Security Aspects of Climate Change
Thursday, May 17, 2007 at 22:17 At a meeting sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program on March 6, 2007, Columbia University’s Marc Levy and University of New Hampshire’s Charles Vörösmarty discussed the preliminary results of their team’s effort to overlay geospatial information with demographic and conflict data to assess the connections between
environmental factors and conflict. The researchers hypothesize that the links connecting environmental scarcity and conflict are found between groups at the localnot the statelevel, and that changes in availability and distribution of local resources, and the context in which scarcity occurs, are the true indicators of increased risk of environmental conflict.
The Economist ("The Big Dry," 4/26/07) reports that Australia's extended drought has led to disputes between the federal and local governments over water use, and warns that other countries will face similar problems as the global climate warms.
