UNITED NATIONS - / MaximsNews Network / 23 November 2008 --The new U.S. intelligence report issued by the National Intelligence Council, the "Global Trends 2025" report includes warnings tied to climate change. Including water and food shortages worldwide.

Thomas Fingar, chairman of the NIC and deputy director of national intelligence says of the report that may effect the U.S. most is that the United States will have much less influence around the world as the growing climate conditions, water and energy stresses the planet.

The report predicts, within just two decades the already sensitive areas from China to Africa will have to deal with more droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water.

At a recent briefing Fingar stressed that limited water and agricultural land could "add a kind of competition to the international system that we haven't seen for a very long time."

Water "will have to be on the agenda" of political leaders, he added.

Fingar, who reportedly is leaving the NIC on Dec. 1, 2008, after three years, who served for almost 20 years at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Fingar famously dissented from the 2002 national intelligence estimate conclusion that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program.

Since 1997 the fourth of its kind is designed to help U.S. Presidents and their administrations think strategically and long-term about potential future trends and how they should be dealt with.

Earlier this month, he told a conference on Middle Eastern issues that parts of that region are "among the most vulnerable to water shortages" caused by warming temperatures that spread drought.

"If water is a problem today," he added, "it'll be a bigger problem in the locations that are a problem today by 2025."

Fingar has also said that based on what climate scientists are saying there's nothing the world can do to avoid some changes already in motion.

"The changes in sea level, the changes in temperature, the impact on agriculture, the impact on water availability, the impact that comes from melting in the Arctic and opening up resources and extending growing seasons in some places, and shortening them in others. That is going to happen," he said. "All we can begin to do now is prepare to mitigate those impacts."

Even the United States is vulnerable, he noted, citing predictions of a new "Dust Bowl" in the Southwest and more severe storms along the Atlantic seaboard and Gulf Coast.  "Practical problems" from more severe weather includes "63 military installations that are in danger of being flooded by storm surges," he added. "The number of nuclear power plants that are so similarly vulnerable is almost as high."

According to Fingar his biggest concern is what climate-tied water and food shortages might do to weaker nations.

"Climate change, we concluded, is not by itself going to bring down any governments. It is not going to lead to wars," he added. But in the case of “already stressed and strained and failing and flailing governments and states ... this well could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back."

"Think about the difficulty of scrounging up in the international system the food for 17 or 18 million North Koreans, for a few tens of millions on the Horn of Africa," he said.

Last June, Fingar told Congress that "sub-Saharan Africa will continue to be the most vulnerable to climate change because of multiple environmental, economic, political and social stresses." In many African nations, climate stresses are "a main contributor to instability," he added.

In a previous speech, Fingar said that even prosperous China has "severe water problems now and they get much, much worse by 2015 or 2020."

As an example he pointed out that a farming region in China's north that produces food for 400 million people “is running out of water because they are depleting the underground aquifers through millions of tube wells drilled in the 1960s."

"Any activity put down in the Chinese context, you have got one hell of a problem," he added. "And that is going to happen. This isn’t in the maybe category. This is in the for-real category."

Many agree and are very concerned that these changes will cause serious tensions worldwide and more fighting locally as while as major conflicts will ensue.

-Michael Webster is a syndicated investigative reporter.

Labels: United Nations, U.N., MaximsNews, MaximsNews WATER, MaximsNewsWATER, water, National Intelligence Council, NIC, Global Trends, report, 2025, Fingar, drought, scarcity, food, Michael Webster, international development, environment, water news, water sustainability, water resource, water management, global water crisis, sustainable development 

 

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