On the edge

Darfur and Bosnia

It was not climate change wot made them do it

Climate change and the lack of rain are much less important than the land-use patterns promoted by the government of Sudan and the development policies of World Bank and I.M.F., which were focused on intensive agricultural expansion that really mined the soils and left a lot of land unusable...that was probably the principal impetus for a lot of intra-Darfur migration in the decades leading up to the conflict in Darfur.

-- John Prendergast, a founder of the Enough Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress and the International Crisis Group to abolish genocide and mass atrocities, quoted in A Godsend for Darfur, or a Curse?, which looks at the implications of the underground megalake recently discovered beneath northern Darfur.

(See also It was climate change wot made me do it)

[P.S. 27 July Simon Donner finds there is no lake beneath Darfur]

It was climate change wot made me do it

Analysis and discussion of the impacts of climate change on human security (featured as a key note issue in this piece by John Ashton and Tom Burke in the spring 2005 openDemocracy-British Council debate on the politics of climate change) grows and grows. See, for example, a small sample of the news reports across the last few months here, here and here.

Work by military, academic and allied institutions may turn up all kinds of things, some more useful than others. See, for example Culture, Conflict...and Climate?, which notes a provision for the U.S. FY08 intelligence authorization bill to explicitly direct the U.S. intelligence community to consider climate impacts when preparing future National Intelligence Estimates, or How climate change is pushing the boundaries of security and foreign policy, a paper for a conference this week at Chatham House, 'Step-change' needed on climate change.

But there may be at least two 'reality checks' to some of this thinking.

One, climate change is not an excuse for some current behaviour. Responding to Rainfall records could warn of war (New Scientist, 30 May), the International Crisis Group said:

we find the suggestion of a "link between climate change and conflict" overly simplistic. The humanitarian disaster in Darfur results primarily from the Sudanese government's extremely brutal counter-insurgency campaign...resulting in over 200,000 deaths and 2.5 million displaced. Look not to the cloudless skies but to Khartoum.

Two, climate-related insecurity that is a reality today should not be neglected because of concern about the medium to long term future. Responding to an exchange noted here, one correspondent writes:

There is a tendency in some of the debate on climate change to [focus on] an apocalyptic future. While I accept that this future is plausible, what about the human development catastrophes that are emerging less dramatically today in the form of small but rising increments to risks associated with drought, extreme weather, floods etc.? In rich countries, people deal with increased risk through government protection...and private insurance. Having recently spent time talking with farmers in drought prone areas of South Gonder, Ethiopia and Kenya, I can confirm the blindingly obvious insight that social risk insurance is not widely available. As a recent Oxfam report has argued, isn't it time that we addressed head-on how we mobilize support for a campaign for climate justice that includes rich countries paying now for the damage their citizens and governments have chosen to inflict on poor people in poor countries?

P.S. 2pm - the Chatham House meeting also featured Transforming our energy within a generation by the redoubtable Walt Patterson, who puts it (almost) all in a nutshell, partly summarised as:

• Energy is not about commodities but about infrastructure.
• Climate is an energy issue; energy is an infrastructure issue; therefore climate too is an infrastructure issue, demanding policies to match.
• Transforming our energy starts with transforming how we think about it, and can start immediately.

Partners in received logic

Now here is a comparison that some people will find seriously obnoxious, but when John Bolton says:

“Our obligation was to give [the Iraqi people] new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war....Helping the refugees flies in the face of received logic.”

and Paula Dobriansky — the undersecretary of state for democracy and global affairs — and her colleague Ellen Sauerbrey, assistant secretary of state for population, refugees and migration, "mainly agreed with him", how precisely does this differ from the attitude of the Sudanese government towards refugees from Darfur?

There are an estimated 4,000,000 Iraqi refugees and 'internally displaced persons', about 15% of the population. Since 2003 the United States has given asylum to 701.

(the quotes are from The Flight From Iraq by Nir Rosen)

The Darfur divide

Scorched, a report on the role of climate change in the Darfur crisis by Julian Borger, contains passages very close to Stephan Faris's The Real Roots of Darfur published over a month ago. But Borger's report contains a note of optimism that one would hope is well grounded -- and that is, it is possible to make choices even in severely adverse circumstances. Borger quotes Said Ibrahim Mustafa, the sultan of the Chadian border region of Dar Sila: "The real problem here is moral, it is not a question of climate."

This is a key point too in the Globe for Darfur demonstrations today. Unfortunately, it look as if no organisations with an Islamic dimension are involved in the London protests, indicating a potential risk of sectarianism over what should be a universal concern: the murder of up to 400,000 people and displacement of many more.

Meanwhile in Turkey today there is a big demonstration by secularist-nationalists, and things look as if they could turn serious (is the subtext: "a military coup, please"?). In the background, neither the secularists nor their Islamist opponents seem fully ready to acknowledge the Armenian genocide, even though, as the historian Taner Akçam writes, "only full integration of Turkey's past [with its historical record] can set the country on the path to democracy."

Googling Darfur

Thanks to Bacon Butty (Atrocity Exhibition) for drawing attention to emerging political uses of Google Earth re Darfur and UNEP.