While on the topic of climate change and the military, Inside Defense had a couple of good articles last month on how a couple of different combatant commands are thinking about the problem. On Joint Forces Command:
The U.S. military may be deployed more often to prop up weak governments worldwide as the effects of climate change are expected to destabilize entire regions, offering fertile ground for extremist ideologies, according to a new report from U.S. Joint Forces Command."Projected climate change will seriously exacerbate already marginal living standards in many Asian, African, and Middle Eastern nations, causing widespread political instability and the likelihood of failed states," JFCOM officials wrote in a December 2007 document called the "Joint Operating Environment."
AFRICOM in particular appears to be taking these concerns quite seriously, having concluded that the Darfur crisis stems from a resource/environmental problem, and consequently concluding that Africa in particular will suffer from more such problems in the future. The argument isn't so much that Africa will face more devastating environmental problems, but rather that weak state institutions and marginal living standards will make the effects of climate change more problematic. This is kind of interesting; natural disasters often have the effect of strengthening state power at the expense of societal groups with fewer resources. Of course, stronger state institutions don't necessarily mean less war, so there's still considerable room for concern. --Robert Farley