Category Archives: Security & Conflict

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9 November 2015, Christian Science Monitor, World Bank: Global warming will drive 100 million people into poverty. Without swift action, 100 million people could fall into poverty within 15 years because of global warming, a new World Bank report says. More than 100 million people could fall into extreme poverty due to global warming, according to a World Bank report released Sunday. The 227-page report called “Shock Waves: Managing the Impact of Climate Change on Poverty,” warns those numbers could be reached in less than 15 years.As most of the world prepares for a global warming summit in Paris later this month, the report indicates only a change in strategy will spare the world’s poorest nations from the increasingly devastating effects associated with the Earth’s rising temperatures. Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia are the regions most susceptible to the effects of climate change. “Climate change hits the poorest the hardest, and our challenge now is to protect tens of millions of people from falling into extreme poverty because of a changing climate,” World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said in a statement. The debate over the role of rich and poor nations has already begun. Last week, a high-ranking summit member representing 134 developing nations involved in climate change talks said that, without financial support, poorer countries would not be able to meet the mandates likely to be imposed at the summit. Read More here

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22 October 2015, TruthDig, ‘The Drone Papers’ Offer Even More Reasons to End Remote-Controlled Wars. The recent publication by The Intercept of the “The Drone Papers” should have made an explosive splash both in the media and Washington, D.C. But the leak of classified documents has so far generated only modest media coverage (as of this writing, The New York Times has yet to cover it), and there has been no acknowledgment of it by elected officials. The documents were provided by an anonymous source to an outlet with a strong reputation for muckraking journalism. They reveal how the CIA—an agency with no mandate to fight wars—and the Joint Special Operations Command vie for control of the remote-controlled battles fought in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. They also make clear that the U.S. is well aware of the vast civilian carnage from drones. In Afghanistan, “[d]uring one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets,” wrote Jeremy Scahill, who led the reporting. Scahill further determined that “the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA—‘enemy killed in action’—even if they were not the intended targets of the strike.” The intrepid journalist has spent years tracing the inner workings of U.S. drone programs, revealing the results in his 2013 book “Dirty Wars” and a documentary film of the same name. Read More here

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8 October 2015, Truthdig, Why the U.S. Owns the Rise of Islamic State and the Syria Disaster. Pundits and politicians are already looking for a convenient explanation for the twin Middle East disasters of the rise of Islamic State and the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria. The genuine answer is politically unpalatable, because the primary cause of both calamities is U.S. war and covert operations in the Middle East, followed by the abdication of U.S. power and responsibility for Syria policy to Saudi Arabia and other Sunni allies. The emergence of a new state always involves a complex of factors. But over the past three decades, U.S. covert operations and war have entered repeatedly and powerfully into the chain of causality leading to Islamic State’s present position. The causal chain begins with the role of the U.S. in creating a mujahedeen force to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Osama bin Laden was a key facilitator in training that force in Afghanistan. Without that reckless U.S. policy, the blowback of the later creation of al-Qaida would very likely not have occurred. But it was the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq that made al-Qaida a significant political-military force for the first time. The war drew Islamists to Iraq from all over the Middle East, and their war of terrorism against Iraqi Shiites was a precursor to the sectarian wars to follow. Read More here

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11 September 2015, The Independent, Refugee crisis: Is climate change affecting mass migration? John Kerry painted an apocalyptic vision of climate change last week as he addressed a global warming conference in Alaska. “You think migration is a challenge in Europe today because of extremism, wait until you see what happens when there’s an absence of water, an absence of food, or one tribe fighting against another for mere survival,” the US secretary of state warned. Few experts would argue with Kerry’s analysis of the future, but some would argue his vision is already upon us. The current refugee crisis marks a watershed moment in the history of global warming because it’s the first wave of emigration to be explicitly linked to climate change, according to one leading scientist, who predicts rises in temperature and increasingly extreme weather will unleash many more mass movements of people in the future. Professor Richard Seager acknowledges that there is much more to the Syrian uprising than the climate, but says that global warming played a key role in creating the conditions that fuelled the civil war behind the refugee emergency. “Syria was destabilised by 1.5 million migrants from rural communities fleeing a three-year drought that was made more intense and persistent by human-driven climate change, which is steadily making the whole eastern Mediterranean and Middle East region even more arid,” says Professor Seager, of Columbia University in New York, who published a report into the role of climate change in the Syrian conflict in March. Read More here

Beyond the fighting and fanaticism, another long-term threat menaces the world’s troubled regions.