Page 62 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

dr. Jamie shea

We also have the impact of climate change on critical infrastructure. In
1950 there were only 74 cities with over 1 million people; today we have 500
such cities and there will be 700 by the middle of the century; by 2025 we will
have 37 megacities, which means about 1 billion people, who now live in expo-
sed conditions in favelas, in shanties in existing cities, will be 2 billion. Most of
those are going to be near the coast, at a time when the U.S. Navy estimates that
we are going towards a 1.3 mm rise in sea levels, leading to more severe floo-
ding and tidal storms.

Essentially the only thing so far that has come anywhere close to pushing
humanity towards extinction is, in fact, pandemics (together with nuclear war
and artificial intelligence possibly one day through out-of-control robots).
Historically so far, the two most devastating pandemics: the Black Death in the
1340s which wiped out 10% of the world’s population; the Great Plague of
Justinian in 541 A.D., which wiped out between 13 and 17% of the world’s
population, when it was about 25 to 33 million people; the Spanish Influenza
in 1919, just after the end of the Great War, wiped out about 50 million, which
accounted for about 3% of the world’s population. Funnily enough, the great
wars killed far less. But what would be, in terms of everything we see today, the
link with climate change that could produce something equivalent to the bubo-
nic plague or Black Death is another factor that we need to monitor closely.

The third element is the human security factor. The military have been
increasingly involved in recent years in intervening to deal with extreme wea-
ther events: the US deployed 30,000 troops to hurricane Katrina to manage
security, prevent looting, provide evacuation. The civil authorities were unable
to do it by themselves. Equally, we at NATO sent the NATO Response Force
to Pakistan in 2006 to help after the Kashmir earthquake, as we regularly deploy
NATO forces to fight forest fires in Greece or Croatia or to deal with flooding
in Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. We know very well that we are
going to go with greater levels of global warming to increasingly violent and
destructive storms, regardless of whether they will affect essentially large lan-
dmasses or with hurricanes, tsunamis in the Indian Ocean or in islands, where
the maritime element is going to be often the first on the scene to provide that
kind of assistance as well.

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