Climate Change & National Security: Instability in the Developing World

Speaker: Jeffrey Mazo (download Jeff's presentation)

Summary of Remarks: The security dimension of climate change will come increasingly to the fore over the next two to four decades as many developing countries face falls in available resources and reduced economic vitality, creating greater instability in regions of strategic import and a widening gap between rich and poor. Countries already living on the edge may be pushed into failure or collapse by climate-induced shocks, but if they are already that fragile, the increased security threat may be minimal from a global perspective. More important will be regionally important but less fragile states which could be nudged off the path of development and descend or retreat towards instability and failure, altering the geopolitical landscape.

Excerpt from: Climate Change and National Security. June 4, 2010.

Watch (20 minutes, 50 seconds):

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Dr Jeffrey Mazo is Managing Editor, Survival and Research Fellow for Environmental Security and Science Policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. His book Climate Conflict: How global warming threatens security and what to do about it was published by Routledge in the IISS Adelphi Series in March 2010. He holds an A.B. from Harvard (1981) and M.A. (1983) and Ph.D. (1991) from UCLA in a broad, interdisciplinary field combining anthropology, history, paleoclimatology, archaeology and medieval studies. He has worked in the security and international relations field since 2002.

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