Scores of countries face war for
scarce land, food and water as global warming increases. This is the conclusion
of the most devastating report yet on the effects of climate change that
scientists and governments prepare to issue this week.
More than 60 nations, mainly in
the Third World, will have existing tensions hugely exacerbated by the struggle
for ever-scarcer resources. Others now at peace - including China, the United
States and even parts of Europe - are expected to be plunged into conflict.
Even those not directly affected will be threatened by a flood of hundreds of
millions of "environmental refugees".
The threat is worrying world
leaders. The new UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, told a global warming
conference last month: "In coming decades, changes in the environment -
and the resulting upheavals, from droughts to inundated coastal areas - are
likely to become a major driver of war and conflict."
Margaret Beckett, the Foreign
Secretary, has repeatedly called global warming "a security issue"
and a Pentagon report concluded that abrupt climate change could lead to
"skirmishes, battles and even war due to resource constraints".
The fears will be increased by
the second report this year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The result of six years' work by 2,500 of the world's top scientists, it will
be published on Good Friday.
The first report, released two
months ago, concluded that global warming was now "unequivocal" and
it was 90 per cent certain that human activities are to blame. The new one will
be the first to show for certain that its effects are already becoming evident
around the world.
Tomorrow, representatives of the
world's governments will meet in Brussels to start four days of negotiation on
the ultimate text of the report, which they are likely to tone down somewhat.
But the final confidential draft
presented to them by the scientists makes it clear that the consequences of
global warming are appearing far sooner and faster than expected. "Changes
in climate are now affecting biological and physical systems on every
continent," it says.
In 20 years, tens of millions
more Latin Americans and hundreds of millions more Africans will be short of
water, and by 2050 one billion Asians could face water shortages. The glaciers
of the Himalayas, which feed the great rivers of the continent, are likely to
melt away almost completely by 2035, threatening the lives of 700 million
people.
Though harvests will initially
increase in temperate countries - as the extra warmth lengthens growing seasons
- they could fall by 30 per cent in India, confronting 130 million people with
starvation, by the 2050s.
By 2080, 100 million people could
be flooded out of their homes every year as the sea rises to cover their land,
turning them into environmental refugees. And up to a third of the world's wild
species could be "at high risk of irreversible extinction" from even
relatively moderate warming.
International Alert, "an
independent peace-building organisation", has complied a list of 61
countries that are already unstable or have recently suffered armed conflict
where existing tensions will be exacerbated by shortages of food and water and
by the disease, storm flooding and sea-level rise that will accompany global
warming, or by the deforestation that helps to cause it. The list forms the
basis of the map on the opposite page.
Four years ago the Pentagon
report concluded: "As famine, disease and weather-related disasters
strike... many countries' needs will exceed their carrying capacity. This will
create a sense of desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive
aggression."
Many experts believe this has
begun. Last year John Reid, the Home Secretary, blamed global warming for
helping to cause the genocide in Darfur. Water supplies are seen as a key cause
of the Arab-Israeli conflicts. The Golan Heights are important because they
control key springs and rivers and the Sea of Galilee, while vital aquifers lie
under the West Bank.
John Ashton, the Government's
climate change envoy, says that global warming should be addressed "not as
a long-term threat to our environment, but as an immediate threat to our
security and prosperity".