Climate change threats - from worsening water shortages in Iraq and Pakistan to harsher Caribbean hurricanes - are a growing security risk and require concerted action to ensure they don't spark new violence, security experts warn.
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"Climate change is not about something in the far and distant future. We are discussing imminent threats to national security," Monika Sie Dhian Ho, general director of Dutch think tank Clingendael Institute, said on Tuesday.
The drying of Africa's Lake Chad basin, for instance, has helped drive recruitment for Islamist militant group Boko Haram among young people unable to farm.
Iraq, meanwhile, has seen its water supplies plunge as its upstream neighbours build dams and climate change brings hotter and dryer conditions to Baghdad, Hisham Al-Alawi, Iraq's ambassador to the Netherlands, said.
Shoring up the country's water security, largely by building more storage and cutting water losses, will cost nearly $80 billion through 2035, he said.
Faced with more heat and less rain, "we need to be wise and start planning for the future, as this trend is likely to continue," he said.
The threat of worsening violence related to climate change also extends to countries and regions not currently thought of as insecurity hot spots, climate and security analysts at the conference warned.
The Caribbean, for instance, faces more destructive hurricanes, coral bleaching, sea-level rise and looming water shortages.
"We're facing an existential crisis in the Caribbean," Selwin Hart, the Barbados-born executive director of the Inter-American Development Bank, said.
The region's economic activity - particularly tourism, fishing and port operations - takes place on the threatened coastline, Hart said.
But as global emissions continue to rise, "there's not a realistic chance of achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement", Hart suggested.
The agreement calls for a rapid shift away from fossil fuels to hold the global average temperature rise to well below two degrees Celsius.
The failure to cut emissions means the Caribbean, while doing what it can to become more resilient, also needs "to plan for the worst-case scenario."
It is building coordination and assistance networks among Caribbean states and looking to shore up access to food and water, Ronald Jackson, of the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency, said.
Last October the world's climate scientists warned that to hold global temperature hikes to 1.5 degrees C, global energy systems would have to dramatically shift in the next dozen years.
Military officials around the world have increasingly recognised the risks associated with climate change, and moved to shore up bases against sea-level rise, curb military emissions, adopt clean energy and analyse changing risks.
At the Planetary Security conference at the Hague on Tuesday, they announced the creation of a new International Military Council on Climate and Security, made up of senior military leaders from around the world.
The panel aims to help build policy to address climate security risks at national, regional and international levels, backers said.
Australian Associated Press
