4    Lines in the shifting sand

The strategic politics of climate change, human security and national defense

Betsy Hartmann

In September 2009 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) launched its new Center on Climate Change and National Security. According to the agency’s press release, the center will study the national security impacts of desertification, rising sea levels, population shifts and conflict over natural resources, and will be “aggressive in outreach to academics and think tanks working on the issue” (CIA, 2009). The center’s establishment reflects mounting concern in U.S. national security circles about the threats climate change poses to American interests and international stability (Broder, 2009).

These threats were elaborated further in the Defense Department’s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). This is the first QDR to tackle climate change. While it cites various practical ways climate change could impact national security, such as its potential effects on defense installations and capabilities, the first reason given is its potential to act as an “accelerant of instability or conflict” (DOD, 2010: 85). In addition to contributing to poverty, environmental degradation, and the weakening of fragile governments, climate change will exacerbate resource scarcity, the spread of disease and mass migration (ibid.). Moreover, “extreme weather events may lead to increased demands for defense support to civil authorities for humanitarian assistance or disaster response both within the United States and overseas” (DOD, 2010: 85).

In this chapter, I argue that the linkages U.S. defense interests are making between climate change, conflict, and natural disasters threaten not only to distort climate policy, but to further militarize development and humanitarian assistance.¹ Since the early 1990s, the humanitarian mission has become increasingly politicized and militarized. Especially in conflict situations, humanitarian aid agencies are deeply worried about the evolving doctrine of military-civilian operations promoted by the U.S. and NATO. Doctors Without Borders, for example, has taken a strong stand against military involvement in humanitarian aid in Afghanistan (Hofman, 2011). Under this doctrine, military forces are seeking a larger and larger role in the delivery of aid, undermining the independence, neutrality and safety of humanitarian aid workers (Barry and Jefferys, 2002). They are also pushing for more involvement in humanitarian assistance during natural disasters (Hofmann and Hudson, 2009).

As a result, it is vitally important for those working at the intersection of global environmental change, development and human security to be attentive to the role of defense and intelligence interests in the climate field and the perils of securitizing climate change (Floyd, 2008). The boundaries between human security, environmental security and national security have often been fuzzy, and ought to be recognized explicitly as such.

Section one of this chapter explores the evolution of emerging security narratives about climate change and conflict focusing in particular on those that emphasize the risk of violent conflict among poor and displaced people. Section two looks at current U.S. defense strategies and how climate change could factor, rhetorically and practically, into future military and development interventions, especially in Africa.

Operation enduring narrative

Although long in the making, climate conflict narratives burst decisively onto the world stage in 2007. First the Atlantic Monthly (Faris, 2007), then the UN Environment Programme (UNEP, 2007), then even UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon (2007) attributed violence in Darfur to a combination of demographic pressures, resource scarcities and climate change. Along with the Darfur stories came other dire predictions about the threat of so-called “climate refugees” spilling across the globe and wreaking havoc, and according to a Christian Aid report called “Human Tide,” creating “a world of many more Darfurs” (Christian Aid, 2007a; 2007b). Well-known security pundits like Jeffrey Sachs (2007) and Thomas Homer-Dixon (2007) jumped on the theme with apocalyptic opinion pieces in popular media.

In April of 2007 the British government brought the issue of climate change before the UN Security Council for the first time with then foreign secretary Margaret Beckett identifying climate change as one of the main causes of conflict in Darfur (Harvey, 2007). In the U.S., the defense think tank, Center for Naval Analysis (CNA), gathered a team of 11 retired U.S. generals and admirals to produce a report titled “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” which argued that global warming could help trigger widespread political instability in poor regions and large refugee movements to the U.S. and Europe (CNA, 2007). Toward the end of the year, the Norwegian Nobel committee (2007) warned of the threat of climate-induced violent conflict and war when it awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore, Jr. and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The 2007 climate conflict blitz could be read in purely pragmatic terms: Journalists and pundits wanted to make headlines. NGOs and researchers were looking for new winds to shake the money trees. The Nobel committee found a rationale to link peace and climate change. Climate scientists hoped security arguments would heighten the need to reduce carbon emissions. The UN decided to divert attention from its own peacekeeping failures in Darfur by shifting the focus to a shortage of rainfall rather than a long drought of political will. National security interests were looking for new threats to provide a sense of historical purpose and to justify increasing defense expenditures.

No doubt linking climate change to national security is a way to get the issue more attention at the highest levels of government. “The glum reality is that governments tend to take security threats more seriously than any other kind,” writes British journalist Jonathan Freedland (2007).

However, while all these factors may have played a role, the pragmatic explanation is not sufficient. Missing from the picture is the fact that many people believe climate conflict narratives because they are based on old, widely accepted assumptions about poverty, scarcity, overpopulation and migration that in many Western academic and policy circles are virtual articles of faith.

Climate conflict narratives draw on neo-Malthusian environmental security discourses of the 1980s and 1990s, in particular the concept of environmental conflict developed by Canadian political scientist Thomas Homer-Dixon (Hartmann, 2009). He maintains that:

According to Homer-Dixon, this conflict can potentially fragment states or make them more authoritarian, destabilizing the international order. At the root of Homer-Dixon’s model of environmental conflict, and others closely related to it, is an unquestioned acceptance of old colonial and neo-colonial stereotypes of destructive, over-breeding peasants and herders. Meanwhile, there is very little attention paid to the resource degradation caused by powerful economic and political interests, such as extractive industries (Hartmann, 2001). The rich only make cameo appearances in a tragic play where poor people get a few roles as victims, but are cast mainly as villains.

Add climate change to the mix, and you get the next iteration of environmental conflict. UNEP’s 2007 report on Sudan, for example, draws on Homer-Dixon’s model to make claims that overpopulation of both people and livestock, coupled with environmental stresses such as water shortages related to climate change, is at the root of conflict in Northern Darfur (UNEP, 2007). Thus, it doesn’t take much to make the leap, or rather small step, from environmental to climate conflict. The same is true in the case of the step from environmental to climate refugees.

Also with a problematic neo-Malthusian history, the term ‘environmental refugee’ gained widespread currency in the international policy arena in the 1980s and 1990s (Saunders, 2000). In 1995 a report by Norman Myers for the Climate Institute in Washington, DC made the claim that globally there were 25 million environmental refugees, “persons who can no longer gain a secure livelihood in their traditional homelands because of environmental factors of unusual scope,” including water shortages, desertification, natural disasters, and climate change (Myers, 1995: 18–19). Although the 25 million figure was arrived at more by conjecture than scientific method, and the term “environmental refugee” is analytically flawed, the figure became “fact” and was widely cited in policy documents (Black, 1998; Nordas and Gleditsch, 2007).

Then Myers later claimed there will be 200 million climate migrants by 2050, a figure which is similarly making the rounds in policy documents, even though Myers himself acknowledges that the estimate is based on “heroic extrapolations” (cited in Brown, 2008: 8). As Oli Brown notes, “The simple fact is that nobody really knows with any degree of precision what climate change will mean for human population distribution” (Brown, 2008: 8).

This is not to deny that climate change is likely to cause displacement, but the extent of that displacement will not only depend on how much the temperature rises and affects sea-levels, rainfall patterns and the severity of storms, but on the existence and effectiveness of adaptation measures that help individuals and communities cope with environmental stresses. Whether or not such measures are in place in turn depends on political economies at the local, regional, national and international levels that are often conveniently left out of the discussion of so-called “climate refugees.” And as one report points out, larger climate-related humanitarian emergencies may be in places “where people cannot afford to move, rather than the places to which they do move” (O’Brien et al., 2008: 24). There is a growing consensus that climate-related migration is more likely to take place within national borders than across them (UNHCR, 2008).

In the end, migration is too complex a process to label simply as environmental or climate-induced (Morrissey, 2008: 28; Farbotko, 2010; Tacoli, 2011; White, 2011). It is also too complex to link ipso facto to violent conflict. Yet this is the overwhelming message of the climate conflict literature: poor and displaced people are dangerous. They violently fight over scarce resources and threaten security in the Global North.

One cannot underestimate the tremendous power of this narrative, despite the rich body of research that challenges it. For example, a World Bank study by Norwegian researchers found that current alarms about climate conflict are not based on substantive evidence (Buhaug et al., 2008). In Africa, violent conflict is actually connected more closely to competition over resource abundance (rich oil and mineral reserves, valuable timber, diamonds, etc.) than resource scarcity (Fairhead, 2001). Portraying Darfur as a climate conflict ignores basic elements of Sudanese political economy. These include gross inequalities in wealth and power between the elite in the capital and the rural population; government agricultural policies that favor large mechanized farms and irrigation schemes over rain-fed, small-farmer agriculture; forced migration, such as the 1990s removal of Nuba farmers from their lands into so-called “peace villages”; and what Alex de Waal calls “militarized tribalism” (de Waal, 2007, see also Manger, 2005).

This long history of oppression gets lost in the climate conflict version of events. Precisely for that reason, researcher Harry Verhoeven writes, the Sudanese government “loves the ‘climate war’ rhetoric” because it obscures the regime’s role in causing the conflict through policies of exclusion, patronage and violence (Verhoeven, 2011: 695) Verhoeven sees a reverse logic at work between climate change and conflict. State-sponsored violence, whether in the form of direct military action or more indirect attacks on people’s land and livelihoods, makes local communities less able to adapt to climate-related stresses such as long-term declines in rainfall.

Narratives about the risk of climate conflict and climate refugees could pave the way for the appropriation of the climate change and human security agenda by military interests. The warning signs are already here.

All terrain security

While 2007 may have represented the high water mark of climate conflict alarm, the waves were already washing in several years before. In 2003 a Pentagon-sponsored scenario of the impacts of abrupt climate change painted a neo-Malthusian nightmare of poor, starving populations overshooting the reduced carrying capacity of their lands, engaging in violent conflict over scarce resources, and storming en masse towards U.S. and European borders (Schwartz and Randall, 2003).

A next round of scenarios on the foreign policy and national security implications of climate change was undertaken in 2006–2007 by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC. Those involved were supposedly a diverse group of experts from a wide range of disciplines, yet from a reading of the list there appear to be very few, if any, international development or environment scholars representing perspectives from the Global South. Instead on the foreign policy side, the list reads like a who is who of former Clinton-era officials and advisors waiting in the wings for a Democratic presidential victory (Campbell, 2008: 1–3). Indeed, the Wall Street Journal described CNAS in November 2008 as a “top farm team” for the incoming Obama administration’s national security apparatus (Ackerman, 2008). Michele Flournoy, co-founder of CNAS, was named Undersecretary of Defense for Policy in January 2009. In this capacity, she spoke about how climate change was going to accelerate state failure, mass migration, the spread of disease and possibly insurgency (CSIS, 2009).

The CNAS-CSIS project predicts that as the mercury rises, so will the violence of the poor, especially in Africa. With a rise of 4.7 °F (2.6°C) by 2040 (Campbell and Parthemore, 2008: 19), governments with resources will have to engage in triage and decide which of the poor are worth saving. The author of this scenario envisions that war, disease and draconian population control measures might restore an environmentally sustainable relationship between people and nature (Fuerth, 2008). The overall message of the project is that climate change may be the biggest security challenge the U.S. faces, and that it presents “surprisingly similar” challenges as terrorism, a powerful reason why “groups whose interests center on either the environment or on national security have cause to come together and act in tandem” before the world turns into a harrowing, Hobbesian dystopia (Campbell and Parthemore, 2008: 19–20).

This beating of the climate conflict drums has to be viewed in the context of larger orchestrations in U.S. national security policy. While development assistance and humanitarian aid have long been strategically deployed as an element of defense policy (Keen, 2008), in recent years the military has encroached much further into civilian territory. Observers are beginning to speak of an “aid-military complex” – in 2005 the share of official U.S. development assistance dispersed by the Pentagon was 22 percent, up from 6 percent three years before (Easterly, 2008). The State Department’s role in both diplomacy and development has been severely weakened as a consequence, and disaster response is increasingly becoming the purview of the Pentagon at home and abroad (Berrigan, 2008).

These trends reflect a strategic shift in defense thinking toward a focus on stability operations and the taming of “ungoverned spaces.” In 2005 the Department of Defense (DOD) issued a directive stating that “stability operations” shall be given equal priority to combat operations:

To this end, the U.S. military should mainly work through “indigenous, foreign, or U.S. civilian officials” or “military-civilian teams” which shall be open to representatives of International Organizations, NGOs, and the private sector (DOD, 2005: 3). The Army’s 2008 manual on stability operations cites climate change as a driver of conflict (Department of the Army, 2008).

The concept of “ungoverned spaces” derives from a 2007 study of “ungoverned territories” done by the Rand Corporation for the U.S. Air Force, which identified these areas as failed or failing states, poorly controlled borders, or locations within “otherwise viable states where the central government’s authority does not extend” (Rabasa and Peters, 2007: 1). As critics point out, many of these spaces are actually governed, but not by groups favorable to U.S. interests (Clunan and Trikinus, 2008). Ungoverned spaces are perceived as a threat because they can serve as recruiting and organizing grounds for terrorists, criminal networks and other illicit activities. Discursively and strategically, the concept of ungoverned spaces provides a point of convergence for anti-terrorism efforts, stability operations and development assistance.

Since 2007, Africa has been the primary focus of climate conflict discourse. Coincidence or not, this development has coincided with the establishment of the new U.S. military command for Africa, AFRICOM. The reasons for the creation of AFRICOM are multi-faceted and include the protection of U.S. access to African oil and other strategic resources, the War on Terror, and countering increasing Chinese influence in the region (Volman, 2008). Popular resistance within Africa has meant that the U.S. has not been able to locate AFRICOM’s headquarters on the continent; it is currently stationed in Stuttgart, Germany. By its very institutional structure, AFRICOM represents the blurring of military/ civilian boundaries. Among its staff AFRICOM includes senior USAID officials to “help us plan our own military tasks supportive of USAID efforts” (USAID, 2009: 14). In general, AFRICOM seeks to integrate U.S. military objectives more firmly with economic and political ones.

Constructing climate conflict as a particularly African security threat meshes well with these objectives. CNA’s 2007 report on the threat of climate change specifically linked potential insecurity caused by climate change to the proposed mission of AFRICOM (CNA, 2007). While it is highly unlikely that the U.S. would send in the troops or base strategic development assistance solely on a perceived risk of climate conflict, the promotion of that risk helps to make such interventions more palatable, especially in liberal foreign policy circles. Indeed, a report by the Center for American Progress, another think tank close to the Obama administration, calls for protecting America through “sustainable security” (Brigety and Dewan, 2009: 1). It seeks to tie U.S. development assistance to strategic defense and intelligence objectives. “Climate-induced resource conflicts” are cited as a potential “significant source of political instability and violence” (Brigety and Dewan, 2009: 14). CNAS, meanwhile, is promoting a similar concept of “natural security” (Burke, 2009).

What is emerging is a rearticulation of Clinton/Gore style liberal stewardship, a vision of a win-win world where the U.S. not only makes the world safe through democracy and free markets and from terrorism, but protects the environment and wins the hearts and minds of potentially dangerous poor people too. This time around, however, the ideological and institutional convergence between military and civilian objectives is more complete, and the ungoverned spaces of Africa are the new, and perhaps last, frontier.

Conclusion: drawing the line

On the simplest level, the deployment of climate conflict and associated discourses is a serious distraction from the urgent need for the international community to come up with just and effective measures to increase the resilience of the most vulnerable people in the face of climate change. It does those people no favor to portray them as potentially dangerous and violent threats to Western borders and national security. And as Rita Floyd (2008) points out, the focus on climate conflict could inhibit cooperation between countries on climate policy.

On a deeper level, it is time to draw a sharp line between national security and human security. We do not live in a win-win world. The real battle ahead is not for the hearts and minds of people in enemy territory, but for the meaning of development itself as defense interests encroach further and further into what should be civilian territory.

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