largest military headquarters armed only with parcel knives makes this outlook - to say the least - self-defeating. Europeans will be as little able to align the Mediterranean as the moat for their 21st-century castle as will the Israelis to build a wall high enough to exclude those determined to breach it.

True, the European Union report at least does see things in more than purely security terms; it addresses the need to support affected countries outside Europe in surviving the impacts of climate change, and it recognises that there is a link between socio-economic divisions and environmental constraints. What it is unable to do is to follow comprehensively the implications of that link.

European action to avoid a dysfunctional global condition requires an unprecedented commitment to prevent climate change and ameliorate those effects that cannot now be avoided, especially in poorer countries. It will also require a greatly heightened commitment to development, not least in terms of trade reform, debt cancellation and direct international assistance targeted at sustainable and gendered development (see “Wanted: a new global paradigm”, 8 November 2007).

Dystopia and optimism

Thirty-five years ago, the economic geographer Edwin Brooks evoked the risk of “(a) crowded glowering planet of massive inequalities of wealth buttressed by stark force yet endlessly threatened by desperate people in the global ghettoes" (see Edwin Brooks, "The Implications of Ecological Limits to Growth in Terms of Expectations and Aspirations in Developed and Less Developed Countries", in Anthony Vann & Paul Rogers (eds), Human Ecology and World Development [Plenum Press, 1974]).

An integrated response to climate change and the wealth-poverty divide is both essential and urgent. The Europeans have the capacity to provide leadership and the resources to take action, and their new - as yet officially unreleased - report begins to open up the issue in the systematic manner needed (see Mats Engström, “Europe’s green power”, 25 March 2007). If the analysis could be extended to a global understanding, and if the sheer urgency of the issue could be recognised, then there will be cause - even at this late stage - for optimism. All this, however, demands the biggest step-change of all: imagination. If it is not forthcoming, Brooks's dystopic prediction - already reality in too many places - is the most likely outcome.

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