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Global warming may trigger wars, says UK minister

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.
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