“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an attempt to get an international group of scientists together to assess what we know about climate change,” says Geoff Dabelko in an interview with the Wilson Center’s Context program. “That is not a quick process.”

The IPCC’s fifth assessment report since 1990 is being released by its member governments in parts this year, with the latest coming out last night. Dabelko, a senior advisor to ECSP and director of environmental studies at Ohio University’s Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Affairs, is one of several authors of a new chapter. “For the first time, this fifth assessment includes a chapter on human security and what climate change is going to mean for human populations quite explicitly,” Dabelko says.
“We need to find ways to become more nimble in adjusting our understanding of what we know”

The chapter authors, including New Security Beat contributors Neil Adger, Jon Barnett, and Marc Levy, examined a broad set of issues. Climate change is adding a “new dimension to geopolitics,” Dabelko says. Water flows will change, access to resources of all types – including energy and food – will change, transportation routes will change, there will be new migration patterns as people adjust, and there may be new tensions between countries as a result.

From the Bay of Bengal and small-island states to northern Europe and the southern United States, “there are different timelines, there are different sets of vulnerabilities depending on those places, but they do have common vulnerabilities,” Dabelko says. For example, it’s commonly assumed that the poorest countries will be hit hardest, which is largely true, but that doesn’t mean richer areas are immune to changes. He points out that wealth and built infrastructure are more concentrated in developed countries, making damage to even relatively small areas potentially devastating. “Whether it’s the vulnerability of wealth and a lot of built infrastructure…or whether it is the lack of that intense and dense infrastructure in other parts of the world, they’re both vulnerable and they both have real challenges that will literally affect tens of millions of people.”

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