From The Independent, 4/1/07:
http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2411376.ece

Wars of the world: how global warming puts 60 nations at risk

As scientists deliver a detailed report on the impact of climate
change this week, an 'IoS' investigation shows it will spark a major
rise in conflicts

By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor

Scores of countries face war for scarce land, food and water as global
warming increases.

This is the conclusion of the most devastating report yet on the
effects of climate change that scientists and governments prepare to
issue this week.

More than 60 nations, mainly in the Third World, will have existing
tensions hugely exacerbated by the struggle for ever-scarcer
resources.

Others now at peace - including China, the United States and even
parts of Europe - are expected to be plunged into conflict.

Even those not directly affected will be threatened by a flood of
hundreds of millions of "environmental refugees".

The threat is worrying world leaders.

The new UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, told a global warming
conference last month:

"In coming decades, changes in the environment - and the resulting
upheavals, from droughts to inundated coastal areas - are likely to
become a major driver of war and conflict."

Margaret Beckett, the Foreign Secretary, has repeatedly called global
warming "a security issue" and a Pentagon report concluded that abrupt
climate change could lead to "skirmishes, battles and even war due to
resource constraints".

The fears will be increased by the second report this year by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The result of six years' work by 2,500 of the world's top scientists,
it will be published on Good Friday.

The first report, released two months ago, concluded that global
warming was now "unequivocal" and it was 90 per cent certain that
human activities are to blame.

The new one will be the first to show for certain that its effects are
already becoming evident around the world.

Tomorrow, representatives of the world's governments will meet in
Brussels to start four days of negotiation on the ultimate text of the
report, which they are likely to tone down somewhat.

But the final confidential draft presented to them by the scientists
makes it clear that the consequences of global warming are appearing
far sooner and faster than expected.

"Changes in climate are now affecting biological and physical systems
on every continent," it says.

In 20 years, tens of millions more Latin Americans and hundreds of
millions more Africans will be short of water, and by 2050 one billion
Asians could face water shortages.

The glaciers of the Himalayas, which feed the great rivers of the
continent, are likely to melt away almost completely by 2035,
threatening the lives of 700 million people.

Though harvests will initially increase in temperate countries - as
the extra warmth lengthens growing seasons - they could fall by 30 per
cent in India, confronting 130 million people with starvation, by the
2050s.

By 2080, 100 million people could be flooded out of their homes every
year as the sea rises to cover their land, turning them into
environmental refugees.

And up to a third of the world's wild species could be "at high risk
of irreversible extinction" from even relatively moderate warming.

International Alert, "an independent peace-building organisation", has
complied a list of 61 countries that are already unstable or have
recently suffered armed conflict where existing tensions will be
exacerbated by shortages of food and water and by the disease, storm
flooding and sea-level rise that will accompany global warming, or by
the deforestation that helps to cause it.

The list forms the basis of the map on the opposite page.

Four years ago the Pentagon report concluded:

"As famine, disease and weather-related disasters strike... many
countries' needs will exceed their carrying capacity. This will create
a sense of desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive
aggression."

Many experts believe this has begun.

Last year John Reid, the Home Secretary, blamed global warming for
helping to cause the genocide in Darfur.

Water supplies are seen as a key cause of the Arab-Israeli conflicts.

The Golan Heights are important because they control key springs and
rivers and the Sea of Galilee, while vital aquifers lie under the West
Bank.

John Ashton, the Government's climate change envoy, says that global
warming should be addressed "not as a long-term threat to our
environment, but as an immediate threat to our security and
prosperity".