2015 Earth Odyssey

Last July, only three months before the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, one of his closest collaborators held a meeting in Washington to examine a disturbing yet rarely discussed aspect of climate change, i.e. the possibility that it is a provoking factor of conflicts, terrorism and even wars. In November, John Podesta would lead the Obama’s transition team, supervising the selection of members of the president-elect’s Cabinet and of the senior staff of the White House and of the Executive. But that July morning Podesta was overseeing a war game, a simulation of war, a practice that is often used by military to test weapons or tactics in conditions of virtual reality, in that case aimed at considering the actions that the global community would have to undertake in order to face the impacts of climate change in the future.

The simulation was set in 2015. The scenario of the impacts elaborated on the base studies of the UN Intergovernmental Commission on Climate Change. The Secretary General of the United Nations, played by Podesta, had summoned an emergency meeting of the nations responsible for the greatest emissions of greenhouse gases: the U.S., the EU, China, and India. Each delegation was made up of a dozen different experts on the global level: past and present diplomats, officials of the armed forces, political scientists.

The Secretary General presented the picture: drought was torturing the north of Africa, cutting production of food and causing violent conflicts that recalled the horrors of Darfur a decade earlier. Egypt and Ethiopia were on the brink of war about the distribution of the diminished flow of the waters of the Nile. Millions of refugees in flight threatened to invade Europe. In Asia, Bangladesh was maimed by an imposing cyclone that caused 200,000 victims. India had deployed the army to prevent refugees from crossing the border. In 2014, the monsoon rains arrive late, ruining the harvests and flooding the cities of the whole region.

In 2015, the prices of food in the whole world rise, provoking tumult and spreading hunger, disease and death.

The experts did not find many solutions, but the simulation proved a new reality in international relations. Regardless of the speed with which greenhouse gases may be reduced, climate change will pose serious threats to peace and security in the 21st century.

Across the world, military strategists have reached the same conclusion. It is to be expected that political instability, natural disasters and the dearth of resources, aggravated by climate change, “increase a potential recruitment pool of terrorism,” says Tom Fingar, deputy director of National Intelligence, Intelligence Analysis, making reference to a confidential report filed by the U.S. intelligence agencies last June. A few months previously, a report by the security authorities of the European Union affirmed that climate change is to be considered a multiplier of risks that aggravates tendencies, tensions and extant instability and threatens to obliterate states and regions that are already fragile and prone to conflict.

The Obama administration is likely to pay more attention to this problem than the previous one, although it remains to be seen to what extent. The implications of climate change on the level of security worried Hillary Clinton, today the designated Secretary of State, to such a point that as a senator she proposed an amendment to the draft Law on Military Spending in 2008, demanding that the Pentagon take into account the problems of climate change in future planning.

The new National Defense Strategy approved by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who will maintain his position under Obama, should in theory take this into account. But it may be necessary to persuade the man appointed by Obama to the job of Advisor for National Security, the ex-General of the Marine Corps, James Jones. Jones has spent the last two years in the Chamber of Commerce, a business association that has doubted that global warming even exists.

But reality is a source of valuable teachings. According to December U.N. estimates, climate change will produce six million refugees per year from now until 2050. As indicated by Podesta’s simulation, the global community is unfortunately unprepared for such a scenario. “We have to make it understood to people that the future will not be like the past,” explains Kris Ebi, public health expert who participated in the simulation: “Has the Red Cross discussed initiatives to be taken if in Africa there will be 20 million “climate refugees”? We cannot imagine such dimension of the problem, but it is entirely possible and not that far off.”