Franklin D. Roosevelt said "Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off." A Democrat, Roosevelt dragged the World from the jaws of the Great Depression and was the driving force behind the creation of the United Nations in 1945. The 32nd President of the United States envisioned a world after World War II in which countries no longer went to war to solve disputes, and victory was won with dialogue and reason instead of the blood of our young men and women.

Roosevelt didn't live to see the impact his legacy would bring to the World. Countless conflicts averted, millions lifted out of poverty, human rights enshrined in international law and untold lives saved. Truly American values brought to millions through the vision of a truly great American. It seems, though, that today the World is facing the threat of conflict, on a scale not seen before in human experience. 

According to Jürgen Scheffran, a research scientist in the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament and International Security and the Center for Advanced BioEnergy Research at the University of Illinois "the impact of climate change on human and global security could extend far beyond the limited scope the World has seen thus far." The research was published earlier this summer in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and offers a sobering warning for the consequences of inaction on Global Warming.

Scheffran says that damage to the ecosystem and the resulting competition for food and other natural resources are increasingly serving as triggers for conflicts around the World. He believes that declining natural resources coupled with the threat to populations due to natural disasters, disease and disintegration of social and ecosystems will have a "cascading effect" resulting in more and more armed conflict. Sudan's Darfur conflict may be a glimpse of things to come. Drought forced Arab herders onto land occupied by African farmers, aggravating an already bitter conflict. "Large areas of Africa are suffering from scarcity of food and fresh water," he says and points out that the Middle-East, Central Asia and South America are also being affected.

This prediction of large scale conflict may seem incredible, but we have already seen the first major conflict in a series of global wars for control of natural resources. In 2003, the U.S. administration of George W. Bush led what the then United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan termed an "illegal", invasion of Iraq, which cost the lives of thousands of young Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. At the time, the Bush administration attempted to convince the World that Iraq was a threat, but it was obvious to most that the reason for the invasion was a lust for oil.

The move weakened the United Nations and set a precedent for unilateral action, a precedent which has recently emboldened a newly emergent Russia into flexing its military muscle in Georgia. Many see Russia's invasion of Georgian territory as an attempt to knock its former Soviet ally back into line and gain control of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline. Georgia's BTC oil pipeline is a key transit route for crude oil from Asia to the west, bypassing Middle-Eastern and Russian oil.

Meanwhile the retreat of Arctic sea ice, currently at its lowest recorded level, has led to increased tensions over the area as climate change renders the region increasingly accessible. Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States are all staking claims to the 1.2 million square kilometres of seabed, which could hold up to 25% of the World's oil and natural gas.

All is not lost though, according to Scheffran. "Although climate change bears a significant conflict potential, it can also transform the international system toward more cooperation if it is seen as a common threat that requires joint action," he says. He believes that governments need to incorporate measures to combat climate change into their national policy and develop international cooperation.  Is the Bush administration up to the task, given their talk-to-the-hand style of foreign policy and utter intransigence on the issue of Global Warming?

As Leslie Berliant pointed out in her article entitled "Climate Change and International Security", the Bush administration has in the past suppressed reports warning of the dangers posed to National Security from climate change. Indeed, this is not the first time that this administration had suppressed its own reports on the threat posed by Global Warming, as this article from 2002 illustrates. In 2004 the director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York slated the Bush administration for its repeated filtering of scientific evidence of the dangers of Global Warming in an effort to keep the public uninformed. Berliant's article also demonstrates this U.S. administration's propensity for alienating even friendly governments, such as Canada by ignoring its sovereignty over the Canadian Arctic Archipelago.

However, Sheffran's report is optimistic. "Grass roots movements are emerging in the U.S. for protecting the climate and developing energy alternatives," he says. He points out that Global Warming is taking a key role in the current presidential race. Hardly surprising, given the relationship between Global Warming, the economy and national security. During his bid for the presidency, the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee Senator Joe Biden demonstrated his keen grasp of foreign policy and it's relationship to climate change.

"... this is not merely an environmental issue ... If we don't do something about Global Warming drastically and soon, we literally are going to find ourselves reconfiguring our military to deal with occasions for new wars. You see what's happening in Darfur now - that's part of the problem."

While answering press questions in Iowa, Senator Biden illustrated the link between Global Warming and the threat to national security from world conflict.

"You have 100 million people in the World who live at 3.2 feet above sea level. It would be an international catastrophe resulting in a global war, a global war for resources."

Jürgen Scheffran says that: "...the seeming conflict between the environment and the economy will be best overcome with the recognition that protecting the climate is in the best interest of the economy." So will America and the world finally get a U.S. administration that is capable of tackling the serious threat to security, the economy and the environment that Global Warming presents; or, will we get four more years of, as former President Bill Clinton recently described it, "too much unilateralism and too little cooperation?"

Further Reading:

• Arctic Melting and Oil: Countries Stake Claims as World Faces Environmental Disaster
• Working Out Who Might Claim the Arctic
• Climate Change and International Security