'Tenfold R&D rise needed for climate change'

Charles Clover, The Telegraph 22 Apr 08;

Climate change could cause global conflicts as large as the two World Wars which will last for centuries unless it is controlled, a leading defence think tank has warned.

The Royal United Services Institute said a tenfold increase in research spending, comparable to the amount spent on the Apollo space programme, will be needed if the world is to avoid the worst effects of changing temperatures.

However the group said the world's response to the threats posed by climate change, such as rising sea levels and migration, had so far been "slow and inadequate," because nations had failed to prepare for the worst-case scenario.

"We're preparing for a car bomb, not for 9/11," said Nick Mabey, author of the report which comes after Lord Stern, who compiled an economic assessment of climate change for the Government, said last week that he had underestimated the possible economic consequences.

Mr Mabey, a former senior member of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit who is now chief executive of the environmental group E3G, said leading economies should be preparing for what would happen if climate change turned out to be running at the top of the temperature range scientists are predicting.

He said the Apollo programme cost the United States £10bn a year (at 2002 prices), nearly 10 times more than the current spending on energy research.

The equivalent scaling-up of research and development needed to be undertaken by every major country to prepare for the eventuality that the climate would reach a "tipping point" where warming and sea level rise began to accelerate, he said.

If the change did not happen so fast, and climate change was more benign than the worst-case scenario, the research would not be wasted as technological advances in nuclear power, biofuels, carbon capture and storage and renewables were urgently needed anyway, he added.

Actually deploying that technology, however, in the event of a "crash" programme would cost £50 billion in America alone, though this sum would have to be found by both the private sector and the state.

The report said: "If climate change is not slowed and critical environmental thresholds are exceeded, then it will become a primary driver of conflicts between and within states."

It added: "Climate impacts will force us into a radical rethink of how we identify and secure our national interests. For example, our energy and climate security will increasingly depend on stronger alliances with other large energy consumers, such as China, to develop and deploy new energy technologies, and less on relations with oil producing states.

"No strategy for long run peace and stability in Afghanistan can possibly succeed unless local livelihoods can survive the impact of a changing climate on water availability and crop yields."

A spokesman for the Foreign & Commonwealth Office said: "We welcome the RUSI report as a helpful addition to the growing debate on climate security."

Security risk from climate said underestimated
Jeremy Lovell, Reuters 22 Apr 08;

LONDON (Reuters) - Countries around the world have hugely underestimated the potential conflicts stemming from climate change and must invest heavily to correct that mistake, a report said on Wednesday.

The report for Britain's Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) by environment expert Nick Mabey said the response had been "slow and inadequate" and to rectify it spending needed to surge to levels comparable to sums spent on counter-terrorism.

"If climate change is not slowed and critical environmental thresholds are exceeded, then it will become a primary driver of conflicts between and within states," said the report "Delivering Climate Security: International Security Responses to a Climate-Changed World".

"In the next decades, climate change will drive as significant a change in the strategic security environment as the end of the Cold War," said Mabey.

"If uncontrolled, climate change will have security implications of similar magnitude to the World Wars, but which will last for centuries," he added in the report for the RUSI, a leading forum for defense and security issues.

Experts in the sector should identify and analyze climate-induced security hot spots and communicate these findings to world leaders and the public at large.

The report said conflicts over natural resources had been a regular feature of history, but that the changing climatic conditions would exacerbate the problems with hundreds of millions of people displaced by droughts, floods and famines.

This in turn would affect the livelihoods of billions more people with the world's population forecast to climb to nine billion people by mid-century from 6.5 billion now.

The report said that Europe, which is leading the way in tackling global warming caused by burning fossil fuels for power and transport, was only spending the equivalent of 0.5 percent of its combined defense budget on the climate crisis.

It said this was due to a systematic undervaluing of the scale and security implications of extreme climate change.

"A failure to acknowledge and prepare for the worst case scenario is as dangerous in the case of climate change as it is for managing the risks of terrorism or nuclear weapons proliferation," the report said.

"Unless achieving climate security is seen as a vital and existential national interest it will be too easy to delay action on the basis of avoiding immediate costs and perceived threats to economic competitiveness," the report said.

(Editing by Keith Weir)

Response to climate security threats 'slow and inadequate': report
Yahoo News 22 Apr 08;

The international response to security threats posed by climate change has been "slow and inadequate", according to a report published Wednesday.

According to the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British security think tank, a failure to adequately prepare for this is on a par with neglecting the risks of nuclear weapons proliferation or terrorism.

"In the next decades, climate change will drive as significant a change in the strategic security environment as the end of the Cold War," Nick Mabey, the author of the report titled "Delivering Climate Security: International Security Responses to a Climate Changed World", said in a statement.

"If uncontrolled, climate change will have security implications of similar magnitude to the World Wars, but which will last for centuries."

The report said that concerns over climate security would lead to "fundamental changes" in the international geo-political landscape, would force countries to radically rethink their national interests, and alter how international relations were conducted.

Mabey said that, for example, Britain's energy and climate security would "increasingly depend on stronger alliances with other large energy consumers, such as China ... and less on relations with oil producing states."

He also recommended a "more pro-active and intensive approach to tackling instability in strategically important regions with high climate vulnerability and weak governance."

"The first signs of this response are emerging, but the necessary changes will need to happen much faster than in the past," Mabey said.

RUSI called for increased investment to reduce "hard security threats" posed by climate change, raising government spending on the issue to the amount Britain currently spends on counter-terrorism.

The think tank warned, however, that if the issue was left by the wayside for too long and an emergency response were needed, spending would be required on a scale comparable to NASA's Apollo space programme.

"If climate change is not slowed and critical environmental thresholds are exceeded, then it will become a primary driver of conflicts between and within states," the report said.

It said that the security sector would have to "proactively support efforts to radically reduce carbon emissions now as a means of avoiding the 'worst case scenario' security implications."