UK Think Tank: Slow Global Response To
Climate Change Has Security Risk
LONDON (The Associated Press) - Apr 23, 2008
- By Kelvin Chan
If uncontrolled, climate change could have security implications as serious
as a world war, a British defense think tank said Wednesday.
The report by the Royal United Services Institute said the response of
governments to climate security threats has been "slow and
inadequate," and it urged nations to integrate climate change into
their security policies to prepare for worst-case scenarios. "In the
next decades, climate change will drive as significant a change in the
strategic security environment as the end of the Cold War. If uncontrolled,
climate change will have security implications of similar magnitude to the
world wars, but which will last for centuries," the institute said in
a summary of its report.
The study calls for a dramatic increase in spending to combat security
threats posed by global warming. The institute said governments should
spend at least as much on researching and developing green technology as they
do on fighting terrorism.
"The basic point is that if we don't control climate change and we
go over these tipping points, those costs continue occurring for centuries,"
said Nick Mabey the report's author, who was a senior adviser the British prime
minister's strategy unit until 2005.
The institute said wealthy countries in Europe as well as the U.S.
and Japan need to increase their spending on energy research tenfold to deal
with the shock from a worst-case scenario of an extreme climate change crisis.
Those spending levels would be comparable to what NASA spent on its Apollo
space program, the report said. "The U.S. government has at least done
something of that magnitude in the past," Mabey said, citing research
that puts the cost of Apollo at nearly US$20 billion at 2002 prices.
The money would need to be spent on large scale carbon capture methods;
advanced solar and biofuel technology; and ultra-efficient hybrid hypercars, electricity
grids and aircraft fuels. Ignoring security threats posed by climate
change is as dangerous as ignoring the risk posed by terrorism or nuclear
weapons proliferation, said the institute.
Its report predicted that climate change will either drive governments to
collaborate or heighten tensions between them and within countries. If it isn't
slowed, climate change will become a "primary driver of conflicts
between states," the report said. Energy security will depend less on
relations with oil-producing states and more on alliances with big energy
consuming countries such as China, in order to deploy new energy technologies,
the report said.
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