The Capacity to Adapt
According to Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling, in an article posted Monday on Newsweek, the most pressing issue of climate change is the capacity—or lack thereof—of the developing world to adapt. He writes,
We can worry about urban heat waves, polar bears, and forest fires, but the worst effects are almost certainly going to be on food production in the poor countries, where half or more of the population depends on growing its own food…
If a billion of those poorest people lost half their income–[as is possible given the projected significant drop in crop yields], it would be an overwhelming tragedy, a true catastrophe, worse than all the earthquakes, floods, tsunamis, landslides, and fires of the past decade.
(Please keep in mind, natural disasters killed more people this year than terrorists have killed in the last forty years.)
Climate change presents a real and growing economic and security threat. Recent events in Tunisia exemplify what could be to come on a larger scale.
Yet as Schelling argues, understanding that
Climate change will be primarily a threat to the poor in poor countries… may make it hard to persuade the non-poor in the developed world to take the problem seriously.
The time for the United States to make strides in reducing emissions is now. Given the potential for civil unrest and government instability, a failure to do so could likely have serious security ramifications in the not-so-distant future.
