Page 59 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

Tackling Environmental Crime throUgh standardized Methodologies

Security Consequences of Climate Change

Dr. Jamie Shea
NATO Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges

I feel qualified to speak at this conference on the subject of climate and
nature since I have been around with NATO for such a long time that I am
known as the ‘dinosaur in residence’ and, of course, dinosaurs were killed by
climate change after living a million years on the planet. So they should have a
certain expertise based on experience.

I would like to address some of the security concerns as I see them
coming from some of the scenarios and the description of the state of affairs
that we have heard about earlier today.

I think the starting point is of course that we have experienced climate
variations quite a bit in human history. Planet Earth has existed for about 4.5
billion years; humanity, as we know it, has been around for about the last quar-
ter of 1 million years, and of course the planet’s climate has changed quite a bit
over that time.

We have recently noticed, particularly in the Middle East, the link between
extended periods of drought to people moving from the land to cities, with
growing unemployment; in particular at the beginning of the Arab Spring and
the particular scenarios that we’ve seen more recently in Syria. The worst
drought in Syria occurred in the 2006-2011 period just before the outbreak of
the Civil War; in fact, the moment violence in Syria began in Derea in 2011, the
reason was because of the dispute between the Mayor and the population over
the allocation of water reserves from the reservoir. We are now looking at
Darfur, increasingly in terms of the dispute between sedentary farmers and
nomads, issues over drought and water distribution. We know that piracy in the
Gulf of Aden has been largely caused by the livelihood of fishermen being
depleted because of warming sea temperatures and pollution.

We have also unsurprisingly seen that the violence in Yemen in
2011 broke out in Ta’izz, which is the most water-stressed part of the
country.

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