Our world is more interconnected than ever—we need to take steps to make sure it stays that way. A new report underscores that how we treat our environment impacts national security.

Relations between countries will be severely strained due to scarcity of resources and people fleeing droughts and rising sea-levels. Nations may turn inwards and globalisation could be threatened.

Poor countries are the hardest hit in terms of environmental consequences. At a forum to release “The Age of Consequences” report, Leon Fuerth, national security adviser to former Vice President Al Gore said that the more fortunate countries could “go through a 30-year process of kicking people away from the lifeboat.” He continued, saying that this would be “extremely debilitating in moral terms” and “it also suggests the kinds of hatreds that build up between different groups will be accentuated as these groups attempt to move to more clement locations on the planet.”

John Podesta, President Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff, president of the Center for American Progress think tank, and contributor to the report, spoke about an inevitable scenario “in which people and nations are threatened by massive food and water shortages, devastating natural disasters and deadly disease outbreaks.”

As early as this week in the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, a bill is up for debate regarding limiting carbon emissions. Let’s hope that we can take some steps to shape our policy in order to minimize our harmful impacts on the environment.

We want to continue to support the flow of good will and resources between nations. Each of us can take steps to reduce our own carbon footprint. We can also tell our candidates how important it is to us to contribute to the stability of our planet and the people on it.

Read the article for more information.

You can also download portions of the report (or the whole thing if you have a lot of time on your hands!) to learn more.

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This entry was posted on Monday, November 5th, 2007 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Security, Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.