Tiempo Climate Newswatch

The United Nations Security Council debated the impact of climate change on international tension and conflict on April 17th, despite objections from developing countries. The session was organized by the United Kingdom. British foreign secretary Margaret Beckett claimed that it was a "security imperative" to act on the climate issues. "What makes wars start? Fights over water; changing patterns of rainfall; fights over food production; land use," she said.

The Non-aligned Movement and the Group of 77 complained that the Security Council was guilty of "ever-increasing encroachment" on the role of other United Nations bodies. Climate change was a matter for the General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council, not the Security Council, they argued. "The developing countries believe that Security Council has neither the professional competence in handling climate change - nor is it the right decision-making place for extensive participation leading up to widely acceptable proposals," said Liu Zhenmin, deputy ambassador for China. Ban Ki Moon, the United Nations Secretary-General, felt that the debate should take place. "Scarce resources, especially water and food, could help transform peaceful competition into violence. Limited or threatened access to energy is already known to be a powerful driver of conflict. Our changing planet risks making it more so," he said.

"Financial, technological and institutional barriers usually hamper the implementation of adaptation measures to climate variability and change in many Asian countries, particularly LDCs," according to the background paper prepared for the Asia Regional Workshop on Adaptation, which took place in Beijing, China, in April. Lead author Mozaharul Alam of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, Dhaka, Bangladesh, and his colleagues cite the example of India's water policy, which aims at integrated water resources development and management but is constrained by financial and technological limitations. The authors conclude that "the challenge in Asia lies in identifying opportunities to facilitate sustainable development with strategies that make climate-sensitive sectors resilient to climate variability."

In the session on agriculture and food security, Nguyen Mong Cuong, from the Research Center for Climate Change and Sustainable Development in Hanoi, Vietnam, noted a series of adaptation options, including restructuring cropping patterns and adjusting cropping calendars, improving irrigation efficiency and developing new crop varieties and farming systems and techniques appropriate to climatic change. He cited weak national assessment capacity, inadequate implementation plans, limited staff capacity, poor quality data on adaptation options and a lack of effective mechanisms for information sharing and management across sectors as key concerns. The workshop was organized by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as part of a series of regional meetings on adaptation.

By the end of the century, forty per cent of the Earth's surface may have a warmer climate that is without parallel today and almost half the world's current climate zones could vanish. This worst-case scenario stems from a recent study of changing habitats, lead by John Williams of the University of Wisconsin-Madison "There is a real problem for conservation biologists," comments Williams. "How do you conserve the biological diversity of these entire systems if the physical environment is changing and potentially disappearing?"

The study forecasts that climate zones will expand away from the equator, moving towards the poles. To assess the significance of these changes, the researchers placed the predictions in the context of natural climate variability. The tropics have very little year-to-year temperature variability so species that live in these stable climates have evolved for a limited range of variability. "That's one of the things that really surprised us," reported Williams. "It may be that a two to three degree temperature change in the tropics may be more significant than say a five to eight degree change in high latitudes."