Prof. Najam in The Boston Globe on National Security and Climate Change
A Boston Globe article titled “Fighting Global Warming with CIA?” quotes Prof. Adil Najam, Director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, as one of the specialists studying the links between climate change and security issues.
Prof. Najam, who is a leading expert on human security and climate change, especially in developing countries, is cited in the article as raising doubts about going too far with ‘securitizing’ the climate change issue.
The Boston Globe feature says, in part:
A new debate is unfolding over whether linking climate change too closely with security planning will create a self-fulfilling prophecy, running the risk that the United States will rely too heavily on its armed forces to deal with global problems.
Najam and a growing number of others fear that policymakers will turn to the military too quickly – dispatching naval forces to secure new shipping lanes in the resource-rich Arctic as polar ice recedes, for instance – or hand the Pentagon a virtually limitless mission to stabilize regions suffering from environmental dislocation.
“Once you try to securitize the problem, you also securitize the solution,’’ said Adil Najam, director of the Boston University’s Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future.
“The solution to those problems is not in the Pentagon,’’ he added. “It is moms and pops driving SUVs.’’