Page 61 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

Tackling Environmental Crime throUgh standardized Methodologies

It is not going to be possible to say with exactitude on which day, which
place and which way it’s going to hit but climate change is a predictable security
problem and we would be all the more irresponsible for not addressing it as it
becomes increasingly predictable.

It has been said already by my fellow speakers that we are dealing with two
basic issues at the strategic level.

The first issue is of course the impact of the temperature rise, sea-level
rise, extreme weather events and shifts in hydrological patterns and the sort of
negative feedback loop in the dynamics of how these things interact. Each of
those these things is going to undermine human security in itself; but of course,
understanding the dynamics and the potential impact is what we need to do.

A second issue which, as a security policy person I am more concerned with,
is the way that the climate factors in a particular loop also cross over into a different
loop, which is the social side political loop, where they interact and cause a stress or
crisis. It is unfortunate, as the Americans used to lament that “God gave the oil to
countries that do not like the United States”, that God has given climate change to
those countries which are least geared to be able to deal with it, because of existing
tensions, border disputes, ethnic problems, weak economic bases, over-dependency
on one particular crop or fossil fuel, rising demographics and, of course, bad gover-
nments. Where climate change becomes a headache is where, inevitably, it intersects
with bad governance and makes this governance even worse. Therefore we need to
keep these two factors in mind: the climate change taking place within itself and
then the climate change as it interacts with strategy and politics.

In terms of demographics, the population of Pakistan, for instance, has
doubled in the last 30 years; the population of Saudi Arabia has grown from
less than 4 million in 1950 to just under 28 million, 30% of whom are under
the age of 14. Equally, the population of Egypt has grown from 60 million 15
years ago to 90 million today, 90% of whom largely depend on the Nile. By the
middle of the century, we expect the population of Africa to double, and
potentially quadruple by the close of the century, which means that the migra-
tion issues we experienced last year, with 1.3 million entering the EU, will be
the new normal for several generations to come. This is the impact of climate
change on demographics.

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