On March 3, 2010, the New America Foundation invited Cleo Paskal to discuss her new book, Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic, and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map. Paskal began her talk by stating a simple but powerful argument: environmental change will have dramatic political, economic and security consequences for us all. She discussed how environmental changes would pose a challenge to physical, services, and legal infrastructure in the future. In assessing environmental threats to physical infrastructure, Paskal first made the observation that humans have traditionally built on land under the assumption that the land will remain unchanged; the hills will continue to stand tall and the local freshwater supply will continue unhindered. However, landslides and flooding do occur and when they do, they cause severe damage to peoples’ homes, re-allocate resources, and make previously impenetrable defenses suddenly vulnerable to outside attacks. This can lead to a major change in geopolitics. In examining services infrastructure, Paskal uses the example of the U.K. floods in 2007 to demonstrate how something like flooding can shut down large segments of mass transportation and cripple parts of a country quickly and suddenly. During these floods, the British military was used extensively to clean up the disaster, demonstrating how quickly a military can become preoccupied and over-strained due to environmental occurrences.

Finally, Paskal examined legal infrastructures that would be heavily affected by environmental changes. Paskal brought up border laws based on geography, as an example. She wondered aloud whether the political border of a country would change if the physical coastline of a country were to shift; if so, international trade agreements about ownership of water and certain fisheries would be immediately threatened. Multiple legal interpretations could cause countries to conflict over newly gained or lost resources. Paskal concluded her talk by warning of the many geopolitical conflicts that could arise over something as seemingly apolitical as changing environmental circumstances.

--Kalie Pierce, Research Intern with the American Strategy Program