Assured Mutual Dependence

LONDON – During the Cold War, the certainty of “mutually assured destruction” steered the nuclear arms race away from catastrophe: a would-be attacker would face immediate retaliation, inevitably ending in both sides’ annihilation.

Today, a very different race is taking place – a race for the earth’s vital resources, and it threatens to undermine stability in key regions of the world. The growing dependence of countries on one another’s food, water, and energy requires that the global response to sustainability is taken to the highest political level.

Unlike the nuclear arms race of the twentieth century, the resource-security agenda is not linear. Mutually assured destruction was explicitly acknowledged during the Cold War in statements from both sides. In the race for resources that defines the twenty-first century, no actor is directly or indirectly threatening other players to curtail food or energy exports, but all bear the systemic risks.

Countries have become unavoidably interdependent, and climate change, water stress, and the loss of ecological resilience all increase the volatility of this mutual dependence. In a world of limited and scarce resources, countries and companies will be forced to make decisions that affect one another’s security.

In order to navigate this interdependence, the Earth Security Index 2014, produced by the Earth Security Initiative, shows countries’ combined vulnerabilities that might increase the risk exposure of governments and companies, unless more strategic approaches and sustainable investments are put in place. The ESI identifies four areas of mutual dependence that will likely shape global security in the coming decades:

· Choke points. Countries’ growing demand for energy, water, food, and land cannot be satisfied without incurring tradeoffs among limited available resources. Choke points are reached when the available resources are insufficient to satisfy demand. In China and India, for example, this means that in certain regions there may not be enough water in the short term to run coal-fired thermal power stations and irrigate large fields to grow crops. In China, 60% of planned coal-fired power plants will be built in water-stressed regions.

· Food. The growing dependence of many countries on food, water, and energy imports creates new opportunities for trade and investment, but it also exposes countries to critical vulnerabilities. Australia, for example, is a large coal exporter but imports most of its refined fuels and holds just three days of fuel stockpiles. The challenges of mutual dependence are particularly acute with respect to food. As the ESI shows, some countries – including Egypt, Peru, and the United Arab Emirates – are heavily dependent on cereal imports from a small number of suppliers. Moreover, grain suppliers’ exposure to extreme weather may compromise their ability to sustain supplies, with knock-on effects for import-dependent countries. In 2010, for example, Russia imposed an export ban on wheat, following a severe drought. The resulting food-price increases are believed to have played a role in Egypt’s revolution.

· Teleconnections. Anticipating systemic ecological risks will be increasingly important for sectors such as reinsurance and infrastructure investments. “Teleconnections” refer to weather events that are related to one another over large geographic distances. They are well known to science but not properly discussed by the industries, investors, and governments whose security depends on environmental stability. For example, tropical rainforests play a crucial function in maintaining stable weather and rainfall, acting as a “pump” that helps moisture travel between different regions. Deforestation can thus have a destabilizing effect on weather patterns, amplifying the frequency and severity of extreme events such as floods and droughts. The resulting liabilities to key industries and the financial sector are clear. In Brazil, for example, deforestation in Amazonia has slowed significantly over the last five years, but Brazil has already lost more than 11 million hectares of rainforest; its exposure to extreme weather has also steadily risen, with floods causing $4.7 billion in losses in 2011 alone.

· Land productivity bottlenecks: Agriculture systems are reaching resource limits, and persistent governance gaps compromise their ability to ensure food security, dignified livelihoods, and ecological stewardship. Companies, investors, governments, and communities confront a series of critical barriers to increasing the food availability that the world needs: Local populations’ insecure land ownership; receding water tables, owing to unsustainable extraction rates; inefficient use of pollution-causing inputs like fertilizers and pesticides; the loss of vital ecosystems, affecting the resilience of food production; and certain areas’ inability to cope with extreme weather. In some regions of India, for example, these issues are playing out in tandem. Insecure land tenure acts as a disincentive for smallholder farmers to commit to productivity-enhancing investments; water extraction rates are depleting aquifers as a result of permissive policies; and food security remains out of reach for millions of people, despite rapid economic growth in urban areas. Countries and companies will increasingly need to invest in sustainable land in order to hedge their resource risks.

In 2015, global frameworks are due to be agreed to address climate change, coordinate responses to natural disasters, and guide the world’s development agenda. Some of these multilateral processes – in particular, those seeking an ambitious global climate agreement – appear to be moving in slow motion and against the grain of geopolitical interests.

In the past, the case for high-level nuclear governance was urgent and clear, but required processes for creating a common understanding of risks and opportunities across national borders. Successful multilateral responses, like the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, continue to be supported by more flexible global platforms, such as the Nuclear Threat Initiative, based on relationships and trust established outside the box of formal multilateralism.

This year, as world leaders discuss the next generation of sustainability, development, and climate frameworks, they will need to put their security and mutual dependence at the heart of the responses. Here, too, the world will need to create informal platforms that supplement traditional multilateralism.

In particular, the outdated divisions between rich and poor countries and their responsibilities must be revised. As new powers like China, Brazil, India, and other G-20 economies bid to reform global governance systems, their vulnerability to resource security must invigorate these processes. Only then will the world be on track to improve the security of all. More

 

Is it 1914 all over again? We are in danger of repeating the mistakes that started WWI, says a leading historian

History never repeats itself, but it sure does rhyme, it has been said. Now an internationally respected historian is warning that today's world bears a number of striking similarities with the build-up to the First World War.

The newly mechanised armies of the early 20th century produced unprecedented slaughter on the battlefields of the "war to end all wars" after a spark lit in the Balkans with the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Professor Margaret MacMillan, of the University of Cambridge, argues that the Middle East could be viewed as the modern-day equivalent of this turbulent region. A nuclear arms race that would be likely to start if Iran developed a bomb "would make for a very dangerous world indeed, which could lead to a recreation of the kind of tinderbox that exploded in the Balkans 100 years ago – only this time with mushroom clouds," she writes in an essay for the Brookings Institution, a leading US think-tank.

"While history does not repeat itself precisely, the Middle East today bears a worrying resemblance to the Balkans then," she says. "A similar mix of toxic nationalisms threatens to draw in outside powers as the US, Turkey, Russia, and Iran look to protect their interests and clients."

Professor MacMillan highlights a string of other parallels between today and a century ago. Modern-day Islamist terrorists mirror the revolutionary communists and anarchists who carried out a string of assassinations in the name of a philosophy that sanctioned murder to achieve their vision of a better world. And in 1914, Germany was a rising force that sought to challenge the pre-eminent power of the time, the UK. Today, the growing power of China is perceived as a threat by some in the US.

Transitions from one world power to another are always seen as dangerous times. In the late 1920s, the US drew up plans for a war with the British Empire that would have seen the invasion of Canada, partly because it was assumed conflict would break out as America took over as the world's main superpower.

Professor MacMillan, whose book The War That Ended Peace was published last year, said right-wing and nationalist sentiments were rising across the world and had also been a factor before the First World War

In China and Japan, patriotic passions have been inflamed by the dispute over a string of islands in the East China Sea, known as the Senkakus in Japan and Diaoyus in China. "Increased Chinese military spending and the build-up of its naval capacity suggest to many American strategists that China intends to challenge the US as a Pacific power, and we are now seeing an arms race between the two countries in that region," she writes in her essay. "The Wall Street Journal has authoritative reports that the Pentagon is preparing war plans against China – just in case."

The US has a mutual self-defence treaty with Japan and in 2012 it specifically confirmed that this covered the Senkaku Islands. In November, China set up an "air defence" zone over the islands and a few days later two American B-52 bombers flew over the islands in defiance of Beijing.

"It is tempting – and sobering –to compare today's relationship between China and the US with that between Germany and England a century ago," Professor MacMillan writes. She points to the growing disquiet in the US over Chinese investment in America while "the Chinese complain that the US treats them as a second-rate power".

Another similarity highlighted by the historian is the belief that a full-scale war between the major powers is unthinkable after such a prolonged period of peace. "Now, as then, the march of globalisation has lulled us into a false sense of safety," she says. "The 100th anniversary of 1914 should make us reflect anew on our vulnerability to human error, sudden catastrophes, and sheer accident.

"Instead of muddling along from one crisis to another, now is the time to think again about those dreadful lessons of a century ago in the hope that our leaders, with our encouragement, will think about how they can work together to build a stable international order." More

 

 

2013 Environment and Security Discussion Series Natural Resources and International Conflicts

For those who may be in Washington tomorrow this discussion should be well worth attending

The Stimson Center presents: 2013 Environment and Security Discussion Series Natural Resources and International Conflicts Tuesday, June 11, 2013 1:30 - 3:30 p.m. The Stimson Center 1111 19th Street, NW, 12th Floor Washington, D.C. RSVP HERE The Stimson Center cordially invites you to join our 2013 Environment and Security Discussion Series. The series brings together the Washington, D.C. area’s leading thinkers for an open exchange of ideas and views on the deepening links between environmental and security concerns, and a discussion of the growing relevance of the environment-security nexus to national and international policy. Speakers: Jeffrey Colgan, Assistant Professor, School of International Service, American University David Michel, Director, Environmental Security Program, Stimson Center Moderator: Ellen Laipson, president and CEO, Stimson Center Colgan is an expert on oil geopolitics and author of the newly published "Petro-Aggression: When Oil Causes War" (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Michel is the co-author/editor of several recent reports on natural resource challenges in the Middle East, South Asia, and the Indian Ocean. The event’s discussion will center on how states’ development of natural resources impacts their foreign policy, human security, and political and social stability. What are the geopolitical and environmental implications of growing demands for the world’s natural resources – energy, water, food? We hope you will join us for what promises to be an engaging conversation on current resource development trends, international security, and environmental sustainability. For more information about the June 11th event or the Stimson Environment and Security Discussion Series, please contact Russell Sticklor at rsticklor@stimson.org or (202) 464-2667.

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Entering a resource-shock world

Brace yourself. You may not be able to tell yet, but according to global experts and the US intelligence community, the earth is already shifting under you. Whether you know it or not, you are on a new planet, a resource-shock world of a sort humanity has never before experienced.

Two nightmare scenarios - a global scarcity of vital resources and the onset of extreme climate change - are already beginning to converge and in the coming decades are likely to produce a tidal wave of unrest, rebellion, competition and conflict. Just what this tsunami of disaster will look like may, as yet, be hard to discern, but experts warn of “water wars” over contested river systems, global food riots sparked by soaring prices for life’s basics, mass migrations of climate refugees (with resulting anti-migrant violence) and the breakdown of social order or the collapse of states. At first, such mayhem is likely to arise largely in Africa, Central Asia and other areas of the underdeveloped South, but in time all regions of the planet will be affected.

To appreciate the power of this encroaching catastrophe, it’s necessary to examine each of the forces that are combining to produce this future cataclysm.

Resource shortages

Start with one simple given: the prospect of future scarcities of vital natural resources, including energy, water, land, food and critical minerals. This in itself would guarantee social unrest, geopolitical friction and war.

It is important to note that absolute scarcity does not have to be on the horizon in any given resource category for this scenario to kick in. A lack of adequate supplies to meet the needs of a growing, ever more urbanised and industrialised global population is enough. Given the wave of extinctions that scientists are recording, some resources - particular species of fish, animals and trees, for example - will become less abundant in the decades to come, and may even disappear altogether. But key materials for modern civilisation like oil, uranium and copper will simply prove harder and more costly to acquire, leading to supply bottlenecks and periodic shortages.

Oil - the single most important commodity in the international economy - provides an apt example. Although global oil supplies may actually grow in the coming decades, many experts doubt that they can be expanded sufficiently to meet the needs of a rising global middle class that is, for instance, expected to buy millions of new cars in the near future. In its 2011 World Energy Outlook, the International Energy Agency claimed that an anticipated global oil demand of 104 million barrels per day in 2035 will be satisfied. This, the report suggested, would be thanks in large part to additional supplies of “unconventional oil” (Canadian tar sands, shale oil and so on), as well as 55 million barrels of new oil from fields “yet to be found” and “yet to be developed”.

However, many analysts scoff at this optimistic assessment, arguing that rising production costs (for energy that will be ever more difficult and costly to extract), environmental opposition, warfare, corruption and other impediments will make it extremely difficult to achieve increases of this magnitude. In other words, even if production manages for a time to top the 2010 level of 87 million barrels per day, the goal of 104 million barrels will never be reached and the world’s major consumers will face virtual, if not absolute, scarcity.

Water provides another potent example. On an annual basis, the supply of drinking water provided by natural precipitation remains more or less constant: about 40,000 cubic kilometres. But much of this precipitation lands on Greenland, Antarctica, Siberia and inner Amazonia where there are very few people, so the supply available to major concentrations of humanity is often surprisingly limited. In many regions with high population levels, water supplies are already relatively sparse. This is especially true of North Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East, where the demand for water continues to grow as a result of rising populations, urbanisation and the emergence of new water-intensive industries. The result, even when the supply remains constant, is an environment of increasing scarcity.

Wherever you look, the picture is roughly the same: supplies of critical resources may be rising or falling, but rarely do they appear to be outpacing demand, producing a sense of widespread and systemic scarcity. However generated, a perception of scarcity - or imminent scarcity - regularly leads to anxiety, resentment, hostility and contentiousness. This pattern is very well understood and has been evident throughout human history.

In his book Constant Battles, for example, Steven LeBlanc, director of collections for Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, notes that many ancient civilisations experienced higher levels of warfare when faced with resource shortages brought about by population growth, crop failures, or persistent drought. Jared Diamond, author of the bestseller Collapse, has detected a similar pattern in Mayan civilisation and the Anasazi culture of New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon. More recently, concern over adequate food for the home population was a significant factor in Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and Germany’s invasions of Poland in 1939 and the Soviet Union in 1941, according to Lizzie Collingham, author of The Taste of War.

Resource-related conflict

Although the global supply of most basic commodities has grown enormously since the end of World War II, analysts see the persistence of resource-related conflict in areas where materials remain scarce or there is anxiety about the future reliability of supplies. Many experts believe, for example, that the fighting in Darfur and other war-ravaged areas of North Africa has been driven, at least in part, by competition among desert tribes for access to scarce water supplies, exacerbated in some cases by rising population levels.

“In Darfur,” says a 2009 report from the UN Environment Programme on the role of natural resources in the conflict, “recurrent drought, increasing demographic pressures, and political marginalisation are among the forces that have pushed the region into a spiral of lawlessness and violence that has led to 300,000 deaths and the displacement of more than two million people since 2003.”

Anxiety over future supplies is often also a factor in conflicts that break out over access to oil or control of contested undersea reserves of oil and natural gas. In 1979, for instance, when the Islamic revolution in Iran overthrew the Shah and the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, Washington began to fear that someday it might be denied access to Persian Gulf oil. At that point, President Jimmy Carter promptly announced what came to be called the Carter Doctrine. In his 1980 State of the Union Address, Carter affirmed that any move to impede the flow of oil from the Gulf would be viewed as a threat to America’s “vital interests” and would be repelled by “any means necessary, including military force”.

In 1990, this principle was invoked by President George HW Bush to justify intervention in the first Persian Gulf War, just as his son would use it, in part, to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Today, it remains the basis for US plans to employ force to stop the Iranians from closing the Strait of Hormuz, the strategic waterway connecting the Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean through which about 35 percent of the world’s seaborne oil commerce passes.

Recently, a set of resource conflicts have been rising toward the boiling point between China and its neighbours in Southeast Asia when it comes to control of offshore oil and gas reserves in the South China Sea. Although the resulting naval clashes have yet to result in a loss of life, a strong possibility of military escalation exists. A similar situation has also arisen in the East China Sea, where China and Japan are jousting for control over similarly valuable undersea reserves. Meanwhile, in the South Atlantic Ocean, Argentina and Britain are once again squabbling over the Falkland Islands (called Las Malvinas by the Argentinians) because oil has been discovered in surrounding waters. More

 

Turmoil from climate change poses security risks

WASHINGTON - 29 October 2009 — An island in the Indian Ocean, vital to the U.S. military, disappears as the sea level rises. Rivers critical to India and Pakistan shrink, increasing military tensions in South Asia.

Drought, famine and disease forces population shifts and political turmoil in the Middle East. [And for South Asia and China] Himalayan glaciers are likely to recede, producing fresh water shortages in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and parts of China.

U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, viewing these and other potential impacts of global warming, have concluded if they materialize it would become ever more likely global alliances will shift, the need to respond to massive relief efforts will increase and American forces will become entangled in more regional military conflicts.
It is a bleak picture of national security that backers of a climate bill in Congress hope will draw in reluctant Republicans who have denounced the bill as an energy tax and jobs killer because it would shift the country away from fossil fuels by limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and industrial facilities.
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