New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has a new piece out today on a report that investigates the web of interconnections between climate change and global insecurity, particularly in the Arab Spring.

“The Arab Spring and Climate Change” is a product of cooperative efforts between the Center for American Progress (CAP), the Stimson Center, and the Center for Climate and Security. The report “doesn’t claim that climate change caused the recent wave of Arab revolutions,” Friedman writes. “But, taken together, the essays make a strong case that the interplay between climate change, food prices (particularly wheat) and politics is a hidden stressor that helped to fuel the revolutions and will continue to make consolidating them into stable democracies much more difficult.”

Anne-Marie Slaughter, one of the report’s lead authors, used the preface of the report to lay out the idea of a “stressor” as a useful framework for thinking about these issues. Borrowed from criminal science concepts, a stressor is a “sudden change in circumstances or environment” that interacts with a complicated web of other factors (often a psychological profile, in criminal science’s case) to create sudden, unforeseen, and volatile change. In this instance, climate shifts such as drought our heat waves act as stressors on everything from crop production to food security, water security, the migration of peoples, the stability of governmental and non-governmental networks, and the informal associations and interactions of both local and more widespread communities.

As Friedman points out, these forces can layer on top of one another in ways that make the world more insecure — instigating, shifting, or intensifying geopolitical events such as the recent uprisings in the Arab world:

[T]this collection of essays opens with the Oxford University geographer Troy Sternberg, who demonstrates how in 2010-11, in tandem with the Arab awakenings, “a once-in-a-century winter drought in China” — combined, at the same time, with record-breaking heat waves or floods in other key wheat-growing countries (Ukraine, Russia, Canada and Australia) — “contributed to global wheat shortages and skyrocketing bread prices” in wheat-importing states, most of which are in the Arab world.

Only a small fraction — 6 percent to 18 percent — of annual global wheat production is traded across borders, explained Sternberg, “so any decrease in world supply contributes to a sharp rise in wheat prices and has a serious economic impact in countries such as Egypt, the largest wheat importer in the world.”

The numbers tell the story: “Bread provides one-third of the caloric intake in Egypt, a country where 38 percent of income is spent on food,” notes Sternberg. “The doubling of global wheat prices — from $157/metric ton in June 2010 to $326/metric ton in February 2011 — thus significantly impacted the country’s food supply and availability.” Global food prices peaked at an all-time high in March 2011, shortly after President Hosni Mubarak was toppled in Egypt.

As Friedman notes, the top nine global wheat importers are Middle Eastern countries, leaving them especially vulnerable to price or supply shocks brought on by climate change. And that vulnerability lines up with the potential for destabilization: in 2011, seven of those nine countries suffered political protests that killed civillians. Moreover, households in those countries spend over 35 percent of their incomes on food on average, versus less than 10 percent in developed countries. “Everything is linked,” Friedman says. “Chinese drought and Russian bushfires produced wheat shortages leading to higher bread prices fueling protests in Tahrir Square. Sternberg calls it the globalization of ‘hazard’”:

In 2009, [the study's co-editors] noted, the U.N. and other international agencies reported that more than 800,000 Syrians lost their entire livelihoods as a result of the great drought, which led to “a massive exodus of farmers, herders, and agriculturally dependent rural families from the Syrian countryside to the cities,” fueling unrest. The future does not look much brighter. “On a scale of wetness conditions,” Femia and Werrell note, “‘where a reading of -4 or below is considered extreme drought,’ a 2010 report by the National Center for Atmospheric Research shows that Syria and its neighbors face projected readings of -8 to -15 as a result of climatic changes in the next 25 years.” Similar trends, they note, are true for Libya, whose “primary source of water is a finite cache of fossilized groundwater, which already has been severely stressed while coastal aquifers have been progressively invaded by seawater.”

As ThinkProgress’ Hayes Brown reported, Friedman and Slaughter recently sat down with Michael Werz in front of a packed house at CAP to discuss the implications of the report:

Friedman implored the audience to think of the Middle East not by the current national borders, but instead envisioning as overlaid maps of culture and climate to understand the region. Slaughter took the concept a step further, adding in maps of political networks — government, corporate, NGOs, and others — and seeing where the larger “nodes” in those networks exist. Tracing where those nodes intersect, Slaughter said, shows where policy can be made.

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By redirecting corn, grains, and other food crops to use as an energy source, biofuel policy in the United States and Europe has been driving up the price of food and contributing to ongoing international shortages. Most recently, the New York Times ran an expose on the devastating effects these policies have had on the poor of Guatemala.

Europe in particular has established new standards mandating that all transportation fuels contain 10 percent biofuel by 2020. While amendements have been proposed to limit the biofuels made from food crops or on land previously devoted top food crops to only half of that portion, they remain in limbo.

So it’s encouraging that a new report from the consultancy CE Delft — commissioned by Greenpeace, Transport & Environment, the European Environmental Bureau and BirdLife Europe — is calling for Europe to meet its 2020 goal without reliance on biofuels from food crops, and laying out the steps for how to get there. GreenBusiness has the story:

The CE Delft report argues the targets can be met through greater investment in fuel efficiency measures, waste and residue-based biofuels, and electric vehicles, alongside tighter rules to phase out the use of biofuels made from land-based food or energy crops.

“The EU Commission’s decision to put a limit on the use of crop-based biofuels is a step in the right direction,” said John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace. “The growing use of transport fuels from crops has driven up food prices, led to more deforestation in places like Indonesia to grow palm oil for fuel, and made climate change worse as a result.”

But he warned that the EU’s proposals needed to be tightened to ensure biofuels that contribute to deforestation and food price inflation are phased out.

“The most serious flaw in the new European biofuel policy is that it does not hold biofuel suppliers accountable for the emissions from indirect land use change, where crops for biofuel displace food production and as a result more rainforests and peatland are cleared to grow food crops,” he said. “So fuel suppliers can still use harmful biofuels like palm oil from Indonesia and claim credit for cutting emissions.”

The report recommends that both the EU and member states should act urgently to “phase out direct and indirect support for land-based biofuels and [adopt] a trajectory from current consumption levels towards near-zero use in order to prevent further environmental and social damage”.

It also calls for tougher reporting requirements for biofuel producers covering their impact on land use and more demanding sustainability criteria for both biofuels and bio-gas.

“The EU and member states need to put a robust policy framework into place that speeds up energy efficiency developments, as well as the production and use of biofuels from waste and residues with no alternative uses,” the report concludes. “This biofuel strategy should be part of a broad biomass and bioenergy strategy, as the sustainable feedstock is limited and other applications will also need sustainable bioenergy to meet their climate goals.”

Almost 870 million people around the world were chronically malnourished between 2010 and 2012. Studies of the food crisis suffered around the globe in 2008 determined that western biofuel policies played a role. And while agricultural production is able to keep pace with global demand for food, that balance becomes more difficult to meet once demand for biofuels is added to the mix, especially during years when the weather is less amenable to crops. So the biofuel demands of Europe — as well as the United States — contribute to this problem by both repurposing existing food supplies, and encouraging farmers to dedicate their land to growing biofuel crops rather than food crops as prices for that produce is driven upwards.

Needless to say, a good deal of human suffering can be produced if Europe can move its energy policy away from the use of any biofuel that impinges on peoples’ food supplies.

Related Posts:

• Biofuels May Push 120 Million Into Hunger, Qatar’s Shah Says: “The era of low food prices … is over.”
• The Corn Ultimatum: How long can Americans keep burning one sixth the world’s corn supply in our cars?