Climate change could lead to global conflict, says Beckett
Pastor Dale Morgan
Climate change could lead to global conflict, says Beckett*
Julian Borger, diplomatic editor
Friday May 11, 2007
The Guardian
Climate change could spawn a new era of conflicts around the world over
water and other scarce resources unless more is done to curb greenhouse
gas emissions, the foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, warned yesterday.
She said climate-driven conflicts were already under way in Africa.
Underlying the Darfur crisis, she said, was a "struggle between nomadic
and pastoral communities for resources made more scarce through a
changing climate".
Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute in London, Mrs Beckett
quoted evidence that a similar conflict was brewing in Ghana where
Fulani cattle herdsmen are reportedly arming themselves to take on local
farmers in a confrontation over water and land as climate change expands
the Sahara desert. The foreign secretary said the Middle East - with 5%
of the world's population but only 1% of its water - would be
particularly badly affected, with Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq
particularly hard hit by a drop in rainfall.
She said the Nile could lose 80% of its flow into Egypt, a country which
would also be threatened by rising sea levels in the Nile delta, its
agricultural heartland, where flooding could displace 2 million people,
threatening internal stability.
"Resource-based conflicts are not new. But in climate change we have a
new and potentially disastrous dynamic."
Her speech echoed a similar warning from the European commission in
January that global warming could trigger regional conflicts, poverty,
famine, mass migration and the spread of infectious diseases such as
malaria and dengue fever.
The British government has this year attempted to focus global attention
on climate change as a security threat, and Mrs Beckett used British
chairmanship of the UN security council in April to convene the
council's first debate on the issue.
"It requires a whole new approach to how we analyse and act on
security," Mrs Beckett said. "The threat to our climate security comes
not from outside but from within: we are all our own enemies."
She compared the struggle to contain climate change to the cold war,
which also had to be fought on diplomatic, economic, political and
cultural fronts. She said public and private sectors would have to
cooperate to ensure the bulk of investment in the energy sector by 2030
was spent on low carbon and energy efficient options.
Britain has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 30% by that year, but the
realism of that goal with current policies has been called into question
by climate experts.
This week scientists, diplomats and activists met in Bonn to start
formulating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which
expires in 2012.
Meanwhile at the UN, a vote is due today on whether Zimbabwe will take
over the chair of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), which
oversees environmental issues in the developing world. The US, the UK
and other European nations have objected to Zimbabwe's candidacy on the
grounds of its human rights records and the parlous state of its
economy, with an inflation rate of over 2,000%. But it is the turn of
African states to nominate a country to chair the commission and they
will vote today on whether to confirm Zimbabwe.
A European official said: "It makes no sense to make a minister from
Zimbabwe head of a commission that affects millions of people, when the
people of his own country have been suffering for so long from economic
mismanagement."