Senator Kerry: Global Warming Threatens Security

Climate change will lead to a new level of global instability – that was the message Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.) delivered as he kicked off an effort to educate both lawmakers and the public about the security threats that will result from climate change. Kerry hopes to build support for legislation in the Senate to curb carbon emissions. 

Kerry made his remarks at a symposium co-sponsored by the American Security Project, a bipartisan nonprofit established in Washington last year. They came during Climate Action Week in New York and Pittsburgh, during which Kerry is playing a leading role in pushing the Obama administration to embrace firm steps that lead to a new climate treaty in Copenhagen in December. The American Security Project, whose mission is to educate the public about security threats, unveiled a new report, the Climate Security Index, that spells out how famine, water shortages and other predicted consequences of climate change could increase terrorism. The biggest trouble spots are in South Asia, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa and Central America, according to the report.

“Climate change injects a major new source of chaos, tension, and human insecurity into an already volatile world,” Kerry said in his speech. “It threatens to bring more famine and drought, worse pandemics, more natural disasters, more resource scarcity and human displacement on a staggering scale. We risk fanning the flames of failed-statism and offering glaring opportunities to the worst actors in our international system. In an interconnected world, that endangers all of us.”

-- Suzanne Bopp