Climate change and security
Subtitle: a gathering storm of global challenges
By: Christian Webersik.
Series: Security and the environment
Publisher: Praeger
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Santa Barbara, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 185
ISBN-13: 9780313380068; 9780313380075
Subjects: Human beings -- Effect of climate on; Human security; Climatic changes -- Social aspects; Climatic changes -- Political aspects; Environmental management
Description: "The strategic U.S. military base on the Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia faces submergence by rising sea level. Himalayan glaciers are shrinking, cutting the flow of the critical rivers shared by India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China and exacerbating military tensions. Changing rainfall patterns in Africa and the Middle East are driving drought, famine, disease, ethnic conflict, national destabilization, radicalism, and international terrorism.

Human-induced climate change is causing resource scarcities, natural disasters, and mass migrations, which in turn destabilize national, international, and human security structures and multiply the human inputs to climate change.

Alarms about the expanding role of climate change as a force multiplier of existing threats to national, international, and human security structures studies are being raised at all levels of governance and intelligence - national (including the U.S. Senate, the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon), transnational (including the European Union and the United Nations), and private (such as the Central News Agency and the American Security Project). Climate Change and Security: A Gathering Storm of Global Challenges focuses on the three major feedback effects of human-induced climate change on human and international security - resource scarcity, natural disasters, and sea-level rise.

Decreasing per capita availability of renewable resources due to such regional effects of climate change as drought and desertification leads to intensified competition for these resources and may result in armed violence - especially when compounded by conditions of rapid population growth, tribalism, and sectarianism, as in Darfur and Somalia. The increase in the frequency and intensity of meteorological disasters associated with global warming weakens already debilitated tropical societies and makes them still more vulnerable to political instability, as in Haiti. Sea-level rise will lead to disruptive mass migrations of climate refugees as dense littoral populations are forced to abandon low-lying coastal regions, as in Bangladesh.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Climate change and security; title: Resource scarcity and its security implications; title: Natural disasters and their security implications; title: Migration as an outcome; title: Ripple effects of climate change mitigation; title: The way forward : a new environmental security agenda for the twenty-first century.