Award Underlines Danger of Climate Change

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By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
Published: October 13, 2007

The Nobel Peace Prize committee made a powerful statement today that the consequences of increasing carbon emissions could be as dangerous as the ravages of war.

The award to Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reflects a growing conviction on the part of scientists, politicians and economists that emissions and the global warming they produce will lead not only to more pollution but could also create economic mayhem, social upheaval and conflicts between nations or groups trying to survive in an increasingly hostile natural environment.

“This prize is an indication of the degree to which we’ve realized in the past few years that what happens in the environment is not just about natural resources but has so many different dimensions,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, which helped found the intergovernmental panel.

“It recognizes that changes in the environment are likely to manifest themselves in tensions and conflicts.”

Indeed, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which has for years maintained a “Doomsday Clock” to monitor the risk of global disaster from nuclear weapons, this year increased its warning level for the first time not because of weaponry but because of the threat posed by global warming.

Some scholars believe that climate-related conflict is already upon us. “I believe there are many places that are in, or on the edge of, conflict because of climate change already, and this prize is a warning that on our current trajectory of climate change the risk will get a lot worse — these will be the conflicts of the 21st century,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York.

He said that climate change had already helped ignite conflicts and wars in a swath of the world that extends from the Sudan in Africa, through the Middle East and to Afghanistan. “All of these are in dry lands that have had significant environmental stress, which is probably related to climate change,” he said.

A recent United Nations report concluded that land degradation and desertification in the Darfur region of Sudan helped set the stage for the devastating tribal and ethnic conflicts of the last few years as poor people increasingly competed for depleted resources. “But for the environmental stress, I doubt this would have exploded,” Mr. Sachs said.

Large-scale migrations from Africa to Europe are already on the increase at least in part because climate change has made traditional livelihoods, from farming to fishing less viable, experts say.

If global warming continues on its current course, the Himalayan glaciers will melt, according to the most recent I.P.C.C. report, ultimately reducing the water supply of hundreds of millions of people in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. “It does not take a lot of imagination to see that this will have drastic economic and social effects and lead to conflicts,” Mr. Steiner said.

But the potential for conflict spawned by climate change is not limited to the poor countries of the world. Already, as polar ice melts, countries are scrambling to claim newly accessible waterways and resources.

The United Nations panel and Mr. Gore have in their separate ways insisted that the world to find a global strategy for limiting climate change and adapting to climate shifts that are already inevitable. Many others have joined forcefully in the mantra that peace and prosperity depend on the success in this quest — including former President Bill Clinton, under whom Mr. Gore was vice president; Sir Nicholas Stern, who was the chief economist of the World Bank; and business leaders like Richard Branson.

In a report prepared for the British government and released last December, Sir Nicholas suggested that projected climate change could shrink the global economy by 20 percent and plunge the world into recession.

At a conference in New York earlier this month, Mr. Clinton noted that the world population was expected to rise from 6.5 billion to 9 billion in the next 43 years, a period in which further warming is projected, even if emissions were brought under control.

“Most of those people are going to be born in countries not able to support their current populations, which gives a certain quaint air to the illegal immigration debate in Congress.”

Those conditions will make 2007 “look like a Sunday afternoon picnic,” Mr. Clinton said.