Human-induced climate change is causing resource scarcities, natural disasters, and mass migrations, which in turn destabilize national, international, and human security structures and multiply the human inputs to climate change.

The strategic U.S. military base on the Indian Ocean atoll of Diego Garcia faces submergence by rising sea level. Himalayan glaciers are shrinking, cutting the flow of the critical rivers shared by India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China and exacerbating military tensions. Changing rainfall patterns in Africa and the Middle East are driving drought, famine, disease, ethnic conflict, national destabilization, radicalism, and international terrorism.

Alarms about the expanding role of climate change as a force multiplier of existing threats to national, international, and human security structures studies are being raised at all levels of governance and intelligence—national (including the U.S. Senate, the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Pentagon), transnational (including the European Union and the United Nations), and private (such as the Central News Agency and the American Security Project). Climate Change and Security: A Gathering Storm of Global Challenges focuses on the three major feedback effects of human-induced climate change on human and international security—resource scarcity, natural disasters, and sea-level rise.

Decreasing per capita availability of renewable resources due to such regional effects of climate change as drought and desertification leads to intensified competition for these resources and may result in armed violence—especially when compounded by conditions of rapid population growth, tribalism, and sectarianism, as in Darfur and Somalia. The increase in the frequency and intensity of meteorological disasters associated with global warming weakens already debilitated tropical societies and makes them still more vulnerable to political instability, as in Haiti. Sea-level rise will lead to disruptive mass migrations of climate refugees as dense littoral populations are forced to abandon low-lying coastal regions, as in Bangladesh.

Features
• Presents tables and figures
• Maps
• A bibliography at the end of each chapter

Highlights
• Underscores that the risks posed by climate change are not just of a humanitarian nature, but also include political and security risks
• Shows how climate change threatens to overburden states and regions that are already fragile and conflict-prone
• Explains how disasters and scarcities caused by regional climate change lead to intensified competition that may result in armed violence
• Proposes a new environmental security agenda for the 21st century

Christian Webersik is associate professor of development studies at the Centre for Development Studies at the University of Agder, in Norway. He was a postdoctoral fellow at United Nations University’s Institute of Advanced Studies in Yokohama, Japan, where he specialized in the role of natural resources and climate change in armed conflict and postconflict and postnatural disaster economic recovery, and at the Earth Institute of Columbia University, where he specialized in GIS mapping of the links between drought and conflict. He worked as a conflict researcher for the United Nations Development Program’s Bureau of Crisis Prevention and Recovery, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, and the UN Climate Change Secretariat. Following his University of Oxford doctorate on environmental scarcity and conflict in Somalia, he served as assistant professor of political science at the University of Asmara, Asmara, Eritrea.

Endorsements
"Webersik makes a strong case for situating climate change and security links squarely within a human security context. He brings climate change down from the airy (and some might say disconnected) heights of carbon mitigation negotiations to focus on the very tangible realm of resource scarcity, natural disasters, and migration impacts. These impacts, and the cascading social, political, and economic reactions to them, constitute a critical human security agenda that demands early action to go with early warning.
Webersik is one of the first to recognize the potentially destabilizing impacts of climate mitigation and adaptation. Climate debates to date have nearly missed this topic entirely and Webersik emphatically does not make this mistake.—Geoffrey D. Dabelko, Director, Environmental Change and Security Program, Woodrow Wilson Center and co-editor of Environmental Peacemaking

"Climate Change and Security provides a comprehensive and balanced perspective on one of today’s most pressing political issues. Webersik clearly and skillfully weaves together diverse strands of research to present a sobering yet optimistic view of an extremely complex problem; sobering in that he demonstrates that there is no single or perfect solution, and optimistic in that he emphasizes the potential for all levels of society to respond to environmental and social challenges. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand climate change and its implications for human security."—Professor Karen O’Brien, University of Oslo, Norway

“Will climate change produce more security threats? Climate study scholars easily answer ‘yes’ in their natural wish to be more alarmist; whereas security study scholars are hesitant to revisit what have been long established as causes of conflict. This marvelous book critically assesses both scientific sides and attempts to identify links, as numerous and problematic as they could be, between climate change and security."—Dr. Vesselin Popovski, Senior Academic Officer, Institute for Sustainability and Peace, United Nations University, Tokyo

“There are two overriding concerns for any national government: economy and security. Climate change threatens both. It is no surprise that both finance ministers and military chiefs take an interest in climate change, once the compound of scientists and environmentalists. Irrespective of the debate over the quality of some of the climate change science, the top brass know all too well that trouble lies ahead if climates do change. Christian Webersik has given us all a great service in covering the many features of climate change and security with a detailed analysis of one of the most imperiled 'failed states', Somalia. This is a magisterial narrative which bears reading and assimilating by everyone who acts for a peaceful planet.”—Professor Timothy O’Riordan, OBE, DL, FBA
Emeritus Professor of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK