Battle for the planet: Climate change to spark global wars
Wednesday April 23 2008
Climate change could cause global conflicts as large as the two world wars but lasting for centuries unless the problem is controlled, a leading think tank in the UK has warned.
The Royal United Services Institute said a tenfold increase in research spending, comparable to the amount spent on the Apollo space programme, would be needed if the world was to avoid the worst effects of changing temperatures.
However the London-based group said that the world's response to threats posed by climate change, such as rising sea levels and migration, had so far been "slow and inadequate,'' because nations had failed to prepare for the worst-case scenario.
"We're preparing for a car bomb, not for 9/11,'' said Nick Mabey, the author of the report.
Last week Lord Stern, who compiled an economic assessment of climate change for the UK government, said that he had underestimated the possible economic consequences.
Mr Mabey, a former senior member of Gordon Brown's strategy unit is now chief executive of the environmental group E3G.
He said leading economies should be preparing for what would happen if climate change turned out to be at the top of the predicted temperature range.
Mr Mabey said the Apollo programme cost the United States €12.48bn a year (at 2002 prices), nearly 10 times more than the current spending on energy research.
The equivalent scaling-up of research and development needed to be undertaken by every major country to prepare for the eventuality that the climate would reach a "tipping point'' where warming and sea level rise began to accelerate, he said. If the change did not happen so fast, and climate change was more benign than the worst-case scenario, the research would not be wasted as technological advances in nuclear power, biofuels, carbon capture and storage and renewables were urgently needed anyway, he added.
Actually deploying that technology, however, in the event of a "crash'' programme would cost €62.41bn in America alone, though this sum would have to be found by both the private sector and the state.
The report said: "If climate change is not slowed and critical environmental thresholds are exceeded, then it will become a primary driver of conflicts between and within states.'' It added: "Climate impacts will force us into a radical rethink of how we identify and secure our national interests.
"For example, our energy and climate security will increasingly depend on stronger alliances with other large energy consumers, such as China, to develop and deploy new energy technologies, and less on relations with oil producing states.
"No strategy for long run peace and stability in Afghanistan can possibly succeed unless local livelihoods can survive the impact of a changing climate on water availability and crop yields.'' (©Daily Telegraph, London).
- Charles Clover in London
