Indonesian perspective: Climate change threatens peace

Meidyatama Suryodiningrat, The Jakarta Post 25 Jan 08;

A second challenge is one to our territorial waters: If Indonesia was so worried about the creeping jurisdiction of Singapore's land reclamation projects, has the country also begun auditing the loss of strategic islands due to rising seas which may alter the borders recognized in the archipelagic concept?

The history of conflicts provoked by environmental resource competition are as long and frequent as savagery in the name of God.

The global community is slowly awakening to the impacts of climate change on human conflict.

While apocalyptic scenarios have been scripted on the long term consequence of environmental omission, the immediate threat is much more imminent.

Even before we reach the end count of these dire predictions, the environmental changes occurring in the meantime generate political-security risks for which most governments are ill prepared.

Climate change has thus far been examined mostly under the context of an environmental or economic issue. Few nations have begun to seriously assess the strategic challenges which will occur.

U.S. defense analysts describe the ramifications of climate change as a "threat multiplier of instability".

Even though the Bush administration held out to the Kyoto Treaty, its military planners and politicians were quick to draft contingencies on the security challenges of climate change.

Three years ago the U.S. National Intelligence Council already included global warming as a part of its five-yearly outlook of potential global flashpoints.

The Center for Naval Analysis recently published a lengthy report on the threat of climate change to national security.

In March 2007 a bipartisan bill -- the Global Climate Change Security Oversight Act -- was submitted to Congress and described climate change as "a clear and present danger" to U.S. security.

Britain has also begun to lay the analytical security framework to review these challenges.

Apart from commissioning key studies like the Stern Report, its climate change research office -- the Met Office Hadley Centre -- is funded by the Ministry of Defense, along with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.

Then British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett in a move which is redefining the concept of security, in April raised climate change issue at the UN Security Council.

She argued unstable climate risks are some of the drivers of conflict, hence warranting the Security Council's attention.

"Climate change is transforming the way we think about security," she said.

Canada is worried about its sovereignty on an ice-free Northwest Passage which countries like China, Russia and the United States claim is an international strait.

Russia has made feral claims to half the North Pole in anticipation that melting ice caps will make it easier to exploit the huge reserve of oil there.

These countries realize beyond the economic and environmental impacts, new trends in climate change will force realignment in state relations.

Living in a region which will be greatly affected by global warming, Indonesia must conceptualize strategic and defense thinking to face these new threats.

Rising sea levels will effect coastal areas in the Asia Pacific, across which some five million people live in low lying coastal perimeters.

Scientists believe a 50-centimeter rise in sea levels will cause a 50-meter coastline retreat in low-lying areas.

As a country with the world's third largest coastline (54,700 kilometers) and with 85 percent of its population living within 100 kilometers of the coast, the shifting demographics likely to occur in Indonesia caused by rising seas is precarious.

One of the first contingencies Indonesia must prepare in the coming decade is the chaotic events of a large-scale displacement of people.

Imagine rising sea levels inundating traditional coastal farming areas such as those in Karawang and Subang regencies, while low lying basins like Citarum could see cropland flooded.

Large shifts in migration almost always bring societal tensions.

A second challenge is one to our territorial waters.

If Indonesia was so worried about the creeping jurisdiction of Singapore's land reclamation projects, has the country also begun auditing the loss of strategic islands due to rising seas which may alter the borders recognized in the archipelagic concept?

Let us not forget State Minister of Environment Rachmat Witoelar's foreboding remark last year: 2,000 small islands could be submerged in two decades.

The Kyoto Protocol and the Climate Change Conference in Bali are worthy preventive measures to reduce climate change. But occur it will.

As a country saddling global warming's equatorial tension belt, Indonesian security thinkers need to invest in ideas which ultimately provide security-based policy options to contain likely tensions and shifting regional power trends before it is too late.

The author, a staff writer with The Jakarta Post, is currently studying at Harvard University as a research fellow with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.