Recent News

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Denmark approaches the debate about climate change will bounce to the front of the global agenda.  From a security perspective much attention will be given to the potential for protesters to make some kind of statement, even though 2009 has been the year when street activism has notably failed to adapt, or score any success.  Beyond the tactical security concerns of the event itself the real rallying cry should be the need to embrace climate change as a security metric.  The CIA has recently opened a climate change center to examine the national security implications of climate change and this work can be replicated at a corporate and non-governmental level.

There is a wealth of information available relating to climate change, what isn’t available is local or individualized synthesis to make sense of this data for an organization.  The terms, ‘increased resource competition’, ‘water scarcity’, ‘extreme weather events’ and ‘coastal flooding’ are all in the popular consciousness– but what would all this mean for governments, companies or individuals?  Given the interconnected nature of environmental systems this is tough analytical work but increasingly looks highly necessary especially when considered projects with longer time horizons.

This map shows projected sea-level rise; the bar at the bottom is in centimeters.

Of all the trends to watch in the climate change space the rise in sea levels appears to be the most important physical effect to monitor.  Given the complexity of the overall environmental system year-to-year temperature fluctuations are best ignored in favor of looking at the oceans.  Sea level rise is the best available measure of the earth’s heat balance because it comes from only two things – the melting of the glaciers and the expansion of water as it warms.  Sea level is therefore the thermometer that indicates true global warming.  This rise in sea levels is not predicted to be uniform, with greater change in the northeastern United States than California (as shown in diagram to the left).  Understanding these local variances can be an organizational priority.

There are clearly some intriguing questions sitting out there in this space.  How will climate change, motivate or create terrorist movements?  Will MEND become the global model for localized resource insurgency focused on water rather than oil?  Will a violent environmentalist group take the place of the largely ineffective Earth Liberation Front (ELF) as climate change becomes a visceral reality?  Whatever the answers to these questions climate change should now form part of security analysts thinking – in contrast to the ineffective cat and mouse activist games at these global gatherings – the oceans rising temperature will have a measurable effect.

[Links to InTerrain data on Earth Liberation Front - Incident List Spreadsheet - Incident Map using Bing]