UN CLIMATE CHANGE SUMMIT:The world could be engulfed by a "global civil war" if rising temperatures are not checked by deep cuts in the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change, according to one of the lead authors of a new report on the likely security risks.
Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chief climate policy adviser to German chancellor Angela Merkel, warned in Bali yesterday that climate change "could result in destabilisation and violence jeopardising national and international security to a new degree".
This grim prognosis was delivered at a press conference here hours before the Nobel Peace Prize was jointly presented in Oslo to former US vice-president Al Gore and Prof Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
The new report, Climate Change as a Security Risk, urges delegates at the UN summit in Bali to adopt "deep and decisive" targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as enabling vulnerable communities to adapt to the effects of global warming.
Otherwise, it warns, climate change - including more extreme weather events, impacts such as the melting of glaciers, the drying out of big forest systems and rising numbers of climate refugees - is likely to overwhelm the ability of many countries to govern and to cope.
Describing the report as a "credible narrative of the future", Prof Schellnhuber said "vulnerable states might implode, with a spillover into other countries", and he expressed particular concern about the meltdown of glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas.
If global surface temperatures continued to rise inexorably, the rivers flowing from the Tibetan plateau "will not have any water" and this would have severe impacts on China and India. Similarly, meltdown on the Andes would leave cities such as Lima, in Peru, with no water.
"If the Greenland icesheet melts, a seven-metre sea level rise would create huge migration pressure - at least 500 million people would have to go somewhere. So the message to Bali is that unless we confine global warming to two degrees, we will have a very difficult time."
Prof Schellnhuber cited the current conflicts in Darfur, Somalia and Afghanistan as examples of wars that had an environmental dimension. He also warned that there would be "no chance of stabilising the Sahel region" of Africa unless steps were taken to deal with drought.
Other potential "hot spots"identified in the report include northern and southern Africa, the Mediterranean, central Asia, Pakistan and Bangladesh, parts of the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico and the Amazon region of Latin America.
Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, said the report - compiled by German and Swiss scientists - was "not a prediction that the world will go up in flames". Rather, it was saying that climate change could "exacerbate latent conflicts" in areas under stress.
He also noted that the UN Security Council had debated the issue of climate change as a security threat earlier this years and there had also been warnings about the potentially dire consequences by retired and serving senior military officers in Australia, Britain and the US.
