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Allen Mutyambizi and Padmore Paradzayi
The way climate change has been portrayed and reported risks creating a hopeless society and spreading climate change fatigue among the wider public.
It is now apparent that the way people talk about climate change has evolved and has taken various dimensions.
0Climate change was once viewed as a purely environmental issue and by then, the world talked about an emerging problem of global warming.
It took a new twist in the 20th century and became an economic and energy policy issue as it became lucid that reducing greenhouse gas emissions would have significant impacts on national economies.
It was not until recently that security threat posed by climate change has taken centre stages of unprecedented international attention.
The language of security has pervaded the speech on climate change, as a number of actors from the political, academic and public spheres are classifying the issue as a threat to international peace and security.
The potential and real threats posed by climate change are many and varied, but there has been a debate among security scholars on the link between climate change and international security. Whether the link between security and climate change is real or a hoax, it is something that has to be empirically verified.
However, if other researches and reports are anything to go by, then it is high time that national leaders take a lead to address the security implications of climate change.
In 2007, the UN Security Council convened a conference to deliberate on the linkage between climate change, energy and security. More than 50 countries attended the debate and agreed that climate change presented a security threat although they had divergent views on whether the Security Council was the right forum to discuss such issues.
A 2008 study on the security implications of climate change in Ghana and Burkina Faso concluded there was some anecdotal evidence that climate change in West Africa might already be associated with conflict.
Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni once called greenhouse gas emissions an act of aggression by the developed world against the developing world.
Oli Brown, a security expert, termed climate “the mother of all security problems” while the British government scientist, Sir David King, noted that “climate change is far a great threat to the world’s stability than international terrorism”.
In view of the above sentiments, it seems the world is moving towards integrating climate change into the security architecture. This has been done either at regional or national level.
The European Union is one of the actors most actively pushing for the integration of climate change in the international security agenda. Both at the EU institutions and at the member-state level, climate change is being re-framed as a threat to national, European and global security.
This re-framing is reflected in a number of official documents addressing the links between climate change and security.
As Southern Africa, the question now is whether climate change is emerging as a security threat to regional peace and security and how Sadc is going to integrate it in our security architecture. Southern Africa is one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change because of fewer resources to cope with climate change and low adaptive capacity.
The impact of global warming and climate change on rainfall patterns are already visible: a number of countries in the Sadc region are observing changes in the length of the growing season. This has led to a drop in agricultural productivity. The number of countries in the Sadc region reporting depressed crop yield is increasing and persistent.
This has led to, or worsens, food-insecurity and an unsustainable increase in food prices across the board. Reduction of arable land, widespread shortage of water, diminishing food and fish stocks, increased flooding and prolonged droughts are already happening.
The impact is already culminating in conflict over resources such as the conflict over fishing water Zambezi along the main river basins and land within some Sadc countries.
In Southern Africa, energy production, which underpins most other production sectors, relies largely on the flow of the Zambezi River either for hydropower generation or for the cooling of thermal power stations. Industrial output from many agricultural processing industries also relies on power availability and on water for processing. The dependency on water for food production in the basin area affirms concerns that the Zambezi basin will be strongly affected by climate change/variability.
Water allocation issues, population and economic growth, expansion of irrigated agriculture water transfer and climate change/variability are expected to cause consumption of water runoff to rise to 40 percent by 2025. On a regional scale, the partition of water will likely be a delicate issue in coming years, especially if climate change leads to significantly lower rainfall and run-off.
Climate change could move from being a development problem to becoming a security issue, but this jump depends on non-climate drivers, that is, those external conditions such as governance, regional relations and so on.
It is, for example, population growth, income distribution and government policy that push people to live on marginal lands in the first place. In other words, a community’s vulnerability to climate conflict is not a constant, it can be increased or decreased for reasons that have nothing to do with greenhouse gas emissions.
Zimbabwe, Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique all experience frequent droughts while Malawi and Mozambique experience flooding. In addition, Mozambique’s coastal location makes it vulnerable to cyclones. In Mozambique and Malawi, there are many areas with high population densities in low lying areas, creating exposure to flooding.
While conflict is as a result of many social factors, constraints on adaptive capacity of communities may also increase the risk of conflict. The Sadc region should develop a common regional policy especially on adaptation activities that emphasise information (on vulnerability and climate risks) and early warning which could lead to conflict prevention.
Robust adaptive strategies could contribute to long-term peace building in conflict-prone areas through measures that build adaptive capacity (co-management of water resources, improved resources management in general).
It is, therefore, imperative for the Sadc region and communities to manage these shifts to ensure that competition for resources does not break out into violent conflict resources. Key to this, is to put in place the skills and infrastructure that will be needed to cope with increasingly frequent natural disasters. The Stern Report of 2006 showed that early action to cut emissions of greenhouse gases makes more sense than waiting for another decade or two and then trying to adapt to the consequences.
This is partly because there are time lags in the global climate system, which mean that even if emissions are to be successfully cut to zero today, another 20-30years of warming are inevitable. In his report, Stern argues that countries should start now to make the necessary investments over a period of time, which will lead the world to a low-carbon economy at manageable pace.
◆ Allen Mutyambizi and Padmore Paradzayi hold MSc degrees in International Relations from the University of Zimbabwe
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