The Political Consequences of Climate Change: Journal Article Critique Assignment

Internal Code: MAS157

Journal Article Critique Assignment:

Question: Preparation of a 500 word Critique in Weeks 3 of one relevant article is intended to encourage independent research and demonstrate a capacity to find, synthesise and critically evaluate information relevant to specific topics or issues. The Critique should demonstrate précis of the key arguments of the article and critical evaluation of the article‘s merits (strengths/weaknesses). Description: The conventional wisdom on climate change and security affairs features resource wars, weak states toppling, and trickles of immigrants turning into torrents. Over the medium term, however, climate change is not likely to involve simple causality and a stark, one-to-one correspondence. Climate impacts may be all but imperceptible for states already beset with acute ongoing problems, such as Afghanistan, North Korea and Zimbabwe. And they may be surprisingly tolerable for long-arid states, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, whose entire histories have involved adjusting to inhospitable climates. For most states climate change tends to be under the radar, intersecting with and exacerbating existing difficulties such as economic weakness, infra- structural shortcomings, communal strife, weak governance and tenuous political legitimacy, often with spillover effects beyond borders. Climate impacts are manifold, diffuse and of systemic consequence in the aggregate. Well-governed states may be better positioned to adapt than states in the developing world, but even the most privileged nations will not get off scot-free.1 Physical changes, social responses Rising temperatures and water anomalies, like droughts or floods, bear on the availability of natural resources such as pasture, agricultural produce and drinking water.Relative scarcity can lead to either cooperation or competition among affected groups, but it is competition that drives the social effects of most concern. This competition, disruptive enough, occurs between urbanites and displaced rural dwellers moving to cities, as has been seen in many parts of the world, such as South Asia. When cities do not have the resources to accommodate new arrivals, many will aim to move on to more prosperous countries. This can lead to human tragedy for migrants stuck outside various cordons and fences, recriminations on sending countries for not securing their borders, and ugly nativist backlashes in destination countries.Another fault line for competition among domestic groups involves distinct regional entities, such as Saharan–Maghrebi divides within North African countries. And competition takes place between clans and ethnic groups as well. Already-weak central governments will be strained by the loss of revenues, new welfare demands, and the upsetting of traditional political balances. Official responses to hard-hit areas are likely to be perceived as inadequate, sometimes stoking pre-existing feelings of marginalisation and discrimination. Central incapacity and local grievance may prompt insurrection in the underserved hinterlands in areas such as parts of the Near East. Conversely, autonomy movements in wealthier portions of beleaguered countries could arise, as may already be happening in some Andean countries. Poorer states further weakened by climate-induced stress will fare poorly keeping some order. Political impacts and institutional developments Climate-change impacts, especially in the form of water availability, will colour relations among regions, states and institutions. China, for example, has large-scale plans to divert water from major southern rivers to its drier north. This, along with existing Chinese dams on the Mekong and declining water from lower snow and glacial melt, would diminish water that would otherwise flow down the Mekong River, vastly reducing its flow through Vietnam, and creating grave economic hardship for people in the Mekong Delta who rely on this resource for fishing and agriculture. It is hard to imagine Chinese–ASEAN amity under such circumstances, and easy to imagine conflict among downstream countries that fight each other because they cannot take on China. These tensions need to figure in any assessment of future East Asian institutional architectures and regional conflict resolution mechanisms. Climate negotiations and global order Finally, climate change may also impel the creation of new international institutions, just as it is making clear that others are brittle and inflexible.Most obviously, a future multilateral arrangement to lower CO2 emissions could involve an International Energy Agency-type organisation to monitor national commitments and perhaps censure those in gross non-compliance. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change already is supported by a secretariat in Bonn that does some of this monitoring. Beyond that,some observers have concluded that greenhouse-gas mitigation will eventually involve global-scale geo-engineering, such as implanting reflective materials in the upper atmosphere.17 States are unlikely to cede to other states a unilateral right to tamper with the atmosphere, so should mitigation efforts come to such extremes, trustworthy multilateral regimes would be necessary. Assessing climate change and the way ahead For security analysts as well as for scientists, climate change is an insidiously multifaceted problem. Climate ‘winners’, like Russia, may turn out to be political losers; witness the interplay of Russia with China. Worse, climate change is both devilishly uncertain and very long term. The political challenge of marshalling interest in a multi-decadal challenge in the teeth of the current and unfolding international economic crisis is daunting. That crisis makes it all the harder to demonstrate and communicate persuasively that a forward-looking pursuit of green technology and infrastructure creates jobs and could be a win–win strategy. Still, not moving now in response only allows eventual effects to be worse. Indeed, if climate scientists are gathered in a back room and asked what needs to be done, they respond ‘everything,all the time’.