When pressed to reveal the source of the demand, traders grudgingly admitted a white-bearded man clad in red had suddenly appeared, agitated and mumbling about those who simply couldn’t be good for goodness’ sake. He had come straight from the Bella Center and was scrolling through a long list of names on his Blackberry. “It just keeps getting longer and longer!” he cried. With a bottle of Carlsberg in hand, he made some final calculations and proclaimed he had a sudden need for coal ready for delivery in one week’s time.

Satisfied he’d have adequate supplies ready for pickup in every country from the North to the South, he made his way up to the roof of the trading house. Those close at hand overheard him say, “Good night to you all, but I won’t see you next year. I’ll have to come up with something else for these naughty types.  They will probably just burn this stuff.”

“At least Mexico City will be warmer!” 

Within seconds, experts from the Departments of State and Energy, USAID, and National Geographic responded with examples, including the Tibetan plateau and glacial melt, the lower Jordan River, and more. I used these cases and others to break through to an audience that included both those skeptical of “treehugger” issues and those eager to learn. The map of Chinese current and planned hydro projects produced audible gasps and wide eyes among the class of future officers.

While at West Point, colleague Meaghan Parker and I met with geography faculty to better understand how and what they are teaching on environmental security and demographic security. The professors on the banks of the Hudson face similar challenges to their non-military brethren; today’s students have shorter attention spans and lack experience conducting in-depth research (or getting beyond Google).

But some challenges are unique to the service academies: isolation from academic peers; the need to make sure the material is relevant to future military leaders; and most of all, the physical and mental demands on cadets’ time placed by army training. I saw it as a sign of success that I only had three stand up during my lecture, the military’s sanctioned way to keep yourself awake in class. (LTC Lou Rios USAF, one of the faculty members we met with, wrote about teaching environmental security at West Point previously on New Security Beat.)

Video, blogs, and other new media seem like a way to bridge some of these gaps. We’re especially excited that the cadets in at least three courses will be using the New Security Beat as part of their classes by reading posts, commenting, and proposing a post on a topic of their choosing. We’re looking forward to a cadet joining us next summer for internship with ECSP.

All of these outreach efforts are part of our strategy to both understand how all types of actors—including future army officers—come to understand environment and security links while providing insights and analysis to that same diverse group.

The long answer is more complex. It’s been 15 years since Washington witnessed its last frenzy over the links between environmental change and conflict. But during environmental security’s mid-1990s heyday, climate change often was dismissed as a long-term–and therefore low-priority–security issue. It took a back seat to more pressing concerns such as population growth, environmental degradation, and violent conflict, evident in the headline-dominating crises in Haiti, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, and Somalia. Similar to today’s challenge, the debates surrounding these conflicts ultimately fell short of their potential because the rhetoric got ahead of the research and oversimplified the threat posed by environmental stresses.

Today, there is a new opportunity to use increased public attention to highlight the relationship between natural resources, climate, and security, as well as to build momentum for mitigation and adaptation without fueling false fears. But redressing the climate-security link requires avoiding some of the pitfalls that impeded progress the last time climate and security shared the spotlight. Four specific lessons are worth special attention:

Read about those lessons at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, where this oped originally appeared.

On Monday he wrote about India and China’s agreement to work together to monitor Himalayan glacial melt. The potential decline in water availability from seasonal snow and glacier melt is finally seeping into the consciousness of policymakers outside the climate world, including the diplomatic and security communities. Lamont frames the step as a rare instance of cooperation in a strategically sensitive area at the center of a 1962 territorial war between the countries.

While it would be easy to make too much of such an agreement, it is a tangible recognition of the importance of the ecological unit rather than the national one. It highlights how environmental interdependence across national boundaries can force cooperation in the face of politically difficult relations.

On Wednesday Lamont used cheetah diplomacy between India and Iran as an entry point for his story on international attempts to address Iran’s nuclear proliferation threat. India is asking Iran to help reintroduce cheetahs on the subcontinent, where they are now extinct. In what Lamont said would be an “unusual” example of “high-profile cooperation” for the two countries, diplomats are arranging for talks ahead of a regional wildlife conference. This baby step in relations could be even more significant since the United States publicly acknowledged that India may be able to play an interlocutor role with Iran on the hot button nuclear program question.

While both of these developments are relatively small in the scheme of the larger strategic relationships, they are fundamentally aimed at (re)building relationships between countries by establishing patterns of cooperation where interdependence is obvious and necessary. Such efforts are just one tool in the often-neglected toolbox of environmental peacebuilding.

The strategic minerals debate is back-but starring some new rocks. One that has received much recent attention is lithium, which is used in cell phone batteries, as well as those under development for electric cars.

Turns out lithium isn’t found in too many places. Around 50 percent of known reserves are in Bolivia, underneath some very dramatic and desolate salt flats. Worldfocus has a terrific news story that gives a glimpse of the place, the politics, and the battle over lithium extraction. Talk of an OPEC-like lithium cartel with China and Chile suggests that the politics at the international level will be just as contentious as the Bolivian domestic scene.

Friends over at the Center for New American Security are taking a fresh and systematic look at the strategic minerals question in their new Natural Security initiative. And we are hearing more and more about it from the advocacy community. For example, ENOUGH has ramped up its Come Clean 4 Congo campaign, which stresses the links between our cell phones, mineral extraction, and continuing violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is reminiscent of the “blood diamonds” campaigns that led to the Kimberly Process.

The lithium story and the complex social, economic, and political disputes it could engender in Bolivia should flag for us an important consideration in the fight against climate change: trying to do right by climate change and energy security might trigger unforeseen conflicts. Greening our transportation sector with more powerful batteries is going to create a new set of winners and losers around the material inputs like lithium.

We need to be much more cognizant of these impacts as we move forward in addressing climate change and the unsustainable use of fossil fuels. The Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program will be tackling this specific dimension of the climate and security debates–the potential for conflict induced by climate mitigation efforts–in the months ahead.

But this view of science diplomacy is overly pessimistic. It sets unrealistically high expectations such dialogue could never hope to achieve. Science diplomacy is not meant to solve all aspects of conflicts or distrustful relationships, so setting such a high bar is a bit of a straw man. Science, as well as dialogue on the management of shared natural resources, remains an under-utilized and under-studied tool for trust-building, so it is premature to declare it a failure before we have sufficient evidence for evaluation.

Veterans of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and other Cold War-era scientific dialogues might suggest we are neglecting some rich experiences from this era. It bears remembering that Pugwash was awarded the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize (and current U.S. Science Adviser John Holdren delivered the acceptance speech as then executive director of Pugwash).

A distinct but related arena for further policy attempts and research inquiries is environmental peacebuilding, where mutual interdependence around natural resources provides pathways for dialogue in the midst of conflict. The establishment of the Cordillera del Condor Transboundary Protected Area between Ecuador and Peru was a result of integrating joint environmental management structures in the 1998 peace agreement that ended a long-festering border conflict. Negotiation over shared resources, such as water, can be a diplomatic lifeline for otherwise-hostile countries, such as Israel and Jordan, which held secret “picnic table” talks to manage the Jordan River while they were officially at war. And the U.S. military has successfully uses environmental cooperation to engage both friends and adversaries.

Collaboration on scientific and environmental issues won’t solve all our problems. And defining and identifying success remains a fundamental challenge when success is the absence of something (conflict). But let’s not retreat to the common church-and-state division where scientists fear being “contaminated” by participating in policy-relevant dialogues. And let’s certainly not declare science diplomacy a failure—and stop trying to make it a success—based on unrealistic expectations for the benefits such efforts might produce.

Perhaps it is not a front-burner issue for both institutions — but that is exactly the point. If dialogue is to improve understanding, build ties, and lower the prospects for confrontation, starting with issues that aren’t contentious in military terms can be a positive first step. As opposed to what typically happens when I have an idea for an oped (i.e., nothing), I got in touch with Dr. Kent Butts, a friend and colleague at the US Army War College who has been teaching environmental security courses there for going on 15 years. Together we banged out a piece for the Christian Science Monitor proposing that largest total emitter and the largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases get to know each other better through some good old-fashioned joint exercises on natural disaster preparedness. Such training is likely to come in handy in a warming world.

Last week, I wrote on New Security Beat about startling new research that found very high levels of naturally occurring radioactivity in some of Jordan’s fossil groundwater. Measurements up to 2,000 percent higher than the international drinking water safety levels were found in the Disi aquifers in southern Jordan. Duke University’s Avner Vengosh and his international team published the results in the highly respected, peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science & Technology.

Last Friday a Jordan Times story featured government assurances that all of the country’s water was safe — and tried to discredit the messenger. In a transparent attempt to raise doubt about the scientists’ motives, the article points out that lead author Vengosh is Israeli-born (he is now a U.S. citizen).

If the newspaper had asked water experts in the region, they would have found that Vengosh has extensive networks and research collaborations across all the region’s political lines. He has a long record of publishing with Jordanian and Palestinian colleagues — including the article in question. He is an old-school scientist (a geochemist in this case) who has little interest or patience for politics.

This simplistic implication that Vengosh can’t be trusted is made more explicit by an “official” source who insists on anonymity to peddle a conspiracy theory. The official “questioned the timing of the study which comes weeks before the financial closure of the multimillion-dollar Disi Water Conveyance Project.” Water and Irrigation Minister Raed Abu Saud went on record this week with similar assertions of ulterior political motives behind the results and timing of the publication.

Few Jordanians actually drink the contaminated groundwater now, but the Disi project would move the fossil groundwater from the aquifer to water-starved Amman, putting many at risk of consuming it. Ironically, Vengosh and his colleagues detail ways the water can be made usable for human consumption, but it has been left to a blogger critical of the government’s response to detail these proactive options.

I hope a regional or international body will move beyond the political wrangling and test Jordan’s Disi aquifer as well as the same Nubian sandstone aquifers that lie below Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Libya. Such replication of results is at the heart of the scientific method and should be done immediately. Research results, even when inconvenient, need to be shared, verified, and acted upon — not downplayed.

After President Bush’s 2007 State of the Union address, which called for massive increases in biofuels, we heard stories of skyrocketing corn tortilla prices and resulting social disruptions.

Now we have stories coming from places like West Kalimantan, a remote region of Indonesia where the rush to plant palm-oil plantations is generating conflict with Indonesians who grow rubber trees and other crops on their small plots of land. The NGO Friends of the Earth Netherlands has a new report calling out the unethical practices of some palm-oil companies that clear existing crops first and make payouts (maybe) to the farmers who own the land later.

It strikes me that this particular link between natural resource management and conflict offers an avenue for addressing one of the traditional shortcomings of environment and conflict research.

Rightly or wrongly (and it has been a little of both), much environment and conflict research has been criticized for neglecting the impact of transnational economic forces on so-called "local" conflicts. For instance, West Africa’s mid-1990s "anarchy" is sometimes portrayed simplistically, without sufficient attention to the role Western timber companies or diamond buyers played in creating demand for the forests and precious stones that helped fuel the conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and other countries.

I do not subscribe to the school that says all environment and conflict work falls into this category. And there are big differences between how these issues were presented in the mid-1990s and how they are portrayed today. Our research has gotten better — both that of original contributors and that of new players. Nevertheless, much environment and conflict work can be characterized as focusing on conflict "over there," without drawing the connections to how North American or European (or increasingly Chinese and Japanese) consumer behavior can play a role in those conflicts.

The links between global consumer behavior and "local" conflict are made unavoidably clear, however, when we see Indonesian palm oil plantations sprouting up in response to the EU mandate for biofuels to constitute 10% of its transport fuels by 2020. All of us in the environmental security world would do well to pay greater attention to these connections. The fact that energy and transportation are part of the biofuels story makes incorporating this issue into European and North American policy and research agendas that much easier. Let’s hope the new focus on biofuels shines a spotlight (and not an eclipse) on the social conflict that our energy consumption engenders, often in places that are remote from where the biofuels are used.

Scholars, policy analysts, and even military officers are breaking down climate change’s impacts into what they hope are more manageable topics for examination. The migration that climate change could cause is one such topic. For instance, the Center for American Progress recently posted a piece entitled “Climate Refugees: Global Warming will Spur Migration.” The International Peace Academy analyzed “Climate Change and Conflict: The Migration Link” (PDF) in a May 2007 Coping With Crisis working paper. Climate change-induced migration also figured prominently in the security perspective offered by the CNA Corporation’s Military Advisory Board in its report, “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.”

In many respects, these pieces are careful in their discussion of the topic. But allow me a few words of caution on climate change and migration, based on what we learned from a series of programs on the topic in the late 1990s here at the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center.

First, the use of the term “refugee” is convenient but problematic.

In order to achieve refugee status, people must be fleeing persecution or violence and must cross a national border. Countries are then obligated by international law to admit them, provide shelter, and so forth. Notably, then, the definition of “refugee” is based on political boundaries and has nothing to offer internally displaced persons. It also does nothing for people who are "pulled" for economic reasons or "pushed" for environmental reasons. Because not all people displaced by climate change will be fleeing violence or crossing a national border, it is critical to avoid referring to them as refugees if one wants to be taken seriously by the UN, lawyers, academics, and governments. Governments, in particular, have a fairly strong interest in keeping the definition narrow because of the obligations they have to refugees. For this reason, the “knee-jerk” reaction for most of them will be to resist granting refugee status to a new large group of people.

The second problem is that the motivations for migration are multiple, and distinguishing between economic pulls and environmental pushes is very difficult. A farmer suffering from prolonged drought is both pushed to move from his land and pulled to an urban area or to more fertile ground by the promise of greater economic opportunity. This is self-evident, of course, but when the situation is reduced to "climate migrants" versus "economic migrants," the response from climate change skeptics will always be: "They are just economic refugees." One can easily see this classification problem with Mexican migrants coming across the border to the United States to work. Are they climate migrants because their homes have experienced prolonged drought that may have been exacerbated by climate change? Or are they economic migrants who are "just coming for our jobs"? The multicausality of the motivations for moving makes labeling a migrant with any single adjective (political, economic, environmental, climate, etc.) problematic.

The third difficulty — which follows from the challenge of multicausality — is that it is extraordinarily difficult to develop and defend a methodology for calculating the number of climate migrants. A prominent biologist who spoke at the Wilson Center in the mid-1990s claimed that the number of climate refugees could be in the tens of millions. When one participant asked him how he determined who was in and who was out of his total, his response was basically: I read a lot of reports and this is my best guess. Naturally, the air went out of the room, and we might as well have ended the meeting right then. This is the danger of asserting that there are millions more climate migrants than political refugees from war or persecution. For starters, is the number of climate migrants being compared with the legal category of refugees, or does the comparison also factor in the millions of war-induced internally displaced persons? If this kind of comparative analysis isn’t done carefully, some will believe that the climate-change migration numbers have been exaggerated by a flawed methodology. This issue will then be in danger of being unfairly marginalized.

I say “unfairly” because I believe climate change could have a tremendous effect on human migration. Even though we cannot parse out a single cause, climate changes are still critical pushes that cause people to move. Migration — like conflict and other social phenomena — is by definition multicausal. Just as "environmental conflict" theories that privileged environmental scarcity as the explanation for civil conflict were criticized, so too is the "climate refugee" argument open to critique.

The most nuanced conflict work now being done focuses on how environmental scarcity or abundance can exacerbate more proximate causes of conflict such as ethnic difference or relative deprivation. Likewise, the key to getting climate on the table as a principal driver of migration is to carefully trace how it interacts with the many other factors that cause people to move.

Climate and migration links may prove to be effective arguments in the larger political discussions of climate change mitigation. That is clearly the way the Center for American Progress is deploying them. Raising migration (and its potentially negative impacts on security, which the CNA report highlights) as an additional cost of inaction may be effective in some political settings. But to maintain a focus on improving the lives of people on the ground, it is crucial to translate this larger theoretical and political argument into a variety of specific interventions. Then, when donors, NGOs, and host governments become convinced of the challenges presented by climate and security linkages, there will be a full menu of responses to offer and implement.