Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
has been channeled mainly to poorer states in sub-Saharan Africa
this despite
the geopolitical and security implications being far more acute in the Arab world.
European-funded initiatives in the region to date
-
-
Desertec and several other
smaller plans
-
are judged to be of limited short-term help in boosting Arab
countries
low carbon resilience.
16
Organisations like International Alert argue that there remains a need in Western
policies to understand the more detailed mechanisms through which climate change
is likely to engender con
'
ict. Extant policies rest on overly linear assumptions. The
key variable is that where local civic organisations are weak, shared resource man-
agement becomes harder and a predatory state more easily takes command. Tensions
between sedentary farmers and herding communities who are forced to move longer
distances by climate stress need inclusive civic forums to resolve. Governance con-
ditions are then a pivotal transmission belt between climatic conditions and instabil-
ity. Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs) criticise European governments and
the EU collectively for failing to incorporate such underlying drivers of instability
into more climate-sensitive con
ict prevention policies.
There is still no granular means of assessing the risk of climate-induced con
ict
and instability. Climate factors fed into early warning lists remain extremely broad-
brush and not su
ciently detailed to understand how climate stress might actually
trigger con
ict. Moreover, generic warnings of droughts and
oods are even less
amenable to being moved from
'
warning
'
to operational
'
climate action.
'
Govern-
ments have struggled to incorporate climate-speci
c elements into their traditional
con
ict prevention programmes because they admit that more climate specialists
would need to engage with the con
ict agenda than has so far been the case.
European governments have stressed their desire to see the UN assume the lead
role on the con
ict prevention strand of climate security. But progress in the UN has
been extremely limited. It has long been recognised at the highest levels in the UN
that climate change is a factor of increasing pertinence to con
ict prevention. As far
back as 2001, then UN secretary general Ko
Annan declared that:
'
Environmental
degradation has the potential to destabilise already con
ict-prone regions, especially
when compounded by inequitable access or politicisation of access to scarce resour-
ces.
'
'
However, when the Swiss Peace Institute surveyed the UN
se
orts to incor-
porate climate change factors into its con
ict prevention programmes it concluded
that
'
the two issues of environment and con
ict have not been explicitly linked in
policy implementation
ict
crises rather than tempering the longer-term underlying causes of instability, such as
climate stress. The UN Environment Programme
'
. The UN remains focused overwhelmingly on post-con
'
s(UNEP
'
s) specialised unit on
Post-Con
ict and Disaster Management Branch was merged into a wider Disasters
and Con
icts Programme. European diplomats lament that tangible upgrading to
UN policies on the ground has not been forthcoming.
