New Report: Climate Change, Migration, and Conflict

The Center for American Progress just released a report on “Climate Change, Migration, and Conflict: Addressing Complex C

risis Scenarios in the 21st Century.” It’s the first ever from the left-leaning think tank on climate and migration. From the summary:

In this paper and the reports to follow, we will discuss regional case studies in which the cumulative effects of climate change, migration, and conflict interact within a broad framework of political, economic, and environmental security challenges. Our objective is to develop a robust contemporary notion of sustainable security that effectively integrates defense, diplomacy, and development into a comprehensive policy designed to deal with today’s global threats while preventing future threats from occurring.

We delve into

these recommendations in detail at the end of this paper but

in this section we briefly explain how we believe the international community, the United States, its allies, and key regional players can together create a sustainable security situation to deal with climate change, migration, and conflict. Specifically they must:

  • Conduct federal government institutional reform in the United States that addresses the development-security relationship and that prioritizes planning for long-term humanitarian consequences of climate change and migration as a core national security issue
  • Develop strategies to strengthen intergovernmental cooperation on transboundary risks in different regions of the world
  • Increase funding for the Global Climate Change Initiative
  • Ensure better information flows and more effective disaster response for early-warning systems
  • Support the best science to expand our understanding of specific circumstances such as desertification, rainfall variability, disaster occurrence, and coastal erosion, and their relation to human migration and conflict
  • Identify regions most vulnerable to climate-induced migration, both forced and voluntary, in order to target aid, information, and contingency-planning capabilities
  • View migration as a proactive adaptation strategy for local populations under pressure due to increased environmental change

A truly sustainable approach to security, then, requires us not only to look at the traditional security threats posed by the interaction between states, but also to understand that the security of the United States is advanced by promoting the individual well-being of people across the developing world, and by embracing collective responses to shared threats posed by climate change. We turn first to understanding the dynamics of those threats.

Read the report in its entirety here.

You can also watch the complementary video with Koko Warner of the United Nations University, U.K. Climate and Energy Security Envoy Rear Admiral Neal Morisetti, Anne-Marie Slaughter, USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah, and Senior Fellow Michael Werz of the Center for American Progress here:

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