Among the 21st-century threats posed by climate change, rising seas, melting permafrost and superstorms, European leaders are warning of a last-century risk they know all too well: war.
Focusing too narrowly on the environmental consequences of global warming underestimates the military threats, top European and United Nations officials said at a global security conference in Munich.
Bloomberg newsagency reports their warnings follow the conclusions of defence and intelligence agencies that climate change could trigger resource and border conflicts.
“Climate change is a threat multiplier that leads to social upheaval and possibly even armed conflict,” the UN’s top climate official, Patricia Espinosa Cantellano, said at the conference, which was attended by the United States secretaries of defence and homeland security, James Mattis and John Kelly.
Even as European Union countries struggle to assimilate millions of African and Middle Eastern migrants and refugees, security officials are bracing for more of the same in the future.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterras named climate change and population growth as the two most serious “megatrends” threatening international peace and stability.
“Ground zero” for armed conflict over the climate will be the Arctic, where record-high temperatures are melting ice and revealing natural resources that some countries might be willing to fight for, Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto said on a panel.
“We have already seen flag planting and already some quarrels on the borderlines,” President Niinisto said, pointing to new Russian military bases on its Arctic border.
The Arctic climate paradox, where countries could fight for rights to extract the very fossil fuels that would cause even more global warming, underscores energy’s role as a cause and potential moderator of climate change, according to President Niinisto.
For Russia, the world’s biggest energy supplier, European nations switching to renewable energy represents an economic threat.
At the same time, European over-reliance on Russian energy exposes them to coercion, according to Kelly Gallagher-Sims, a former climate and energy adviser to President Barack Obama.
US Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a member of the committee on the environment and public works, told officials in the Bavarian capital they may have to fight to preserve the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change from global warming sceptics in the White House.
“The response of the international community will be significant,” Senator Whitehouse said.
While the probability of abandoning the Paris Agreement may be small, they “decrease further if the response of the international community” to the US “is not only, don’t you dare but, that there’ll be consequences in other areas” if you leave.
