JOHANNESBURG: US President George W. Bush may feel Al Qaeda is the mother of all threats but a growing number of analysts and policy makers say Mother Nature could unleash bigger and scarier security concerns.
Ten years after Robert Kaplan wrote a seminal article arguing that the environment would emerge as the security threat of the 21st century, global warming and a host of other green ills are seen as major destabilizing forces.
Canadian Environment Minister David Anderson said this month that global warming posed a greater long-term threat to humanity than terrorism because it could force hundreds of millions from their homes and trigger an economic catastrophe.
Natural disasters caused by extreme weather, including heat waves and tornadoes, claimed more victims in 2003 than the previous year and the trend is set to continue, the world's biggest reinsurance company Munich Re said last week.
"The nature of changes now occurring simultaneously in the global environment, their magnitudes and rates are unprecedented in human history," said Jenny Clover, a researcher at the Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies.
"We see these different stresses, poverty, diseases, water scarcity...what one needs to understand is how these stresses increase vulnerability to environmental change."
Disruptive environmental changes include surging urban populations, wild weather patterns and depleting fish stocks. Environmental change is also seen as a trigger for conflict.
"All sorts of places with political unrest will be made worse if millions of rural people are displaced or lose their livelihood because of climate change or soil erosion," said Steve Sawyer, political director for the environmental group Green peace.
Global warming, blamed widely on emissions of gases like carbon dioxide from cars and factories, is expected to raise global average temperatures by 1.4-5.8C by 2100.
This could melt polar icecaps which would push sea levels higher, sparking a mass exodus from areas vulnerable to flooding like Bangladesh. Such a scenario would raise tensions on the heavily-populated Indian sub-continent.
COMING ANARCHY: Using West Africa as his launch pad, Kaplan painted a bleak picture of an unravelling planet in "The Coming Anarchy", published in the February 1994 edition of the Atlantic Monthly.
"For a while the media will continue to ascribe riots and other violent upheavals...mainly to ethnic and religious conflict. But as these conflicts multiply, it will become apparent that something else is afoot," he wrote.
"It is time to understand the environment for what it is: the national security issue of the 21st century." To Kaplan, soaring populations, deforestation, soil erosion, rising sea levels and the spread of diseases like Aids would all conspire, especially in parts of Africa, to destroy the fabric of society and make many states ungovernable.
He said these developments "will prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts". A number of African states have - to use the political science jargon - "failed" since he wrote these words.
Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo - all scenes of deforestation, unsustainable urban growth and other environmental problems - have been ravaged by war and all but collapsed while Ivory Coast and Zimbabwe are imploding.
Just months after Kaplan's piece appeared, densely populated and ecologically stressed Rwanda exploded in an orgy of violence that saw hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus slain by Hutu extremists. But analysts also see positive developments - including the return of peace, even if fragile - to countries like Liberia and Sierra Leone and the end of Angola's long civil war. -Reuters
