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Climatic Change (2009) 96:1321
DOI 10.1007/s10584-009-9639-6
Planning for climate change: the security communitys precautionary principle
An editorial comment
Geoffrey D. Dabelko
Received: 14 June 2009 / Accepted: 24 June 2009 / Published online: 19 August 2009 U.S. Government 2009
Climate change has become an above-the-fold issue in the last few years, garnering wider attention beyond the world of climate scientists and environmental policymakers. Advances in global scientic understanding, overwhelmingly pointing to more rapid change than previously understood, have been paramount in raising greater political attention, and perhaps even action.
The central message from many scientists, as well as the knowledge brokers who help translate scientic ndings into policy discussions, has been that aggressive action is needed to reduce emissions and adapt to a warmer world (Hansen 2007; Yang and Oppenheimer 2007; Schneider 2003; Lenton and Schellnhuber 2007; King 2004). This community has made the case for a broader set of actors to pay attention in hopes they will make fundamental economic, political, and social changes to redress climate change.
The scientic community has now gotten what it wished for: One of the actors giving climate change greater consideration is the traditional security community. This attention is not uniformly welcome, but it should not be a surprise. Security actors, like the insurance industry, are in the game of assessing risk, and the message coming from scientists is that climate change poses many hazards.
The signs of wider recognition of climate-security links are manifest in a range of traditional international security forums. Under British chairmanship, the UN Security Council devoted a contentious session to climate change as a security issue in April 2007 (UN 2007). The Nobel Peace Prize Committee awarded the 2007 prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. Overcoming the previous objections of Permanent Five members (i.e., China and Russia) to treating
G. D. Dabelko (B)
Environmental Change and Security Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, One Woodrow Wilson Plaza, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20004-3027, USA e-mail: [email protected]
14 Climatic Change (2009) 96:1321
climate as a security issue, small-island states helped push through a unanimous UN General Assembly non-binding resolution requesting that the UN Secretary General submit a comprehensive report on the possible security implications of climate change...