National Security Priorities: Do We Have It All Wrong?

A random comment on the national news this morning got me thinking: There was more violence in malls in this country yesterday than there is at the border. You know, that caravan of "threatening" people fleeing violence or poverty in search of a better life. The ones that we have deployed troops against -- troops who have authorization to use lethal force. We are all too familiar with violence in this country - be it mass shootings, sexual assault, or rage in our malls or on our highways. Yet we turn our angst and actions against the unknown, those "others" that we fear may change who we are as a country, despite being a nation built by immigrants. These desperate people to the south of our border are our modern day boogeymen.

Statues depicting climate refugees at COP15 in Copenhagen

Meanwhile, a headline that many of us may have missed came out of Paris over the past week: Paris Peace Forum Recognizes Climate Change, Food Insecurity, Water Scarcity as Challenges for Peace and Security. Our government defends a lot of our actions by claiming they are in the interest of national security but, in my opinion, it fails to recognize where the very real threats lie.

A report from the BBC news and other outlets earlier in the week about the conflict in Yemen declared 85,000 children 'dead from malnutrition'. I can't begin to fathom their agony, or that of their families. Blockades keep humanitarian aid from reaching those in dire need of food and medical care. This fatality statistic doesn't include all the civilians who have been killed by airstrikes from the Saudi-led coalition, attacks that involve support from the United States. And, by all accounts, millions more in Yemen are at risk of starvation and disease. Remind me again about what threat we are targeting in this country? What exactly is the national security argument? Maybe I am naive, but allowing tens of thousands of children to die horrific deaths and targeting innocent people with our military power, might just tick off an awful lot of people. Maybe even more than there are terrorists in Yemen currently.

Water scarcity exacerbated by a drought that began in 2006 is widely identified as a factor leading to the ongoing civil war in Syria. Around a half million people have died and there are millions of displaced people leading to a refugee crisis from that multi-year conflict. Some experts have questioned whether this is a "climate war". At the very least, many believe that "anthropogenic climate change will become a ‘threat multiplier’ for instability in the decades ahead." [1] If you don't want to bother with the academic literature, Christian Parenti's book Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence or Alex Alvarez's Unstable Ground: Climate Change, Conflict, and Genocide are eye-opening reads.

The 4th National Climate Assessment was released yesterday, on the heals of the latest report by the IPCC: Global Warming of 1.5 °C. Here is the "CliffNotes" bottom line message from the highly technical IPCC report:

Climate-related risks to health, livelihoods, food security, water supply, human security, and economic growth are projected to increase with global warming of 1.5°C and increase further with 2°C.

The graph from Climate Action Tracker shows you where things stand; the current pledges from the Paris Agreement for greenhouse gas emissions (the major contributor to climate disruption) are far from adequate to limit warming of our planet to less then 2°C.

Furthermore, according to the IPCC: 

The risks depend on the magnitude and rate of warming, geographic location, levels of development and vulnerability, and on the choices and implementation of adaptation and mitigation options (high confidence).

Avoiding overshoot [of warming above 1.5°C] and reliance on future large-scale deployment of carbon dioxide removal [i.e. geoengineering] can only be achieved if global CO₂ emissions start to decline well before 2030 (high confidence).

The year 2030 is not very far away. If you haven't read the details of the Paris Agreement, it focuses on post-2020 actions. Hence the use of the word "pledges" in the above graph.

These are very real threats to our national security, but for the most part, we have yet to address them. Instead of seriously considering our "choices and options" related to mitigation and adaptation, we have largely focused on inaction. Pascal's Wager reminds us that this is typically not the wisest option. Denial and deflection, a previous failure to ratify the now defunct Kyoto Protocol, and more recently, threats to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, have been our modus operandi towards climate change policy. Our borders are under threat, but it is our coastlines that will be washed away with sea level rise. Maybe we need seawalls rather than a wall along the border with Mexico. In the southwest, drought contingency plans are being considered as the serious water shortages in that region of the country will impact our own citizens. [2]

According to NASA, rainfall may decline by 20 to 25 percent over California, Nevada, and Arizona by 2100.

Maybe officials in the southwest are taking note of the water-shortage crisis that Cape Town faced this past year. We have already seen record loss of human life and property from the devastating fires in California, fires which have been made worse by (yes, I am going to say it) climate change. The current numbers of migrants or refugees seeking food, shelter, and protection pale in comparison to what we may face in the coming decades with climate migrants. [3] And some of those displaced people could be U.S. citizens.

Less you think that climate refugees are a problem for the distant future, I invite you to watch a short video that a colleague sent me yesterday with the message: "Thankful we live on high islands in Hawai'i, our Marshallese neighbors are not so fortunate." [An aside since I have been mentioning conflict and war: the Marshalls were an American nuclear testing site in the 1950s with 50 plus bombs dropped there.]

Against this backdrop, and amidst tweets of climate change denial and plans for our administration to promote the virtues of coal, I head to Poland with students in a week to attend the 24th meeting of the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The most recent "1.5°C report" from the IPCC is on the agenda. The first of the IPCC reports was published in 1990, and the messages within it brought nations together at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 to develop the UNFCCC and to act in the interests of human safety even in the face of scientific uncertainty. Now, almost 30 years later and with solid scientific evidence for a changing climate, we still haven't figured out how to solve one of the greatest challenges facing humanity.

[1] Selby, J.,  O.S. Dahi, C. Frohlich, and M. Hulme. 2017. Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited. Political Geography 60: 232 - 244. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0962629816301822

[2] N. Baptiste. 2018. This is What a West Without Water Will Look Like. Mother Jones Magazine, published March 15, 2018.  https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/03/this-is-what-a-west-without-water-will-look-like/

[3] Parker, L. (2018) 143 Million People May Soon Become Climate Migrants. National Geographic Online, published March 19, 2018. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/climate-migrants-report-world-bank-spd and K.K. Rigaud, A. de Sherbinin, B. Jones, J. Bergmann, V. Clement, K. Ober, J. Schewe, S. Adamo, B. McCusker, S. Heuser, and A. Midgley, Amelia. 2018. Groundswell : Preparing for Internal Climate Migration. World Bank, Washington, DC. © World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/29461 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.