Q&A: "Climate Change Reinforcing Political Problems"

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=48466


Suzanne Hoeksema interviews ROB VOS, head of the UN Development Policy and Analysis Division


UNITED NATIONS, Sep 16 (IPS) - The negative fallout from climate change, including drought, floods, melting glaciers, mass migration, and sea level rise, is being increasingly viewed as a potential security threat to nation states worldwide.

In a statement on Darfur, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon referred to climate change as one of the main causes of the violence taking place in the Sudanese province threatened by drought and desertification.

This view is shared by U.S. Senator John Kerry, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and a vociferous advocate of mitigation measures for climate change.

However, in an interview with U.N. correspondent Suzanne Hoeksema, the director of DESA's Development Policy and Analysis Division, Rob Vos, says that such a direct link between cause and effect is very difficult to prove.

"Right now we are faced with devastating drought and famine in Eastern Africa", but the extent to which this draught will become a humanitarian disaster, he said, has to do with underlying political problems.

In its 'World Economic and Social Survey, 2009 (WESS) released last month, the U.N.'s Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA) warns of a high probability of destabilising political consequences as temperatures continue to rise.

Vos observes that within the United Nations, the Security Council and the U.S. government, there has been increasing attention to climate change and security issues.

The survey was released in advance of the climate change summit scheduled to take place in New York Sep. 22 in preparation for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Vos says these climate negotiations will mainly try to reach an agreement on the universal reduction of emissions, but they do not fully address how that will be accomplished, or who will pay the bill.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

IPS: What is the link between climate change and political problems? 

ROB VOS: Climate change and political problems reinforce each other, as in Somalia, where pirates and militias inhibit humanitarian aid supplies. Potential conflicts will arise where people leave their habitats and migrate to other places.

Some would say that the Darfur crisis was caused by climate change. Although this is hard to prove, it remains a truism that countries with underlying political and social risk factors will be more vulnerable to climate change.

IPS: How will the effects of climate change in Africa, for example, impact on security in industrialised nations? 

RV: More drought in Africa will bring more Africans to Europe with the accompanying societal issues. Then, where people move, there will be conflicts. So we have to respond to the complexities of climate change strategically. Developing countries must be given an opportunity to grow to make themselves defensible to climate change.

IPS: How can the survey's recommendations be realised? Are growth and reduction of emissions not mutually exclusive? 

RV: It is always difficult to predict the future. Yet importantly, what the survey attempts to show is that without development, the sensitivity to climate change of developing countries will increase. So both policies need to become part of each other. We have the knowledge and technology, but both are expensive and not easily accessible for developing countries.

First, we have to ensure that energy expertise becomes affordable and accessible, and second, we have to facilitate the actual transformation to durable forms of energy.

IPS: Providing knowledge and technology to developing countries alone is unlikely to mitigate climate change. What about political will and public awareness? 

RV: Developing countries may say that it is not their responsibility to clean up the mess the developed countries have caused, and they have a point in that, but they also realise that they feel the consequences of climate change more severely than developed countries. Ignorance is not an option for them.

Countries such as China have realised that there is something to gain from the climate change industry. Soon they will be the main producer of solar panels. Clean energy should become an attractive form of energy, not a financial burden. But, it is true that we cannot force people nor governments: you can bring the horse to the water, but you cannot force it to drink.

IPS: Besides emission reduction, what can be done to avoid conflicts related to climate, for example, water wars? 

RV: Here we have to think about water management, rural development, and other more radical demographic options such as government-led migration. This migration policy is certainly not always possible or desirable, but at some point we might need to think of these measurements.

The question is, what do we do with the people who live in unliveable areas? Do we try to fix the land or do we move the people? Governments of several groups of islands in the Oceania have begun talks with Australia and New Zealand about large-scale evacuations. Nowadays, we only evacuate for short time periods in cases of natural disasters.

It will all depend on governance. For example, people, farms and factories all need water for different purposes. What is needed is a common denominator. When water is used for a single purpose, such as drinking, cooperation may succeed. But when different groups have opposing interests, underlying conflicts can easily take root.

When scarcity is managed by some sort of community or government, conflicts are more likely to be managed peacefully.

(END/2009)