by faster | Feb 19, 2019 | Blog
SOURCE: Reuters DATE: February 19, 2019 SNIP: Climate change threats – from worsening water shortages in Iraq and Pakistan to harsher hurricanes in the Caribbean – are a growing security risk and require concerted action to ensure they don’t spark new violence, security experts warned Tuesday. “Climate change is not about something in the far and distant future. We are discussing imminent threats to national security,” said Monika Sie Dhian Ho, general director of the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch think tank. The drying of Africa’s Lake Chad basin, for instance, has helped drive recruitment for Islamist militant group Boko Haram among young people unable to farm or find other work, said Haruna Kuje Ayuba of Nigeria’s Nasarawa State University. “People are already deprived of a basic livelihood,” the geography professor said at a conference on climate and security at The Hague. “If you give them a little money and tell them to destroy this or kill that, they are ready to do it.” The threat of worsening violence related to climate change also extends to countries and regions not currently thought of as insecurity hot spots, climate and security analysts at the conference warned. The Caribbean, for instance, faces more destructive hurricanes, coral bleaching, sea-level rise and looming water shortages that threaten its main economic pillars, particularly tourism. “We’re facing an existential crisis in the Caribbean,” said Selwin Hart, the Barbados-born executive director of the Inter-American Development Bank. Ninety percent of the region’s economic activity – particularly tourism, fishing and port operations – takes place on the threatened coastline, he said. Hurricanes, in recent years, have flattened the economies...
by faster | Nov 14, 2017 | Blog
SOURCE: Vox and Environmental Justice Foundation DATE: November 14, 2017 SNIP: “My belief is that we will see a renaissance of violent conflict in the 21st century, and that many of these conflicts will spring from climate change. It’s hard to predict the rate of decline or where or when conflicts will emerge, but we can say with some confidence that climate change will render huge parts of the world less hospitable to human beings, and that as a consequence, humans will have to change how and where they live. These sorts of changes will produce tensions among groups of people struggling to adapt to a new environment. Again, that’s why I see climate as a fundamental driver of conflict in this century.” — Harald...
