Climate change could spawn a new era of conflicts around the world over water and other scarce resources unless more is done to curb greenhouse gas emissions, UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett said on Thursday.
She said climate-driven conflicts were already under way in Africa. Underlying the Darfur crisis, she said, was a "struggle between nomadic and pastoral communities for resources made more scarce through a changing climate."
Speaking at the Royal United Services Institute in London, Beckett quoted evidence that a similar conflict was brewing in Ghana where Fulani cattle herdsmen are reportedly arming themselves to take on local farmers in a confrontation over water and land as climate change expands the Sahara desert. The foreign secretary said the Middle East -- with 5 percent of the world's population but only 1 percent of its water -- would be particularly badly affected, with Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq particularly hard hit by a drop in rainfall.
She said the Nile could lose 80 percent of its flow into Egypt, a country which would also be threatened by rising sea levels in the Nile delta, its agricultural heartland, where flooding could displace two million people, threatening internal stability.
"Resource-based conflicts are not new. But in climate change we have a new and potentially disastrous dynamic," she said.
Her speech echoed a similar warning from the European commission in January that global warming could trigger regional conflicts, poverty, famine, mass migration and the spread of infectious diseases such as malaria and dengue fever.
The British government has this year attempted to focus global attention on climate change as a security threat, and Beckett used British chairmanship of the UN security council last month to convene the council's first debate on the issue.
"It requires a whole new approach to how we analyze and act on security," Beckett said. "The threat to our climate security comes not from outside but from within: we are all our own enemies."
She compared the struggle to contain climate change to the Cold War, which also had to be fought on diplomatic, economic, political and cultural fronts. She said public and private sectors would have to cooperate to ensure the bulk of investment in the energy sector by 2030 was spent on low carbon and energy efficient options.
This week scientists, diplomats and activists met in Bonn to start formulating a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, which expires in 2012.
GEOPOLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE: The CGA’s nonmilitary role makes it a tool to avert diplomatic issues, an official said, while confirming the donation of a ship to Manila Coast Guard Administration (CGA) ships are scheduled to sail to the Philippines bearing the words “Taiwan Coast Guard” in a high-profile visit in October next year, the first such visit by a Taiwanese maritime law enforcement vessel to the Southeast Asian nation, the agency said yesterday. The CGA also confirmed that it had donated one of its decommissioned patrol vessels to the Philippines in a rare transfer of a retired ship to a nondiplomatic ally. The Republic of China (ROC) Navy last made such a visit in 1974, shortly before the Philippines switched diplomatic recognition to the People’s Republic of China in
‘GLOBAL WARNING’: The infiltration is not just a local problem, as Beijing has been deploying the same tactics worldwide against Western democracies, a report said Between 50,000 and 100,000 Chinese spies are operating in Taiwan, far more than the National Security Bureau’s previous estimate of 5,000, German journalist and author Jurgen Kremb said on Monday. Kremb presented his research, titled “The War of Spies: How China’s Intelligence Services Are Infiltrating Taiwan — and What Europe Must Learn from It,” at a joint event held by the Taiwan offices of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and the European Values Center for Security Policy. The report was published in June in the Ministry of Justice Investigation Bureau’s Prospect & Exploration Monthly (展望與探索月刊). By spies, he said he was referring to informants,
PRICE STABILIZATION: The Ministry of Economic Affairs has urged the legislature to support the Cabinet’s supplementary budget for state-owned energy companies State-owned oil supplier CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) on Saturday announced that it would raise domestic gasoline prices by NT$0.7 (US$0.02) per liter and diesel prices by NT$0.6 per liter this week after international crude oil prices rose above US$100 per barrel last week. Formosa Petrochemical Corp (台塑石化) yesterday said that it matched CPC’s price adjustments for this week. The decisions end a six-week period during which CPC and Formosa kept fuel prices in Taiwan unchanged. Retail gasoline prices this week would rise to NT$31.2, NT$32.7 and NT$34.7 per liter for 92, 95 and 98-octane unleaded gasoline respectively at CPC
More than 100 Taiwanese-Americans, Taiwanese lawmakers and members of civic groups on Saturday marched through New York City to call for Taiwan’s participation in the UN, with Marshall Island Permanent Representative to the UN John Silk joining the event to show support. Participants chanted: “UN for Taiwan” and “Keep Taiwan Free” as they marched through central Manhattan, passing Times Square and Bryant Park before ending near the New York Public Library. The annual march brought together Taiwanese community groups from across the US East Coast. Silk expressed hope that Taiwan would one day be able to participate in UN meetings
RSS