ABSTRACT
There is a new form of climatic determinism on the rise and the allure of this thinking for the naive or for the mischievous is dangerous. It finds its expression in some of the balder claims made about the future impacts of climate change: 180 million people in Africa to die from hunger; 40 per cent of known species to be wiped out; 20 per cent of global GDP to be lost. But such determinism is perhaps at its most insidious when found in the new discourse about climate (in) security. Here are only five recent examples, among an increasing number:
a report on Sudan by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) which concludes that the ‘impacts [of climate change] are closely linked to conflict in [Northern Darfur]’ (see UNEP, 2007);
an article by David Zhang and colleagues at the University of Hong Kong which argues that ‘it was the oscillations of agricultural production brought about by long-term climate change that drove China’s historical war-peace cycles’ (see Zhang et al., 2007);
a seminar held at the Royal United Services Institute in London on 12 December 2007 which was entitled ‘Weather of mass destruction: climate change as the “new” security problem’; the presentation (by Oli Brown of the International Institute for Sustainable Development) argued that ‘the way we think about climate change may have to grow from a concern about environmental and economic damages to a recognition of the need for secure political systems that can weather the upcoming storm of adaptation to climate change’;
a number of speakers at the Bali climate-change conference on 3–14 December 2007 who emphasised the security implications of climate change, among them UNEP’s executive director, Achim Steiner (see Howden 2007);
a report by the NGO International Alert, written by Dan Smith and Janani Vivekananda, which claims to identify ‘forty-six countries at risk of violent conflict and a further fifty-six facing a high risk of instability as a result of climate change’ (see Smith and Vivekananda, 2007).
