http://www.climateark.org/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=78338

Climate change and the fight for resources 'will set world aflame'

Climate change has become a major security issue that could lead to "a world going up in flames", the United Nations' top environment official has warned. From rising sea levels in the Indian Ocean to the increasing spread of desert in Africa's Sahel region, global warming will cause new wars across the world, said Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP).

"People are being pushed into other people's terrain by the changing climate and it is leading to conflict," he said. "Societies are not prepared for the scale and the speed with which they will have to decide what they will do with people."

The world was already experiencing its first war partly caused by climate change, he said. Dramatic changes to the environment in the Darfur region of Sudan helped lay the ground for today's conflict which has displaced more than 2.5 million people and killed at least 200,000.

A report to be published by UNEP tomorrow will make a direct link between climate change and the Darfur conflict. "It will be one of the most significant documents in terms of linking environment change and conflict," Mr Steiner said. "It will say that climate change is now a key dimension that must be considered in conflict issues."............

........Earlier this year Britain used its presidency of the UN Security Council to lead its first debate on climate change and conflict. "What makes wars start?" asked the Foreign Secretary, Margaret Beckett. "Fights over water. Changing patterns of rainfall. Fights over food production, land use. There are few greater potential threats... to peace and security itself."

The two major areas of potential conflict, Mr Steiner said, are the Sahel region and east Asia. "In the next 35 years most of the glaciers in the Himalayas will... disappear. You are talking of 500 million people being affected directly and another 250 million people affected downstream." Rising sea levels off the coast of Bangladesh are another potential area for conflict, he said: "India has already started building a wall to stop Bangladeshis coming across. The predicted half-a-metre sea level rise means 34 million people not being able to stay where they are now. Where will they go? They will break through the boundaries.".............

Mojave, these are the kinds of migrations I was speaking of in the end of thread SC43. People will move across the " boundries " of other nations, trying to find better conditions. Energy scarcity, Climate Change, Resource wars etc are causing people to migrate now, and they will do so much more in the future. As you suggest Mojave, other mitigating factors, or vast events as yet unforseen, will dictate just how all these events actually unfold in various areas of the world.