Home > Opinions > Climate insecurity

Climate insecurity

By Brahma Chellaney

Brahma Chellaney in a file photo. Wikimedia Commons/Harshray

India may be a great power-in-waiting, but it lives probably in the world’s worst neighbourhood. Whichever way India looks, it sees crisis across its frontiers. Add to the picture the risks from climate change, which has been correctly identified as a threat multiplier. Climate change, unfortunately, has become a divisive issue internationally before a plan for a low-carbon future has evolved. While it is easy to exaggerate or underestimate the likely impact of climate change owing to the continuing gaps in scientific knowledge, three broad strategic effects can be visualised in relation to India on the basis of studies so far.

First, climate change would intensify inter-state and intra-state competition over natural resources, making resource conflicts more likely. A new Great Game over water, for example, could unfold, with Asia as the hub, given China’s control over the source of most of Asia’s major rivers — the Plateau of Tibet. Accelerated melting of glaciers and mountain snows would affect river-water flows, although higher average temperatures are likely to bring more rainfall in the tropics.

Tibet’s water-related status in the world indeed is unique: No other area in the world is a water repository of such size. Tibet’s vast glaciers, huge underground springs and high altitude have endowed it with the world’s greatest river systems. But China is now pursuing major inter-basin and inter-river water transfer projects on the Tibetan plateau, which threatens to diminish international-river flows into India and other co-riparian states.

Second, higher frequency of extreme weather events (such as hurricanes, flooding and drought) and a rise in ocean levels are likely to spur greater inter-state and intra-state migration from the delta and coastal regions to the hinterland. Such an influx of outsiders would socially swamp inland areas, upsetting the existing fragile ethnic balance and provoking a backlash that strains internal and regional security.

India could face a huge refugee influx from the world’s seventh most populous country, Bangladesh, which is already losing land to saltwater incursion. In addition to the millions of Bangladeshis that already have illegally settled in India, New Delhi would have to brace up to the potential arrival of tens of millions of more.

Third, human security will be the main casualty as climate change delivers a major blow to vulnerable economic sectors. Disparities, already wide in Indian society, would intensify.

The Maoist rural insurgency in the poorest districts of India at a time when the country is economically booming is a testament to the costs of growing inequalities.

Against this background, India is likely to find itself on the frontline of climate change. To deal with the national-security implications, it needs, first and foremost, to frame the concept of security more broadly and redefine its defence planning and preparedness.

Unconventional challenges — from transnational terrorism to illegal refugee inflows — already have become significant in India’s security calculus. India also needs to build greater state capacity — at federal, state and local levels — to tackle various contingencies and adapt to a climate change-driven paradigm.

Internationally, Indian diplomacy must ensure that the country is not saddled with unfair obligations that compound its challenges. Equity in burden-sharing has to be ensured. The challenge is to devise carbon standards that help protect the material and social benefits of economic growth in the developing world but without damaging prosperity in the developed countries. But just as the five original nuclear-weapons states helped fashion the 1970 NPT to perpetuate their nuclear-weapons monopoly, countries that become wealthy early wish to preserve their prerogatives in a climate-change regime, despite their legacy of environmental damage and continuing high carbon emissions. This has raised the danger that efforts to lock in the rich nations’ advantages by revising the 1992 Rio bargain and re-jiggering the Kyoto Protocol obligations through a new regime could create another global divide between haves and have-nots — an NPT of climate change.

An enduring international regime to combat global warming will have to be anchored in differential responsibility, a concept at the heart of the Climate Change Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol, but also embedded in international law through several other agreements — from the Montreal Protocol to the Maastricht Treaty. As the Copenhagen summit illustrates, climate change is not just a matter of science but also a matter of geopolitics.

Copyright © 2009 Diligent Media Corporation Ltd.

Published in Daily News & Analysis