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Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change

New Brookings Press Book Measures Risks to Global Peace and Security

WASHINGTON, June 26 PRNewswire-USNewswire — Climate change has received a great deal of attention but most news coverage has focused on environmental concerns. Climatic Cataclysm examines the national security and foreign policy risks posed by global warming. This new Brookings book provides a primer on how climate change may undermine the security of the planet and create new challenges — pandemics, large-scale migration, resource scarcity — that could dwarf the issues of today.

Kurt M. Campbell, editor of Climatic Cataclysm, along with several peers, led a group of distinguished experts in climate change, foreign policy, political science, oceanography, history and national security in an exercise to measure the climatic risks to global peace and stability. Employing the best available evidence and climate models, they imagined three future world scenarios and considered the potential foreign policy and national security implications for each.

Climatic Cataclysm analyzes the consequences and security implications of the scenarios. The expected scenario relies on current scientific models of carbon emissions to project the effects on temperature change and sea level rise over the next 30 years. The severe scenario, which posits a much stronger climate response to continued carbon loading, foresees profound and potentially destabilizing global effects over the next generation or more. Finally, the catastrophic scenario is characterized by a devastating "tipping point" in the climate system 50 to 100 years from now. In this future world, the land-based polar ice sheets have disappeared, global sea levels have risen dramatically, and existing natural order has been destroyed beyond repair.

The contributors seek to anticipate future threats so that national governments and international institutions can take action now. They conclude that climate change will heighten existing tensions, dramatically increase global migration, lead to increasingly serious health problems, intensify conflicts over resources, collapse agricultural markets and challenge the institutions of global governance. Any combination of these effects could potentially destabilize the global balance of power. Drawing on lessons from the past, they consider what can be learned from how previous civilizations responded to natural phenomena. They also outline what three of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases - the United States, the European Union, and China - can do to reduce risks and lead the way to a post-Kyoto agreement.

The Editor

Kurt M. Campbell is CEO and co-founder of the Center for a New American Security and director of the Aspen Strategy Group. He served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asia and the Pacific in the Clinton administration. His books include Hard Power: The New Politics of National Security, written with Michael O'Hanlon (Basic Books, 2006) and The Nuclear Tipping Point: Why States Reconsider Their Nuclear Choices, edited with Robert J. Einhorn and Mitchell B. Reiss (Brookings, 2004).

The Brookings Institution is a private nonprofit organization devoted to independent research and innovative policy solutions. For more than 90 years, Brookings has analyzed current and emerging issues and produced new ideas that matter — for the nation and the world.

Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change

Kurt M. Campbell, Editor

Brookings Institution Press

Pub date: July 2008

6 x 9 â€¢ 237 pages

cloth, ISBN 978-0-8157-1332-6, $28.95/ pounds 16.99

SOURCE Brookings Institution

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