Armies must ready for global warming role: Britain

Mon Jun 25, 2007 3:23PM EDT
REUTERS

By Jeremy Lovell

LONDON (Reuters) - Global warming is such a threat to security that
military planners must build it into their calculations, the head of
Britain's armed forces said on Monday.

Jock Stirrup, chief of the defense staff, said risks that climate
change could cause weakened states to disintegrate and produce major
humanitarian disasters or exploitation by armed groups had to become a
feature of military planning.

But he said first analyses showed planners would not have to switch
their geographical focus, because the areas most vulnerable to climate
change are those where security risks are already high.

"Just glance at a map of the areas most likely to be affected and
you are struck at once by the fact that they are exactly those parts of
the world where we see fragility, instability and weak governance today.

"It seems to me rather like pouring petrol onto a burning fire," Stirrup told the Chatham House think-tank in London.

British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett chaired the first debate
on climate change at the U.N. Security Council in April this year. She
argued that the potential for climate change to cause wars meant it
should be on the council's radar.

Stirrup said the unpredictability of the immediate effects of global
warming on rainfall patterns and storms meant flashpoints could be
advanced by years without warning.

He did not identify the problem areas, but Bert Metz of the U.N.'s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change told the meeting they
included Central America, the Amazon Basin, large parts of north,
central and southern Africa and swathes of Asia.

Scientists say average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 4.0
degrees Celsius this century due to burning fossil fuels for power and
transport, melting ice caps, bringing floods, droughts and famines, and
putting millions of lives at risk.

Stirrup said the security threat was far more immediate than those figures might suggest.

"If temperatures rise towards the upper end of the forecast range we
could already start to see serious physical consequences by 2040 -- and
that is if things get no worse."

"If things do get worse you don't need to come very much forward
from 2040 before, in my terms at least, you are talking about the day
after tomorrow," Stirrup said.

He said the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington
showed the devastation that attacks fuelled by political, economic and
social deprivation could achieve.

"Now add in the effects of climate change. Poverty and despair
multiply, resentment surges and people look for someone to blame," he
said.

Even if the world agreed quickly on a way of equitably tackling the
climate crisis -- which was far from sure -- the nature of the problem
meant a significant degree of adverse change was already in the
pipeline.

"That rapidity, alongside the size of the global population and the
complexity of today's society, leaves us particularly vulnerable,"
Stirrup said. "It is bound to present substantial security challenges
of one kind or another."

Asked on the margins of the meeting if that meant military planners
should opt for preemptive action where they saw a security crisis
emerging, he said: "Only in the sense of building governance.
Recognizing the problem is the first step."

Powered by ScribeFire.