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During a recent field trip to mid-monsoon Nepal, stories of floods affecting vulnerable communities across the country dominated the daily headlines. At the same time, international donors are pouring in funds in an attempt to help the vulnerable cope with the impacts of climate change we are already feeling. Last week, the Adaptation Fund, a fund set up by the UN to help poor countries cope with the impact of climate change, became operational. But are these funds helping – or are they contributing to the problem?

With less than two months to go until the next global summit on climate change in Mexico, the issues for agreement are about reducing carbon emissions and – more importantly for poor countries – how much money the developed countries, who have the main responsibility for global warming, will put on the negotiating table to help people in poorer countries cope with the consequences. But these are not the only important issues.

One issue that is barely acknowledged is the heightened risk of political instability and conflict related to climate change. Factors linking climate change to an increased potential for instability and conflict include water scarcity, accelerated land degradation, decreased food production, and indeed the management of the climate funds themselves.

The risk will be greatest where governance is weak. Nobody will dispute that this is the case in Nepal. 

 ‘A Climate of Conflict’, a report by International Alert, estimates that just under three billion people live in 56 conflict-affected countries, where climate change could increase the risk of political instability. Nepal is one of the 56 at risk.

Climate policy makers, however, are largely silent on the matter. International Alert’s latest research finds that new funds, already coming into the country’s coffers with more still in the pipeline, could make the situation worse if they don’t take account of the complex linkages between environmental change, security and governance.

What should inform climate responses?
Responses to climate change have to respond to the political and social realities of fragile contexts such as Nepal or they will not work.

Climate change is not only a climate issue. Climate change will affect political stability, development, government, equity, trade and the national economy. And these issues all affect the ability of people and the governments to respond constructively to the challenges climate change generates. The problems are interlinked, so the responses must be too.

At a meeting of the South Asia Network on Security and Climate Change (SANSaC) co-hosted by International Alert and the EU on 3^rd September, SANSaC recommended that in post-conflict situations like Nepal, adaptation strategies should address the broader dimensions of community resilience.

Resilience is multi-dimensional.

Adaptation strategies should be defined not only by the nature of the natural hazard that is faced, but also on the basis of understanding the systems of governance and power. This must involve a deep understanding of the local context, and avoid pitting groups against each other. They must also address broader risks to resilience such as security. For example, a new Government of Nepal pilot project to address energy security and reduce deforestation through promotion of biogas plants is being rolled out in nine districts. The switch to biogas aims to curb deforestation for fuel wood thereby decreasing risks of soil erosion and landslides. But the pilot implementation was halted in three districts – Saptari, Udayapur and Siraha – due to the security situation in those places. Such decisions leave these communities doubly vulnerable: to the lack of sustainable energy sources, and to pre-existing insecurity.

Who are the ‘most vulnerable’?

Donors often speak about targeting the ‘poorest and most marginalised’ but base their programming on a generalised conception of who these people are. Speak to people in the villages and they’ll tell you. ‘A poor person is a poor person, regardless of whether he is Brahmin or Janjati. Ethnicity is a political construct. The local context is socially and culturally complex. It is social and cultural factors that determine economic activity – not ethnicity’ a local from Sunsari explained. ‘It’s not so simple that because you are a Brahmin you have all the resources and rights, and because you are a janjati you don’t’. Local organisations must understand the local reality and they must make central governments and international actors aware of this complex reality.

A further problem already giving rise to local community level grievances is a culture of dependence on funds. ‘Everyone’s happy to get funds from donors but when they run out of donor funding, they come back to local government’ stated a local municipality employee in Dhankuta. This dependence on donor assistance usurps local authorities’ roles and responsibilities and undermines the social contract between communities and local government. This relationship between government and the governed is already fraught and may not be able to take the strain of well intended but ill-advised interventions.

Likewise, peace and reconstruction efforts need to be climate-proofed by paying attention to the availability of resources for livelihoods such as agriculture or returning ex-combatants or people displaced by conflict. These could be under pressure because of climate change. For example, possible future plans to reintegrate ex-combatants from cantonments into villages where they may hope to make a living from agriculture could cause and face future problems. Farmers struggling with changing rainfall patterns and only getting one harvest per year rather than two are seeing their rice yields falling. The prospect arises of returned fighters becoming resentful unemployed farmers, and thus potential recruits, with their combat experience, in instability.

More broadly, direct access to large-scale adaptation funding combined with low capacity and high corruption within government will limit the ability to effective use it. It is highly likely that funds will be diverted into the hands and pockets of one faction or another in the political elite. With public awareness of these funds coming in, people’s expectations for support – for example compensation for flood victims – are rising, and where they are not met, we are likely to see an increase in protests and political instability. In Nepal’s Koshi basin, recent experience shows that community protests are easily hijacked by political and criminal gangs who promote violence for their own ends. Misuse of funds may thus be the primary factor exacerbating instability.

If responses to climate change take account of the broad dimensions of what makes people resilient – not just drought-resistant crops and embankments to protect them from floods – but also the interlinked factors of livelihoods options, good infrastructure, social inclusion and effective governance, there’s a good chance that responses to climate change could yield a double dividend: increasing resilience to both climate change and conflict.

Failure to take account of the linkages however could result in the billions of dollars of funding for adaptation actually becoming part of the problem.

Janani Vivekananda is a senior advisor on climate change and security at international peacebuilding organisation International Alert

Image Source: TheDreamSky

The new British Defence Secretary, Dr Liam Fox, has now announced the beginning of the long-awaited Strategic Defence Review and the indications are that the process will be completed before the end of 2010. Given Britain’s role in the European Union and NATO, and its close links with the United States, the outcome of the review will be watched with interest in many countries.

The incoming Conservative-Liberal-Democrat coalition government believes that a Strategic Defence Review is urgently required for a number of reasons, including

• the inability of the UK Ministry of Defence to maintain current commitments and programmes on present-day funding levels;
• the high cost of existing and future programmes;
• the recent experience of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how far the methods that have been employed, have achieved their goals; and
• serious constraints on UK public spending that are likely to persist for up to a decade.

The new government has also set up a cross-departmental National Security Council that will further develop the trend to a national security strategy established by the Labour government. While this is a welcome move, it comes in the context of recent programme decisions made ahead of the review that, if not reversed, will direct the defence posture in such a narrow manner that a wider and much-needed reappraisal of Britain’s security will prove impossible. Instead, questions need to be asked about what is needed to limit conflict and create a more peaceful environment in an era of new global security challenges.

The two most significant programmes are:

• The aircraft carrier/F-35 strike aircraft programme
• Like-for-like replacement of the Trident nuclear system

These are very substantial in terms of costs, but their greater importance is in the manner in which they will dictate a particular role for the UK defence posture – what is in effect a scaled down version of the much larger US global power projection capability. Essentially, they will determine a role for Britain in international security which is out of date and more related to the Cold War, bearing little relation to the issues of global insecurity and conflict, which will be dominant in the next two to three decades. 

Britain’s National Security Strategy

In the last two years of the Labour government, some interesting attempts were made to inject some new thinking into UK defence policy. The first was the National Security Strategy of March 2008, and more recently, there was a Defence Green Paper published earlier this year. Following the Green Paper, the Conservative Party, then in opposition, published its own national security Green Paper, A Resilient Nation.

While the National Security Strategy of 2008 was published in an environment in which the war on terror, Iraq and Afghanistan were hugely prominent, it did seek to look well beyond the immediate circumstances:

“The Cold War threat has been replaced by a diverse but interconnected set of threats and risks, which affect the United Kingdom directly and also have the potential to undermine wider international stability. They include international terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, conflicts and failed states, pandemics and transnational crime. These and other threats and risks are driven by a diverse and interconnected set of underlying factors, including climate change, competition for energy, poverty and poor governance, demographic change and globalisation.” (NSS para 1.3)

This wider approach with its recognition of the underlying trends of climate change, marginalisation and energy insecurity, also comes through to a more limited extent in the recent Green Papers, albeit with more of an emphasis on national security in the Conservative contribution. It goes some way towards the analysis of global challenges, developed in recent years by Oxford Research Group and other organisations that see the need for a radical re-thinking of the approaches of countries such as Britain to international security (see Global Security After the War on Terror).

While ORG is not arguing against the maintenance of defence forces per se, it places much more emphasis on long-term conflict-prevention. It argues that the more substantive problems that will be faced in the coming decades, stem from a dangerous combination of severe environmental constraints, especially climate change and energy shortages, and an increasingly divided world community in which the benefits of globalised economic growth have been excessively concentrated in about one-fifth of the global population. In such circumstances there is the very strong risk of societal breakdown as well as desperate responses from within the majority of the world’s people who are marginalised and will be under increasing environmental constraints.

There is the further risk that the main emphasis for security policies will be on suppressing such actions and maintaining the status quo, rather than responding to the underlying drivers of insecurity. ORG has long argued that the much more appropriate response is to embark on a transition to low carbon economies to combat the fundamental problem of climate change, while developing a socio-economic system that acts to reverse the dangerous trend towards the marginalisation of the majority of the world’s people. It also argues the need to shift resources to the development of conflict resolution techniques to deal with radical disagreement.

What is significant about some of the thinking in the National Security Strategy and the two Green Papers is that the analysis of future dangers, implicit in an environmentally constrained and economically divided world, is present and the risks are acknowledged. What is not done, however, is to follow this through in terms of what it means for an integrated strategy, involving major aspects of economic and environmental policy. Moreover, the timing of two major military projects that are in the early yet crucial stages of their development means that unless decisions are reversed, the possibility of entering into a genuinely far-sighted strategic security review is greatly diminished, if not rendered impossible.

The first project is the planned replacement of the Trident nuclear force with a broadly similar system and the second is the building of two very large new aircraft carriers deployed with a maritime variant of the US-produced F-35 strike aircraft. The carriers will be the largest warships ever to see service with the Royal Navy and will give the UK a global strike capability that it has not had for close to forty years, harking back almost to the days of Empire.

The sheer scale of the two projects – the planned nuclear force replacement and the carrier procurement – will inevitably determine the UK defence posture. In essence, the UK’s ability to intervene in conflicts in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere will be much increased, and it will have a nuclear strike capability that could, in extreme circumstances, be available in support of operations in overseas theatres.

However, the cost of constructing and deploying such systems will be so high, especially at a time of financial stringency, that there will be relatively little left for other programmes. What is more, the whole tenor of the defence posture will be one of maintaining control in a fragile and uncertain world, rather than addressing the underlying trends likely to result in that fragility and uncertainty – a matter of keeping the lid on problems or “liddism” as it has been termed.

Trident

Britain’s current nuclear force comprises four Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarines, each capable of deploying with 16 missiles. While these are usually fitted with three independently-targetable warheads of about 100 kilotons of explosive power (8x the Hiroshima bomb), some are deployed with a much smaller single warhead for what has variably been called tactical or sub-strategic use. Neither term is now used, not least as they give the impression of a willingness to use nuclear weapons in less than extreme circumstances of national survival. – UK governments prefer to avoid acknowledging this aspect of the UK nuclear posture.

Britain maintains its nuclear force with at least one missile submarine at sea at any one time – what is termed “continuous at-sea deterrence” or CASD.

The Trident system is due for renewal by the 2020s and current plans involve a broadly like-for-like replacement. Given that the Aldermaston/Burghfield nuclear weapons development and production complex in Berkshire costs around £1 billion a year, and given the cost of the new submarines and the high cost of deploying them with numerous support facilities, the likely life-time cost of replacing Trident will approach £100 billion, much of it front-loaded to the next 10-15 years. The intention of the previous Labour government was to exclude the Trident replacement programme from a post-election Strategic Defence Review. That was also the intention of the Conservatives when in opposition and is likely to remain the case, in spite of some Liberal-Democrat concerns over the Trident replacement issue.

Given the commitment of significant world political figures, including President Obama, to the idea of moving towards a nuclear-free world, there are major steps that the British government could take to further progress in that direction. They include:

• Cutting the UK nuclear stockpile from the present size, estimated at 160 warheads, to under one hundred;
• Ending continuous at-sea deterrence and mothballing one of the four submarines; and
• Ruling out the hugely expensive like-for-like replacement of Trident and including the options of going for a much more limited nuclear system, or even considering phasing out nuclear weapons altogether.

Such moves do not in themselves involve the UK giving up its nuclear forces in the short term but they would signal a strong commitment to substantially lower nuclear forces while also leaving open the possibility of going further, should the international and domestic political environments allow. They would also make it easier to have a comprehensive security review which would not be possible if the nuclear question is excluded.

The Aircraft Carriers

The second major issue is the carrier programme. The two new carriers, the 65,000-tonne Queen Elizabeth-class ships, each nearly three times the size of the current Invincible-class ships, are large vessels capable of a range of uses, but the reality is that they are intended as force-projection warships equipped with an extremely expensive new strike aircraft. The combined total order for the carriers and the RAF is expected to be 130 planes at a cost per plane of £94 million, although this cost continues to rise. Along with escorts and support ships, maintaining and deploying the carriers will dominate naval capabilities for the lifetime of the ships.

The Lockheed F-35, in particular, is already a greatly troubled project with substantial cost overruns and long delays. In some ways, the problems facing this project are reminiscent of the Eurofighter project, a Cold War-era plane that should have been cancelled in the early 1990s but had built up too much momentum for politicians to take such a decision. Famously described in 1997 by a former defence minister, Alan Clark, as “essentially flawed and out of date”, he commented on its role in job creation thus: “we must find a less extravagant way of paying people to make buckets with holes in them”. Eurofighter survived – as the Typhoon – in smaller numbers than planned, and was eventually adapted at great cost, to fulfil some new roles. at great cost, to fulfil some new roles. It was, though, very much an example of a project overtaken by events. The US F-35 programme is also essentially a project of the 1990s.

The planned British purchase of F35 strike aircraft in combination with the carrier programme will be more of an imperial throwback than a real contribution to Britain’s security.

The entire UK carrier/F-35 programme should be cancelled. Replacements might include two much smaller sea control ships utilising the rapidly developing UCAV (drone) technologies, with a much scaled-down purchase of one of the F-35 alternatives currently available.

The real problem here is that a serious review of Britain’s security cannot be done if the future defence posture is already dictated by Trident replacement and the carrier/F-35 programme. The right option therefore is to scale down the existing Trident force, review its replacement and cancel the carrier/F-35 programme before much more money is wasted.

The Issue of Procurement

Perhaps the most serious financial issue facing the Ministry of Defence is the persistent failure to control the cost of individual programmes. Among current programmes that have hugely overrun their original estimates, the most extreme is the replacement of the Nimrod MR2 maritime patrol and surveillance aircraft with the Nimrod MRA4. This was due to be deployed in 2003, was subject to innumerable delays and cost increases and will not now enter service until 2012. Only 9 aircraft will be procured instead of the original 21, largely because of the huge cost increases currently estimated at around £400 million per aircraft.

Because of many problems with the current MR2, including concerns over airworthiness, these planes were withdrawn from service two months ago, leaving the RAF to try to fill the gap with a mix of other aircraft and helicopters, none of them remotely comparable in the maritime role to the MR2. The MR2/MRA4 saga is one of many examples of delayed programmes and cost overruns that have plagued defence procurement for many years.

Successive governments have sought to bring costs and programmes under control but with very little success, mainly because of the nature of what was described by President Eisenhower, more than fifty years ago, as the military industrial complex. For Britain, one of the key issues is that the complex is essentially self-organising but not self-regulating. Very few companies operate in the advanced defence sector, and there is little competition as well as a pervasive climate of mutual interest. Thus, senior civil servants and senior military, especially those concerned with procurement, are frequently able to acquire lucrative consultancies not long after they retire, and independent oversight of large programmes is effectively absent. Successive defence select committees have had little impact and the National Audit Office concentrates on individual programmes and is liable to be constrained by issues of secrecy and restricted terms of reference.

Any serious defence/security review has to address the procurement issue, even though it will be singularly difficult to come up with any effective measure of oversight. At the same time, there are lessons to be learnt from the evolution of the Police Complaints Authority and, perhaps more significantly, the Financial Services Authority, especially as the latter has recently shown itself willing to take on major financial institutions.

A viable option would be to establish a Defence Procurement Authority, outside of the control of the Ministry of Defence, which would provide the continuing scrutiny of defence procurement as a whole which has been so singularly lacking in the past.

Conclusion

Britain is beginning to embrace the idea of looking at international security in a manner that goes beyond a traditional defence review, with the National Security Strategy, the Green Papers and the new National Security Council being evidence of this. In the face of current financial constraints and the carrier/Trident issue, though, there is every sign that the forthcoming defence review will be very limited in its remit, and therefore fundamentally inadequate.

Instead:

• The review should be inter-departmental and overseen at Cabinet Office level.
• It should address the issue of defence procurement.
• It should be wide-ranging and able to develop integrated policy on broadly-based global security issues, such as climate change, economic marginalisation and conflict-prevention.
• It will not be able to do this effectively, unless the carrier/F-35 programme is cancelled and replaced with a smaller and much more versatile option, and the Trident force and its replacement are substantially scaled down.
• Each constrains an effective and far-sighted review – together they make a genuine review well-nigh impossible.

 www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk

The structure of Libyan society under the Qadhafi regime, as well as during its demise and aftermath, was and remains peculiarly fragmented. The former dictator deliberately kept state institutions weak (in particular the army) in order to prevent the formation of an organised opposition and to create a cult of leadership centred on himself and his family. The consequence for the nature of the uprising was that rebel forces were fragmented, their control over the country was acquired piecemeal, and the internationally recognised National Transitional Council has had tenuous legitimacy outside its base in Benghazi and the east.

Now that the regime has fallen, the process of rebuilding should be underway; but Libya has many autonomous, disconnected and heavily armed militias, all of whom have independent claims on their country’s liberation as well as the fire power to back those claims. The following Crisis Group Report examines the tricky path that the authorities must navigate in order to successfully disarm, demobilise and reintegrate into society Libya’s rebel fighters, without plunging the country back into violence. Many of the young men who took up arms and joined the rebellion found in it a dignity long denied them by lack of economic and employment opportunities. So while the number of weapons in circulation must be dramatically reduced, the status that they bestow needs to be met by other means.

Executive Summary and Recommendations

As the recent upsurge of violence dramatically illustrates, the militias that were decisive in ousting Qadhafi’s regime are becoming a significant problem now that it is gone. Their number is a mystery: 100 according to some; three times that others say. Over 125,000 Libyans are said to be armed. The groups do not see themselves as serving a central authority; they have separate procedures to register members and weapons, arrest and detain suspects; they repeatedly have clashed. Rebuilding Libya requires addressing their fate, yet haste would be as perilous as apathy. The uprising was highly decentralised; although they recognise it, the local military and civilian councils are sceptical of the National Transitional Council (NTC), the largely self-appointed body leading the transition. They feel they need weapons to defend their interests and address their security fears.

A top-down disarmament and demobilisation effort by an executive lacking legitimacy would backfire. For now the NTC should work with local authorities and militias – and encourage them to work with each other – to agree on operational standards and pave the way for restructured police, military and civilian institutions. Qadhafi centralised power without building a central state. His successors must do the reverse.

A dual legacy burdens Libya’s new authorities. The first was bequeathed by Qadhafi in the form of a regime centred on himself and his family; that played neighbourhoods and groups against one another; failed to develop genuine national institutions; and deliberately kept the national army weak to prevent the emergence of would-be challengers. The second legacy stems from the way in which he was toppled: through the piecemeal and variegated liberation of different parts of the country. A large number of local forces and militias volunteered to take part in this fight. After Qadhafi’s fall, all could legitimately claim to have sacrificed blood and treasure for the cause, and all could consider themselves national liberators.

To much of the world, the NTC was the face of the uprising. It was formed early, spoke with authority and swiftly achieved broad international recognition. On the ground, the picture was different. The NTC was headquartered in the eastern city of Benghazi, a traditional base of anti-regime activity that provided army defectors a relatively secure area of operations, particularly after NATO’s involvement. The eastern rebellion was built around a strong kernel of experienced opposition and commanders who found friendly territory in which to defect at relatively low cost and personal risk. But it could only encourage western cities and towns to rise up, not adequately support them. At key times, army components that defected, stuck on the eastern frontlines, by and large became passive observers of what occurred in the rest of the country. In the eyes of many, the rebel army looked increasingly like an eastern, not a truly national force. As for the NTC, focused on obtaining vital international support, it never fully led the uprising, nor could it establish a substantial physical presence in much of the rest of the country.

In the west, rebels formed militias and military brigades that were essentially autonomous, self-armed and self-trained, benefiting in most instances from limited NTC and foreign government support. Some had a military background, but most were civilians – accountants, lawyers, students or labourers. When and where they prevailed, they assumed security and civilian responsibility under the authority of local military councils. As a result, most of the militias are geographically rooted, identified with specific neighbourhoods, towns and cities – such as Zintan and Misrata – rather than joined by ideology, tribal membership or ethnicity; they seldom possess a clear political agenda beyond securing their area.

The situation in Tripoli was different and uniquely dangerous. There, victory over Qadhafi forces reflected the combined efforts of local residents and various militias from across the country. The outcome was a series of parallel, at times uncoordinated chains of command. The presence of multiple militias has led to armed clashes as they overlap and compete for power.

The NTC’s desire to bring the militias under central control is wholly understandable; to build a stable Libya, it also is necessary. But obstacles are great. By now, they have developed vested interests they will be loath to relinquish. They also have become increasingly entrenched. Militias mimic the organisation of a regular military and enjoy parallel chains of command; they have separate weapons and vehicle registration procedures; supply identification cards; conduct investigations; issue warrants; arrest and detain suspects; and conduct security operations, sometimes at substantial cost to communities subject to discrimination and collective punishment.

They also have advantages that the NTC and the National Army lack, notably superior local knowledge and connections, relatively strong leaderships and revolutionary legitimacy. In contrast, the NTC has had to struggle with internal divisions, a credibility deficit and questions surrounding its effectiveness. It has had to deal with ministries still in the process of reorganisation and whose employees – most of them former regime holdovers – have yet to cast off the ingrained habit of referring any decision to the ministerial level.

But the heart of the matter is political. The security landscape’s fragmentation – and militias’ unwillingness to give up arms – reflects distrust and uncertainty regarding who has the legitimacy to lead during the transition. While the NTC and reconstituted National Army can point out they were among the first to rebel or defect and were crucial in obtaining international support, others see things differently. Some considered them too eastern-dominated and blamed them for playing a marginal role in liberating the west. Civilians who took up arms and who had been powerless or persecuted under Qadhafi resent ex-senior officials who defected from the army and members of the regime’s elite who shifted allegiances and now purport to rule. Although they are represented on the council, many Islamists consider the NTC overly secular and out of touch with ordinary Libyans. Above all else, militias – notably those in Tripoli, Zintan and Misrata – have their own narrative to justify their legitimacy: that they spearheaded the revolution in the west, did the most to free the capital or suffered most from Qadhafi’s repression.

Formation of a new cabinet was supposed to curb militia-on-militia violence as well as defiance of the National Army; it has done nothing of the kind. Instead, violence in the capital if anything has escalated, with armed clashes occurring almost nightly. Regional suspicion of the central authority remains high as does disagreement over which of the many new revolutionary groups and personalities ought to be entrusted with power.

The problem posed by militias is intimately related to deeper, longer-term structural issues: Qadhafi’s neglect of the army along with other institutions; regional friction and societal divisions (between regions, between Islamist-leaning and secularist-leaning camps, as well as between representatives of the old and new orders); the uprising’s geographically uneven and uncoordinated development; the surplus of weapons and deficit in trust; the absence of a strong, fully representative and effective executive authority; and widespread feeling among many armed fighters that the existing national army lacks both relevance and legitimacy.

Until a more legitimate governing body is formed – which likely means until elections are held – and until more credible national institutions are developed, notably in the areas of defence, policing and vital service delivery, Libyans are likely to be suspicious of the political process, while insisting on both retaining their weapons and preserving the current structure of irregular armed brigades. To try to force a different outcome would be to play with fire, and with poor odds.

But that does not mean nothing can be done. Some of the most worrying features of the security patchwork should be addressed cooperatively between the NTC and local military as well as civilian councils. At the top of the list should be developing and enforcing clear standards to prevent abuses of detainees or discrimination against entire communities, the uncontrolled possession, display or use especially of heavy weapons and inter-militia clashes. The NTC also should begin working on longer-term steps to demobilise the militias and reintegrate their fighters in coordination with local actors. This will require restructuring the police and military, but also providing economic opportunities for former fighters – vocational training, jobs as well as basic social services – which in turn will require meeting minimum expectations of good government. Even as it takes a relatively hands-off approach, the international community has much to offer in this respect – and Libyans appear eager for such help.

Ultimately, successfully dealing with the proliferation of militias will entail a delicate balancing act: central authorities must take action, but not at the expense of local counterparts; disarmament and demobilisation should proceed deliberately, but neither too quickly nor too abruptly; and international players should weigh the need not to overly interfere in Libya’s affairs against the obligation not to become overly complacent about its promising but still fragile future.

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the Transitional National Council (NTC):

1.  Strengthen the legitimacy of central authorities by ensuring greater transparency in decision-making and in identifying and selecting Council representatives and members of the executive.

2.  Ensure all decisions relating to disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) are taken in close consultation with local military councils and militias, by appointing a credible personality to liaise and coordinate with such local bodies.

3.  Enhance opportunity for involvement by community and religious leaders in sponsoring and supporting DDR initiatives.

4.  Back local DDR initiatives financially in cooperation with local councils, including weapons registration, improvement of detention facilities and support for young fighters.

To the Revolutionary Brigades, Local Military Councils and Local Civilian Councils: 


5.  Seek to reintegrate armed rebels, notably the youngest among them, inter alia by identifying and registering those who wish to pursue careers in the police and military; offering alternative civilian employment; and sponsoring civic improvement initiatives with city funds.

6.  Disclose all sources of funding.

7.  Agree on and enforce codes of conduct and mechanisms for dispute resolution, especially where several militias operate in the same area.

To the NTC, Revolutionary Brigades, Local Military Councils and Local Civilian Councils:

8.  Agree on and enforce a common set of rules and behaviour for all armed fighters; implement a single procedure for weapons registrations; and ban the display of heavy weapons in town centres and the bearing of arms at checkpoints and key installations.

9.  Transfer as quickly as possible responsibility for detainees to central authority and, in the meantime, ensure respect for rule of law and international standards in arrest and detention procedures; release persons whose detention is not consistent with such practices; and bring to justice, speedily and in accordance with international law, those accused of criminal acts.

10.  Agree on a process for NTC inspection of arms depots, detention centres, border posts, checkpoints and other militia-controlled facilities.

11.  Implement initial steps toward DDR by:

    a) focusing at first on heavy weapons;

    b) through a joint effort by the government and local councils, providing support for young fighters in particular;

    c) establishing an NTC-funded mandatory training program covering rules of engagement and discipline for militia members who wish to pursue careers in the military or policing; and

    d) providing vocational training for militia fighters as well as necessary financial incentives.

12.  Establish and implement criteria for appointment to senior posts within the defence ministry and army on an inclusive basis.

13.  Create at both the central and local levels a non-par­ti­san, inclusive committee to review and refer candidates for recruitment into the police and national army.

14.  Institute an appeals procedure for rejected candidates.

To the UN Support Mission in Libya and other International Stakeholders, including Arab countries, the European Union and the U.S.:

15.  Offer the NTC assistance in, inter alia:

    a) undertaking quick assessments of security, DDR, and related needs;

    b) police training, including possibly establishment of a gendarmerie function;

    c) security force professionalisation, including specifically on human rights and civilian oversight; and

    d) border control.

Tripoli/Brussels

Article Source: Crisis Group. To read the full Report, click here

Image Source: United Nations

The consequences of climate change for human security are profound, but much of the last decade has been lost in avoiding those consequences. The implications for human security are serious. Today, with the consequences of climate change being increasingly recognised by military analysts, there is a risk of the “securitising” of the climate change agenda leading simply to military responses rather than a more preventative course of a rapid shift to a low-carbon society.

A World Blowing Cold and Hot

In 2009-10, the United Kingdom and much of the rest of north-west Europe experienced one of the coldest and most prolonged winters for several decades. In the minds of many people this seemed to confirm the view that the evidence for global warming was limited at best, and that the views of climate change sceptics were to be taken seriously. Furthermore, the winter’s experience came after the Copenhagen climate negotiations made little progress, and was also in the aftermath of a major controversy concerning climate change research at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

In this context- of suspicion over the reality of climate change – many people in Western Europe found it difficult to believe that the month of January 2010 was actually one of the warmest on record. This was the case when expressed in global rather than European terms – while the north-east Atlantic had been experiencing severe cold, parts of North America had warmer than average winters, and temperatures were high in many other parts of the world.

As 2010 progressed, two other weather events and one oceanic development added further to a sense of uncertainty. For much of the mid-summer period, Russia experienced exceptionally high temperatures which, in the case of the greater Moscow region, resulted in numerous forest fires leading to smog over the city. At the same time, further south in Central Europe, there was widespread flooding across 8 countries. In addition to this, there were appalling floods in Pakistan as the monsoon season was marked by some of the heaviest rainfall in decades. The full scale of the losses in Pakistan is still not clear.

Few climate scientists sought to claim that these weather events were direct indicators of climate change, but an indirect connection was certainly suggested. While it may be a common mistake to confuse “short-term weather” with “long-term climate”, it has been widely predicted that as the atmosphere of the entire planet slowly heats up, then weather systems should be expected to become more energetic, leading to extremes of weather events such as intense tropical storms, exceptional monsoons or continental heat waves. The experiences in Russia and Pakistan could be no more than equivalent to some of the extreme events that have been witnessed in the past, but their conjuncture at least reminded many people of other aspects of climate change.

The final element for 2010 was not a weather event as such, but a report that the Artic Ocean was experiencing one of the most substantial losses of mid-year sea ice on record. What seemed particularly surprising was that this should be happening within a matter of months of such a severe winter in the north-east Atlantic. In fact, the loss of sea ice was within the predictions that climate change models have produced in recent years. The overall impact of the loss of sea ice and the extreme weather experienced in Russia and Pakistan meant that by early September there was a widespread sense, once again, that climate change should be taken seriously.

Climate Change in Context

The possible impact of increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere was well recognised over 40 years ago, and by the end of the 1980s there was serious concern that there would be substantial changes in the planet’s climate if carbon emissions were not curbed. Although not directly related to climate change, the potential destruction of the ozone layer through the release of CFC pollutants was recognised in the mid-1980s as being the first clear example of human activity having an impact on the entire global ecosystem. The ozone problem was relatively easy to counter, since CFCs could be replaced, and phasing them out through the Montreal Convention was agreed in 1987. Partly because of the sudden and serious nature of the CFC issue, climate change research was attracting far more attention by 1990.

At the same time, there was one aspect that limited the extent of the concern. This was that studies of natural climate change in prehistoric times have indicated that most of the impact was in the north and south temperate latitudes. If this was repeated with human-induced climate change then at least the countries most likely to be affected would be wealthy enough to be able to adapt. With the tropics and sub-tropics buffered against excessive impacts, poorer people across the world might have less to contend with.

By the early 1990s, advances in climate change science showed that the pattern of natural climate change would not be repeated by human-induced change, and that those parts of the world least able to cope would be seriously affected. By the early part of the 2000s, further work was actually showing that there would be an asymmetric impact. In broad terms, large parts of Antarctica, the southern oceans and the southernmost parts of the continental land masses would experience the smallest increases in temperature, whereas the Arctic region and most northern, sub-tropical and tropical land masses would experience above-average increases. There were also indications that rainfall would tend to increase over the oceans and Polar Regions but decrease over the tropical and sub-tropical land masses.

The implications of this more recent understanding are profound, since those populations and societies least able to cope with the impact of climate change will have to contend with substantial changes. Decreases in crop yields and consequent food availability will be among the factors likely to make societies much more fragile and unstable, one effect being very substantial increases in migratory pressures, with these being strongly resisted by wealthier countries. When seen in combination with the persistent socio-economic divisions that already exist across the world, the potential for serious social unrest and political instability is considerable.

The Recent Politics of Climate Change

Among those resisting the implications of climate change have been large trans-national oil companies and oil-exporting countries. The former have funded policy institutes and others to promote critiques of climate change research and the latter have been deeply reluctant to support international protocols limiting carbon emissions. Beyond these forces, which may be powerful and well-funded, a much more serious issue in the first decade of the 21st century was that the world’s largest emitter of carbon, the United States, had an administration in power that was deeply suspicious of climate change. The United States withdrew from the Kyoto Climate Change Protocol within months of George W Bush assuming office in 2001, and throughout the next eight years, the United States played little part in climate change negotiations.

While this altered with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, by the middle of this year, part of the opposition to his administration was coming from the Tea Party Movement and other right-wing elements in the Republican Party, one feature of their outlook being a deep suspicion of climate change combined with strong opposition to any limits on carbon emissions. November’s mid-term elections to Congress may determine whether these views solidify in Congress, – a major risk, if the Democrats lose control of either house.

Climate Change and the Military

We are at a point where a combination of factors, including the attitude of the Obama administration, means that the risks emanating from climate change are being more generally recognised. This coincides with a significant change in attitude among military planners. In military planning units and security think tanks across the western world climate change is now seen as one of the key future drivers of insecurity. It is an outlook that stems partly from a tendency for military analysts to look long-term. Unlike most political and commercial institutions that tend to focus on 4-10 year time spans, military planning is frequently much longer term, to a certain extent because military forces depend partly on the development of systems involving development and procurement processes that stretch over decades.

Much of the analysis on climate change coming from military sources produces results that coincide with the ideas of radical environmental analysts, pointing to the social and political consequences, the risks of state failure and the rise of radical oppositional movements. However, when it comes to responses, the primary military focus is on maintaining the security of the state, either on its own or in alliance with others. This is to be expected and is legitimate from the perspective of a military organisation – its reason for being is to keep the state secure. Thus, the emphasis may be on increased border security and the patrolling of potential migratory routes, and the intervention capabilities necessary to stabilise failing states and ungoverned space that may be a consequence of the impact of climate change. What this almost never involves, is advocating the primary preventative measure that is required for responding to climate change – a rapid move towards an ultra-low carbon economy.

The Military Complication

Discussions with military analysts, including those who are engaging with Oxford Research Group’s Sustainable Security Programme, frequently focus on issues concerning climate change and security. There is sometimes recognition by some in the military that there should be a role for senior military officers in advocating a low carbon transition as part of a process of conflict prevention. The complication is that the loss of a decade at the start of the current century means that there will inevitably be numerous impacts of climate change, even if a low carbon transition can be achieved in the next two decades. From a military perspective it can therefore seem reasonable and legitimate to plan for security consequences. The problem is that this can have the negative effect of providing a political excuse to slow down the rate of transition. If “we”, in a rich country, can maintain our well-being by protecting ourselves from the security impacts of climate change, then engaging in the huge changes involved in a low carbon transition can assume a lesser political priority. This is an attractive proposition for most politicians given the likely electoral unpopularity of the transition.

The response to this “securitising” of climate change is that some adaptation is undoubtedly going to be required, but that little of this has to do with the military. There will need to be a far greater focus on issues such as improving water management across the tropics and sub-tropics, breeding more drought-tolerant crops, preparing for more severe storms and protecting low-lying regions, but these are not the ultimate answer to climate change. That involves addressing the problem at root – controlling and minimising carbon emissions.

A substantial element of Oxford Research Group’s Sustainable Security approach is the recognition that conflict prevention is at the root of society’s response to climate change, and that the next five years are crucial in moving towards a more emancipated and environmentally sustainable world. Where there is much work to do is in convincing those in the international security community that it is essential to prevent climate change and that responding to it by protecting elite societies is fundamentally inadequate. It is a huge task but it is at least aided by the manner in which military analysts do have the ability and willingness to think long-term. That is a welcome asset in difficult circumstances.

Author: Oxford Research Group’s Security Consultant Paul Rogers

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