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Scenario One: Expected Climate Change
“It will be the developing nations in the Earth’s low latitudinal bands and sub-Saharan Africa that will be most adversely affected by climate change. In the developing world, even a relatively small climatic shift can trigger or exacerbate food shortages, water scarcity, destructive weather events, the spread of disease, human migration, and natural resource competition. These crises are all the more dangerous because they are interwoven and self-perpetuating: water shortages can lead to food shortages, which can lead to conflict over remaining resources, which can drive human migration, which, in turn, can create new food shortages in new regions. In Darfur, for instance, water shortages have already led to the desertification of large tracts of farmland and grassland. The fierce competition that emerged between farmers and herdsmen over the remaining arable land combined with simmering ethnic and religious tensions to help ignite the first genocide of the 21st century.”
—John Podesta and Peter Ogden
Key selected environmental stresses based on scenario assumptions
- Water scarcity affects up to 1.7 billion people
- Changed distribution of some infectious disease vectors & allergenic pollen species
- Up to 3 million additional people at risk of flooding
- Up to 30 million more people at risk of hunger due to crop failure
Key selected national security implications based on scenario assumptions
- Conflict over resources due to and driving human migration
- Immigrants – or even simply visitors – from a country in which there has been a significant disease outbreak may not be welcomed and could be subject to quarantine & lead to loss of national income from restricted tourism
- Dissatisfaction with state governments could radicalize internal politics and create new safe havens in weak and failing states
- A strengthened geopolitical hand for natural gas exporting countries and, potentially, biofuel exporting countries; a weakened hand, both strategically and economically, for importers of all fuel types
- Social services will become increased burden on central government where available
- The regional positions of Turkey and others will likely be strengthened as a result of the water crisis
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