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Climate Change and National Security
This page intentionally left blank
Climate Change and National Security
A Country-Level Analysis

Daniel Moran, Editor

Georgetown University Press / Washington, D.C.

Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C. www.press.georgetown.edu

©  by Georgetown University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by
any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Climate change and national security : a country-level analysis / Daniel Moran, editor.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN ---- (pbk. : alk. paper)
. Global environmental change. . Climatic changes—Social aspects.
. International relations—Forecasting.
I. Moran, Daniel.
GE.C 
⬘.—dc


o This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for
Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

             First printing

Printed in the United States of America

 Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments viii
List of Abbreviations ix

1 Introduction: Climate Science and Climate Politics 1

Daniel Moran

2 China 9
Joanna I. Lewis

3 Vietnam 27
Carlyle A. Thayer

4 The Philippines 43
Paul D. Hutchcroft

5 Indonesia 59
Michael S. Malley

6 India 73
T. V. Paul

7 Pakistan 85
Daniel Markey

8 Bangladesh 103
Ali Riaz

9 Russia 115
Celeste A. Wallander

10 Central Asia: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,

and Uzbekistan 129
Edward Schatz

11 The European Union 141

Chad M. Briggs and Stacy D. VanDeveer

12 Turkey 153
Ibrahim Al-Marashi
vi Contents

13 The Persian Gulf: Bahrain, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia,
the United Arab Emirates, and Oman 163
James A. Russell

14 Egypt 177
Ibrahim Al-Marashi

15 The Maghreb: Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia 189

Gregory W. White

16 West Africa I: Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, and Senegal 203

Linda J. Beck and E. Mark Pires

17 West Africa II, The Mano River Union: Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone 221
Dennis Galvan and Brian Guy

18 Southern Africa: Lesotho, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe 233

Ngonidzashe Munemo

19 The Northern Andes: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru 247

Kent Eaton

20 Brazil 259
Jeffrey Cason

21 Conclusion: The Politics of Uncertainty 269

Daniel Moran

Appendixes
A Temperature Change and Freshwater Availability 275
B Sea-Level Rise 281

List of Contributors 285

Index 287
 Illustrations

Tables

2.1 China’s Greenhouse Gas Footprint 10

2.2 Projected Sea-Level Rise in China’s Eastern Coastal River Deltas 14

7.1 Pakistan’s Total Installed Electricity Generation Capacity 89

13.1 Freshwater Availability in the Persian Gulf States 166

13.2 Historic and Projected Population in the Gulf Region 167

13.3 Gulf States’ Ecological and Carbon Footprint per Capita 169

15.1 Maghrebi Infant and Maternal Health and Mortality 196

18.1 Per Capita Water Availability in Southern Africa 238

18.2 Selected Shared Water Sources in Southern Africa 239

20.1 The Weight of Agriculture in the Economy: Brazil, Chile, and Paraguay 263

A.1 Anticipated Changes in Temperature, Freshwater, and Agriculture

for the Countries in This Study 276

B.1 Estimates of Population, Territory, and Productive Infrastructure at Risk

from Rising Sea Level for the Countries in This Study 282

Figures

2.1 Climate Change Factors in China 17

18.1 The Connection between Climate Change and Security 237

 Acknowledgments

The contents of this volume originated as presentations at a workshop sponsored by the

National Intelligence Council, in support of the National Intelligence Assessment on Cli-
mate Change that it prepared for the U.S. House of Representatives in June .
It is a pleasure to be able to thank Mat Burrows and Paul Herman, of the National Intel-
ligence Council’s Long-Range Analysis Unit, and Rich Engel, of its Office of Science and
Technology, for their support. Everyone involved owes an enormous debt to Marc Levy,
deputy directory of the Center for International Earth Science Information Network at
Columbia University, whose team assembled much of the country-level climate data used
by the contributors to this project. The Peterson Institute for International Economics was
also kind enough to allow chapter  of William R. Cline’s Global Warming and Agriculture:
Impact Estimates by Country () to be distributed to all the conference participants. I
am also glad for the opportunity to thank my colleagues James Russell and Michael Malley
for their assistance in assembling the team of experts whose work is presented here. It goes
without saying that all the contents of this volume reflect the judgment of the individual
chapter authors. Nothing in it has been reviewed or approved by any department or agency
of the United States government.
 Abbreviations

The following abbreviations and short titles are used throughout.

CIESIN Center for International Earth Science Information Network at
Columbia University
GDP gross domestic product
IPCC United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
IPCC, Climate Change Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change
: Impacts : Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of
Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, edited by M. L.
Parry, O. F. Canziani, J. P. Palutikof, P. J. van der Linden, and
C. E. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ).
IPCC, Climate Change Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change
: Science : The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of
Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, edited by
S. Solomon, D. Qin, M. Manning, Z. Chen, M. Marquis,
K. B. Averyt, M. Tignor, and H. L. Miller (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, ).
UNDP United Nations Development Program
UNFCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
Unless otherwise indicated, all monetary figures are in U.S. dollars.
This page intentionally left blank
 1
Introduction
Climate Science and Climate Politics

Daniel Moran

This book seeks to appraise the intermediate-term security risks that climate change may
pose to the United States, its allies, and to regional and global order. It is intended to be a
contribution to the growing literature on “environmental security,” a phrase that encom-
passes a wide range of policy problems. For many environmental security is chiefly about
addressing the challenges that climate change may present to humanity and its institutions.
Security in this context is to be sought through measures designed to mitigate or adapt to
changes in the Earth’s ecology, which may some day, and perhaps quite soon, make cur-
rent social and economic practices unsustainable. Others have sought to interpret climate
change less as a direct threat than as an additional source of stress on the sinews of public
life, which may cause fragile governments to fail, or may provide a new impetus for a range
of violent outcomes, ranging from social upheaval to aggressive war.
The present work is of the latter kind. It does not seek to comment on the likelihood
that the daunting environmental changes foreseen by current earth science will come to
pass, nor to evaluate the policies that might be chosen in response to them. It is, instead,
an attempt to lay the problems hypothesized by science on top of the known or anticipated
challenges of international life and to consider what might change as a consequence. It
seeks to do this in a relatively precise and disciplined way, however, and it is useful to begin
by considering why, in the field of environmental security, precision and discipline can be
hard to achieve.
The greatest difficulty arises from the different speeds at which politics and the natural
environment operate, or more precisely the rates at which they change. It must be admitted
that the phrase “intermediate-term security risks” that was employed a few sentences ago
to describe this project’s goals was chosen for no better reason than because it is equally
unsatisfactory to scientists and statesmen alike. As has already been mentioned in the ac-
knowledgments, this volume originated in a project directly connected to real-world policy-
making, and it was intended to produce a result of practical value in that context. To that
end, all the contributors were asked to evaluate the projected security implications of cli-
mate change until . In the world of politics, twenty years is not the intermediate term.
It is a long time—the far horizon within which serious strategic planning has traditionally
been done. To policymakers and planners, risks that are thought to be a generation away
are long-term risks.
2 Introduction

For earth scientists, on the other hand, twenty years, if not quite the blink of an eye, is
certainly a brief span of time, across which the models by which they seek to anticipate our
environmental future are barely able to generate useful results. The mainstream of cred-
ible work on climate change, as exemplified by the reports from the United Nations Inter-
governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has tended in recent years to look further
outward, toward  or , in presenting its conclusions. Of necessity, models that are
intended to anticipate conditions in fifty or a hundred years lose precision when asked to
render judgments over significantly shorter (or longer) periods.
If we imagine the models of the earth scientist as a kind of lens through which the future
may be viewed, then we must accept that, like real lenses, those models have an optimum
focal range, on either side of which the image becomes progressively blurry. The same can
be said of the assumptions, experiences, and predilections of policymakers, which are the
tools by which they seek to envision the future. The central challenge in the field of en-
vironmental security arises from the fact that these two lenses have such different focal
lengths that their useful fields of vision barely overlap. The time frame of this study was
chosen not because it is optimal in terms of either politics or science but because it is at
least credible in both contexts, and sufficiently so to impose a reasonable restraint on the
range of conditions to be considered. Twenty years may be a long time in politics, but not
so long as to be unimaginable. It may be a short time in the life of the Earth, but not so
short that the changes anticipated by today’s scientists will not have become subject to pre-
liminary “out-of-sample” testing, which will in turn strengthen (or not) the credibility of
their vision of the longer-term future.
In the same way that scientists and policymakers diverge in their sense of how quickly
time passes, they also differ with respect to the maps of the world they carry in their heads.
The earth scientist’s map is drawn by natural forces on a planetary scale, which may be af-
fected by human actions in the aggregate but which nevertheless operate without regard to
human institutions. Its crucial boundaries are drawn by nature, in the form of seacoasts,
mountain ranges, forests, deserts, glaciers, and so on. These things matter to the policy-
maker, too, of course, but their influence is often trumped by other lines, drawn by human
hands, that divide one sovereign state from another. It is within these lines that the political
choices that govern humanity’s response to climate change will be made.
As the contents of this volume demonstrate, there is good reason to believe that those
choices will vary a good deal, even among polities confronted with substantially similar
forms of environmental stress. This project appraises the security risks that climate change
poses when its most readily anticipated effects are applied to the known political and social
conditions of states whose fortunes are of particular importance to the United States. At its
heart lies a body of path-breaking country-level data prepared by Columbia University’s
Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), which allows such
issues to be addressed comprehensively for the first time. CIESIN’s work originally ex-
tended across  countries, in practice all those for which reliable demographic and scien-
tific information is available. From these a secondary list was chosen, including states for
which the scientific data suggest that anticipated climate effects will be especially severe,
and others that may face less grave challenges but whose place in the world system makes
them especially important to the United States.
The process of selection, it is worth emphasizing, was driven by concrete considerations
of policy as judged by those tasked with making it, and not by social-scientific criteria as-
piring to general theoretical validity. The resulting list, as reflected in the table of contents
and the appendixes to this volume, could easily have been extended to almost any length. It
Daniel Moran 3

also omits some countries whose policy relevance would appear to demand their inclusion.
A number of nations of intense current interest—including North Korea, Afghanistan,
Iran, and the states of the Horn of Africa—have not been included because their politics
are at present so opaque or unsettled that it did not seem possible to disentangle and evalu-
ate the likely consequences of their exposure to climate change, however grave that expo-
sure might appear to be. Nevertheless, the resulting study is still the most comprehensive
of its kind, and it is broadly representative of the security challenges that climate change
may pose during the next few decades.
CIESIN’s data on temperature change, freshwater availability, and sea-level rise are sum-
marized in appendixes A and B, which provide additional detail on the methods by which
the data were gathered. Those data were presented to all the contributors, along with other
selected materials chosen to reflect the mainstream of current climate science. These in-
cluded the “Technical Summary” and relevant regional sections from the report of the
IPCC’s Working Group II, some maps showing current and anticipated future changes in
the global distribution of freshwater, and selections from William Cline’s Global Warming
and Agriculture: Impact Estimates by Country, some of whose findings are also incorpo-
rated into appendix A. All this material reflected what might be described as down-the-
middle assumptions about how anthropogenic climate change will unfold during the next
few decades—that is, it has been assumed that basic trends, both human and natural, will
continue in their current directions and at their current pace.
Climate science is all about building scenarios and then modeling projected results
across future time periods. Because this project considers a relatively short period in envi-
ronmental terms, albeit an extended one in political terms, it seemed most reasonable to
employ scientific data based on models that assume the world economy will continue to
develop more or less as it has recently: that the large-scale distribution of goods will con-
tinue to be governed by international markets; that market participants will continue to
seek economic growth as a social good; and that no remarkable changes for better or worse
will occur in the consumption of fossil fuels, other that those that may arise as a conse-
quence of rising costs in the marketplace.
Other sets of assumptions are possible, and they have often been explored by earth sci-
entists as a way of testing the range of outcomes their models may generate under varying
patterns of human activity—increasing or decreasing economic growth, static or increas-
ing efforts at environmental mitigation, and so on. Because the focus of this project is
on human activity itself, however, it was essential to hold the earth science constant, and
also to avoid analyses predicated upon “worst-case scenarios”—or “best-case” ones, for
that matter. All the contributors were free to supplement the common body of data and
information originally presented to them with whatever other evidence they deemed ap-
propriate. Because the aim was to cast light on political conditions that may pose security
risks in the future, however, no attempt has been made to challenge, evaluate, or extend
the scientific hypotheses by which that future has been envisioned in environmental terms.
The contributors to this volume were invited to participate because they are policy experts,
not climate experts (though a few are both). One purpose of the project, indeed, was to
broaden the range of scholars participating in the academic conversation about climate
politics.
The area in which the “no-worst-case-scenarios” rule proved most difficult to enforce
was with respect to rising sea level, a particularly contentious area of climate science. Many
well-founded efforts to estimate sea-level rise, including the work summarized by the
IPCC, have been revealed as too conservative in light of subsequent experience, owing to
4 Introduction

the currently rapid melting of polar and glacial ice, whose pace has outstripped the scien-
tific consensus. CIESIN data on sea-level rise are pegged to “low-elevation coastal zones”
of  and  meters, which, within our time frame, imply a rate of sea-level rise significantly
faster than that foreseen by the IPCC even a few years ago. On balance, and assuming the
persistence of current conditions, a -meter rise would lie at the far end of the range of
what is currently thought possible by . A -meter rise would lie outside that range,
and it has been incorporated as a (relatively conservative) proxy for the kind of tidal surge
that severe weather events like tropical cyclones routinely produce, and whose incidence
is expected to increase as a consequence of global warming. The tidal surge produced by
Hurricane Katrina, the most famous such episode in recent American history, exceeded
 meters.
The chapters in this volume are organized around six primary questions that the con-
tributors were asked to address in whatever form seemed best to them. They were free to
ignore questions that did not warrant consideration in relation to their countries or re-
gions, and also to integrate whatever additional forms of analysis they deemed necessary
to produce an accurate appraisal of emerging security risks. Although this may seem an
artificially constrained starting point, it offers the advantage of strengthening the internal
coherence and comparability of analyses that span a very wide range of social and political
conditions. As will become apparent, an excess of uniformity is scarcely the dominant im-
pression that has resulted.
Here are the six questions as originally posed:

. Your country or region may already be susceptible to unruly sociopolitical change due
to existing traditional risk factors. Are the climate impacts hypothesized for  likely
to be an appreciable additional factor in triggering disruptive change, internally or
externally?
. The most basic negative responses to environmental stress are either fight (civil conflict
or external aggression) or flight (internal or external migration). For the people of your
country or region, which response would you consider more likely? Please provide what
detail you can with respect to the political parties, social or ethnic groups, or local areas
where the actions you anticipate may be most serious or most likely to occur.
. Considering the disruptive possibilities you have described in response to the questions
above, how would you assess the risk that the net result will be complete failure of the
state?
. Conversely, might your country or region possess latent reserves of social resilience and
ingenuity, or of institutional capital, which will allow it to meet the challenges of climate
change successfully? Are there important social or other interest groups in your country
or region that might benefit from climate change? Or expect to?
. Would you anticipate that climate change might make your state an object of aggressive
war to control scarce resources? Might it become a destination for migrants and refu-
gees from neighboring countries?
. What do the behaviors and developments that you have foreseen in your state sug-
gest about the outlook and tone of official foreign policy? Would you expect it to be-
come more or less open to engagement with the larger world? More or less amenable to
Western and American influence and interests?

These are not quite the questions that scholars, left to themselves, would have formu-
lated. They reflect the perennial need of policymakers for firm, “actionable” answers to
Daniel Moran 5

straightforward questions, and as a consequence they may sometimes trample upon ana-
lytic nuances that are worth preserving in other contexts. It is apparent, for instance, that
the choices available to a population confronted by climate stress go beyond “fight” or
“flight.” The most likely choice, and the one most thoroughly explored in the chapters that
follow, is adaptation in place—a possibility that is effectively acknowledged in the subse-
quent question about ingenuity and social resourcefulness. Similarly, though it is possible
that climate change may produce “winners” and “losers” within given societies, it is more
likely to produce complex patterns of differential loss, thus increasing inequality while de-
pressing economic performance and degrading social conditions for everyone.
From the outset, the governing assumption of this project has been that realistic argu-
ments about environmental security must be conducted within a politically relevant time
frame, and with reference to real states and the particular societies they govern. Its out-
standing inference, in turn, is that easy generalizations about the security implications of
climate change will be hard to come by. Nevertheless, there is one general point that is
worth emphasizing: Given the power of the natural forces that appear to be bearing down
upon humankind, it is easy to lose sight of human agency and to assume that all essen-
tial questions will eventually be decided by phenomena whose scale dwarfs all human en-
deavor. That may be true in the long run. It certainly will be if the worst anticipated effects
of climate change come to pass. But it is not the case during the period that concerns the
contributors to this book.
On the basis of the evidence presented here, it is clear that the most significant conse-
quences of climate change during the next few decades are likely to arise from, or be sub-
stantially amplified by, human responses to natural phenomena whose immediate effects
may appear to be relatively modest. Climate politics is likely to be hard politics because in-
creasing numbers of people are already concluding that the modest appearance is deceiv-
ing. Not the least of the stresses that climate change presents to politics will arise not from
any actual experience of destabilizing climate change but from increasing concern that
such change is in the offing. In this sense climate politics is like all other politics; it is partly
about what is real and partly, sometimes predominantly, about what is believed, expected,
and feared. The success with which governments are able to allay fears and manage expec-
tations may prove as important to their countries’ survival as their capacity to master the
new material conditions that climate change will create.

Notes
. For a representative selection of recent scholarship in this vein, see the papers presented at the Work-
shop on Human Security and Climate Change, Oslo, June –, , collectively available at www.gechs
.org////holmen_workshop/. It goes without saying that traditional concepts of national and inter-
national security, and newer ones of human and environmental security, are not mutually exclusive. See,
e.g., Jon Barnett and W. Neil Adger, “Climate Change, Human Security, and Violent Conflict,” Political Geog-
raphy , no.  (August ): –. An interesting example of how the rhetorical strategies of Cold
War security studies can be adapted to the challenges of reducing dependence on fossil fuels and cutting
greenhouse gas emissions is given by Sharon Burke and Christine Parthemore, eds., A Strategy for American
Power: Energy, Climate, and National Security, Solarium Strategy Series (Washington, DC: Center for a New
American Security, ).
. Climate change was first injected into the mainstream literature of security in the s as a conse-
quence of a number of challenging works hypothesizing that, in the wake of the Cold War’s unwinding, casus
belli should henceforth be expected mainly from competition over resources, which climate change would
exacerbate. See, e.g., Thomas Homer-Dixon, Environment, Scarcity, and Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, ); and Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New
6 Introduction

York: Metropolitan Books, ). More recent work has tended to back away from such neo-Malthusian
scenarios, primarily because it has proven difficult to specify the nature of the causal links required to con-
nect environmental stress and international violence. Yet it remains apparent that such linkages are possible
and even likely in given circumstances. See, e.g., Idean Salehyan, “From Climate Change to Conflict? No
Consensus Yet,” Journal of Peace Research , no.  (): –; Halvard Buhaug, Nils Petter Gleditsch,
and Ole Magnus Theisen, “Implications of Climate Change for Armed Conflict,” paper presented at the World
Bank Workshop on the Social Dimensions of Climate Change, Washington, March –, , http://site
resources.worldbank.org/INTRANETSOCIALDEVELOPMENT/Resources/SDCCWorkingPaper_Conflict
.pdf; and the articles assembled by Ragnhild Nordås and Nils Petter Gleditsch in Political Geography ,
no. , Special Issue on Climate Change and Conflict (August ): –. Nordås and Gleditsch begin
their volume with a useful survey of the evolution of the literature on environmental security (–),
which may be compared to an earlier one by Gleditsch—“Armed Conflict and the Environment: A Critique
of the Literature,” Journal of Peace Research , no.  (): –—and a more recent one by Geoffrey
D. Dabelko, “Planning for Climate Change: The Security Community’s Precautionary Principle,” Climate
Change  (): –, www.springerlink.com/content/gnh.
. The current top-line statement of American military doctrine is Joint Vision , May , www
.fs.fed.us/fire/doctrine/genesis_and_evolution/source_materials/joint_vision_.pdf. It will eventually be
succeed by a new statement, called Joint Vision , which is now under development. Also see the series
of long-range planning documents created by the National Intelligence Council: Global Trends  ();
Global Trends  (); Mapping the Global Future  (), and the current statement, Global Trends
: A Transformed World, www.dni.gov/nic/PDF_/_Global_Trends_Final_Report.pdf, which
appeared in . And see NATO, “Multiple Futures Project: Trends and Challenges in Global Security to
,” www.act.nato.int/multiplefutures/ACT-RUSI%Roundtable%Report.pdf.
. IPCC WGII, Climate Change . See also Nick Mabey, Delivering Climate Security: International Se-
curity Responses to a Climate Changed World, Royal United Services Institute Whitehall Paper  (London:
Routledge, ).
. These maps are given by Marc A. Levy, Bridget Anderson, Melanie Brickman, Chris Cromer, Brian
Falk, Balazs Fekete, Pamela Green, et al., Assessment of Climate Change Impacts on Select US Security In-
terests, Center for International Earth Science Information Network Working Paper (New York: Colum-
bia University, ), –, www.ciesin.columbia.edu/documents/Climate_Security_CIESIN_July_
_v_.ed_.pdf.
. William Cline, Global Warming and Agriculture: Impact Estimates by Country (Washington, DC:
Peterson Institute for International Economics, ).
. An influential set of alternative future scenarios for use in this context was presented in the IPCC
Special Report on Emission Scenarios,  (www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_sr/?src=/climate/ipcc/
emission/), which sought to envision future conditions varying with relation to economic practices, regional
and global integration, and increasing or static emphasis of environmental remediation. Within the IPCC
framework, the assumptions of this project are consistent with scenario AB, the one most frequently dis-
cussed in subsequent IPCC reports. Scenario AB hypothesizes that economic and demographic trends will
continue along current lines, and that energy consumption will remain balanced among multiple sources,
rather than shifting decisively away from fossil fuels. An example of a study that seeks to consider global se-
curity across a range of climate scenarios—roughly the mirror image of the present project’s structure—is
The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change,
by Kurt M. Campbell, Jay Gulledge, J. R. McNeill, John Podesta, Peter Ogden, Leon Fuerth, R. James Wool-
sey, et al. (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, ), www.csis.org/media/csis/
pubs/_ageofconsequences.pdf.
. See, e.g., Susmita Dasgupta, Benoit Laplante, Craig Meisner, David Wheeler, and Jianping Yan, The Im-
pact of Sea-Level Rise on Developing Countries: A Comparative Analysis, World Bank Policy Research Work-
ing Paper  (Washington, DC: World Bank, ), www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSCon
tentServer/IWP/IB////_/Rendered/PDF/wps.pdf; James Hansen,
“Huge Sea-Level Rises Are Coming—Unless We Act Now,” NewScientist Environment, July , , www
.newscientist.com/article/mg.; Alun Anderson, “The Great Melt: The Coming Transformation
Daniel Moran 7

of the Arctic,” World Policy Journal , no.  (December ): –; and Orville Schell, “The Message
from the Glaciers,” New York Review of Books, May , , –. The melting of Arctic sea ice will not
contribute to sea-level rise, though it is symptomatic of the same environmental trends. It has lately emerged
as a security issue in its own right, because of the opportunities for resource competition and other forms
of national rivalry that it may incite. See Scott G. Borgerson, “Arctic Meltdown: The Economic and Security
Implications of Global Warming,” Foreign Affairs , no.  (March–April ): –; and Klaus Dodds,
“The Arctic: From Frozen Desert to Open Polar Sea?” in Maritime Strategy and Global Order, edited by
Daniel Moran and James A. Russell (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, in press).
. A -meter low-elevation coastal zone is the lowest level at which effects upon population can be cal-
culated with any precision. This is owed in part to significant discrepancies between relevant geographic
and demographic data. See Levy et al., Assessment of Climate Change Impacts, –; and appendix B in this
volume.
. On the significance of extreme weather events as an aspect of environmental security, see Joshua W.
Busby, Climate Change and National Security: An Agenda for Action, Special Report  (New York: Council
on Foreign Relations, ); Joshua W. Busby, “Who Cares about the Weather? Climate Change and U.S. Na-
tional Security,” Security Studies  (): –; and Sven Harmeling, Global Climate Risk Index :
Who Is Most Vulnerable? Weather-Related Loss Events since  and How Copenhagen Needs to Respond,
Germanwatch Briefing Paper, December , www.germanwatch.org/klima/cri.pdf.
. Richard D. Knabb, Jamie R. Rhome, and Daniel P. Brown, Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Ka-
trina, – August , updated August , , National Hurricane Center, www.nhc.noaa.gov/pdf/
TCR-AL_Katrina.pdf.
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 2
China
Joanna I. Lewis

Global climate change will increasingly alter the environment. Although its causes are gen-
erated around the world, its impacts can be highly variable at the local level. Some parts of
the world may be spared dramatic environmental shifts, but many others may face major
climatic changes that could create new social and economic challenges.
China’s role in the climate change problem has increasingly become a topic of inter-
national attention. Because China is now the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases
measured on an annual basis, albeit with relatively low emissions per capita (table .), the
country can no longer ignore its contribution to this challenge. Though China’s leadership
has held firm against international pressures to curb its emissions, a clearer realization of
the impacts that climate change may have within the country is giving rise to growing con-
cern, and it may in fact be this concern that acts as the driving force behind any future cli-
mate change mitigation strategy the country adopts.
Given that China’s domestic realities inform its international policy choices, an under-
standing of how climate change may affect its population and natural resources is critical
to global climate stabilization efforts. The country’s size, geography, regional politics, re-
source endowment, and role in international trade will each play a role in determining how
climate change affects it, and how these impacts will in turn affect the rest of the world.
This chapter explores how China will fare under our changing climate, and it examines

China
10 China

Table . China’s Greenhouse Gas Footprint

Annual Share of Annual
Global Emissions Per Capital
Source (%) Emissions (tons)
China  .
United States  .
EU-  .
India  .
Russian Federation  .
Rest of the World  —
Note: EU- = the European Union at the time it had fifteen member states. The data are for . The data
include carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels only.
Source: Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and British Petroleum, , www.mnp.nl/en/
service/pressreleases//ChinacontributingtwothirdstoincreaseinCOemissions.html.

how the impacts of climate change facing the country, and its response, may drive security
challenges domestically, within the greater Asian region, and around the world.

Climate Change Impacts and China

As the scientific understanding of anthropogenic climate change continues to improve, so
does the understanding of the impacts that climate change will have on specific regions.
China, like many parts of the world, is expected to experience significant climate-related
impacts.
The State of the Science
We now know that human activity is altering the Earth’s climate. Driven primarily by a
century and a half of fossil fuel combustion, carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmo-
sphere had reached  parts per million by ,  percent higher than preindustrial
levels. Average global temperatures have risen by . degree Celsius since the late s,
and the impacts are evident in extreme weather events, changed weather patterns, floods,
droughts, glacial and Arctic ice melt, rising sea levels, and reduced biodiversity. Average
temperatures are projected to increase by another  degrees Celsius upon a doubling of
carbon dioxide concentrations. In China, the observed data show that the nationwide
mean surface temperature has risen between . and . degree Celsius during the past
hundred years, and it will likely increase further by  to  degrees Celsius by the end of this
century. Even if all emissions were to stop today, the greenhouse gases already accumu-
lated in the atmosphere will remain there for decades to come, which will result in more
warming and stronger climate impacts.
Climate Impacts in China
A synthesis report compiled by China’s leading climate change scientists stated: “It is very
likely that future climate change would cause significant adverse impacts on the ecosys-
tems, agriculture, water resources, and coastal zones in China.” The impacts already
being observed in China include extended drought in the north, extreme weather events
and flooding in the south, glacial melting in the Himalayas, declining crop yields, and
rising seas along heavily populated coastlines. Such reports are increasingly acknowl-
edged by China’s leaders. For example, China’s former special ambassador for climate
Joanna I. Lewis 11

change, Yu Qingtai, recently stated that “climate change . . . is in fact a comprehensive

question with scientific, environmental, and development implications and involves the
security of agriculture and food, water resource, energy, ecology, and public health and
economic competitiveness,” and “if the climate changes dramatically, the survival of man-
kind and the future of Earth might be impacted.” Such statements, however, have not yet
influenced China’s international negotiating positions on climate change, or its domestic
policies, in any tangible way.
This lack of response is worrisome, because the science is ever more clearly showing
that climate change is expected to wreak havoc on China through the following channels:

• Decreased precipitation. Studies predict that precipitation may decline by as much as

 percent in the Huai, Liao, and Hai river regions in the second half of this century.
Climate change could decrease river runoff in northern China, where water scarcity is
already a problem, and increase it in southern China, where flooding and heavy rains
are already a problem. Declining runoff to the six largest rivers in China has been ob-
served since the s, with some rivers even facing intermittent flow. Decreased pre-
cipitation is also tied to increased desertification. In China it is estimated that about 
square kilometers of cultivated land is lost annually as a result of desertification.
• Severe weather events. Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and sever-
ity of storm surges, droughts, and other extreme climate events, particularly in coastal
areas. Currently, the Yellow River Delta, the Yangtze River Delta, and the Pearl River
Delta are the most vulnerable coastal regions in China. Climate change could also in-
crease the frequency and intensity of heat waves, resulting in higher mortality and mor-
bidity from heat-related weather events. Hotter temperatures over time could increase
the occurrence and the transmission of infectious diseases, including malaria and den-
gue fever. Malaria is still one of the most significant vector-borne diseases in parts of
southern China, and climate change could expand its geographical range into the tem-
perate and arid parts of the country.
• Sea-level rise. Since the s, sea-level rise has been observed along China’s coastline at
a rate of . to . meter per year. Estimates of future sea-level rise along Chi-
na’s coastline range between . and . meter by , and between . and  meter
by . Higher sea levels magnify the possibility of flooding and intensified storm
surges, and exacerbate coastal erosion and saltwater intrusion. A -meter rise in sea
level would submerge an area the size of Portugal along China’s eastern seaboard; the
majority of Shanghai—China’s largest city—is less than  meters above sea level. Chi-
na’s twelve coastal provinces contain  percent of its population and contribute  per-
cent of its gross domestic product (GDP).
• Glacial melt. The effect of climate change on the glaciers on China’s Tibetan Plateau will
have severe repercussions for the country’s lakes and river systems. The total area of its
western glaciers is projected to decrease . percent by . During the same period,
glacier thawing will increase water discharge by  to  percent per year until water
levels peak between  and . This increased water discharge would then decline
as the glaciers disappear. The mountain and highland lakes that rely on inland glaciers
for recharge, such as the lakes on the Tibetan Plateau and Pamir Plateau, could initially
enlarge as a result of glacier melting but will eventually shrink as the glaciers are re-
duced over time. The Yellow and Yangtze rivers, which support the richest agricultural
regions of the country and derive much of their water from the Tibetan glaciers, will
initially experience floods as the glaciers melt, and then drought, once the glacial runoff
is gone.
12 China

As a result of all these trends, China’s agricultural system, trade system, economic develop-
ment engines, and human livelihoods will all face new threats in a warming world.

Environment, Resources, and Security

Post–Cold War security scholars have pushed for the escalating threats to the global envi-
ronment to be recognized in the concept of national security. Empirical studies have sup-
ported a neo-Malthusian model of scarcity-driven conflict, where population pressures
and high levels of resource consumption lead to competition and eventually to violent
confrontation. In a survey of conflicts, Thomas Homer-Dixon found that whereas envi-
ronmental scarcity is unlikely to be the only factor to cause the outbreak of armed conflict,
more often than not it will be a contributing factor. He further predicted that environmen-
tal pressures in China, including its unequal distribution of resources and its large popu-
lation, may eventually cause the country’s fragmentation.
Lester Brown argued in his book Who Will Feed China? that China’s demand for re-
sources would have not just local but also dire global implications, stating that “China’s
rising food prices will become the world’s rising food prices. China’s land scarcity will be-
come everyone’s land scarcity. And water scarcity in China will affect the entire world.”
Though he did not go as far as to suggest that this scarcity would incite armed conflict, he
did suggest that China’s demand for resources could lead to a global redefinition of na-
tional security away from military preparedness and toward maintaining adequate food
supplies.
A study published in the China Science Bulletin examined the connection between cli-
mate changes and historic societal developments in China by interrelating paleoclimatic
records with historical data of wars, social unrest, and dynastic transitions. Looking at
the period from the late Tang Dynasty to the Qing Dynasty in ancient China, the authors
found that climate change was one of the most important factors in determining the dy-
nastic cycle and alternation of war and peace. Furthermore, they found that  to  per-
cent of peak war activity, and most dynastic transitions, took place during “cold phases,”
a phenomenon they attributed to diminishing thermal energy input and the resulting de-
cline in the productivity of land, which strained resources and human livelihood and, as a
result, drove conflict.
Other studies have found the link between resource conflict and international military
conflict tenuous at best, because countries will try many other solutions before resorting
to military action. For example, Daniel Deudney has written that resource wars between
countries are unlikely, especially for developed countries, and that although free-rider
problems may generate severe conflict, it is doubtful that states will find military instru-
ments to be the most useful tools for coercion and compliance. He has further stated that
“if, for example, China decided not to join a global climate agreement, it seems unlikely
that the other major countries would really go to war with China over this. In general, any
state sufficiently industrialized to be a major contributor to the carbon dioxide problem
will also present a very poor target for military coercion.”
The issue of whether to cast climate change as an issue of national security is itself
somewhat controversial. For example, though many in the U.S. environmental policy com-
munity believe that the “securitization” of the climate change issue will raise its level of im-
portance on the national policy agenda, others fear that a security frame will lead to milita-
rization at the expense of cooperation. Few would dispute, however, that it is appropriate
to view climate change as a “threat multiplier” that is likely to exacerbate many existing
Joanna I. Lewis 13

environmental and resource challenges, including those in some of the most volatile re-
gions of the world. For example, Robert Kaplan has argued that resource depletion, along
with urbanization and population increase, are undermining already-fragile governments
in the developing world.
Although an international war with China over climate change is unlikely, domestic in-
stability within China is probable if current trajectories continue. If not adequately man-
aged, problems within China would probably reverberate across international borders and
markets. These challenges are discussed further below.

Domestic Security Risks

The predicted changes to China’s climate will have social and economic impacts across the
country. Particularly at risk are its agricultural system, its ability to maintain strong eco-
nomic development and foreign trade, and the livelihoods of its population.
Agriculture System Vulnerabilities
A commonly cited statistic is that China feeds more than  percent of the world’s popu-
lation with  percent of the world’s arable land. Climate change is expected to decrease
the stability of agricultural production, causing larger variations in crop productivity. Sci-
entists predict a  to  percent decline in overall crop productivity in China by  as a
result of climate change, and a decline of up to  percent in rice, maize, and wheat yields
after . This marks a serious challenge for the country’s long-term food security. If
this decline in supply were to result in global scarcity and elevated food prices, it could
have particularly severe impacts in Africa, where food insecurity is a grave threat.
Although higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere may increase crop growth and
yield, mainly through their effect on photosynthetic processes, higher temperatures gener-
ally decrease yield by speeding up a plant’s development so that it matures sooner, while
also increasing its demand for water. Higher temperatures also affect the prevalence of
pests, diseases, and weeds. The impacts will differ across regions within China, being most
severe in regions where water is already scarce, such as the northwest. Some model simula-
tions indicate that water shortages in this region could reach about  billion cubic meters
per year between  and .
Encroaching desertification also threatens China’s agricultural system. Desertification
in China has been primarily caused by climate change, and particularly by strong wind
regimes (with high sand transport potential), but it is exacerbated by development and
urbanization. The area affected by desertification is approximately . million square ki-
lometers, or  percent of the total land territory. At present, more than  percent of the
country’s arid and semiarid areas (usually in regions above  degrees north latitude and
having an annual rainfall of less than  millimeters) is being managed using traditional
pastoral and agricultural systems that could be seriously endangered, which would jeopar-
dize the existence of nearly  million people. In addition, as more and more of China’s
land is lost to urbanization, agricultural land is at a premium, and losses in yield due to cli-
mate change could have even more of an impact.
Economic Development and Trade Impacts
A fundamental target of the current development plan articulated by China’s leadership is
an annual economic growth rate of . percent. Many have argued that continued rapid
economic growth in China is critical to the Communist Party’s legitimacy. As noted above,
14 China

Table . Projected Sea-Level Rise in China’s Eastern Coastal River Deltas
Sea Level Rise by
Region Nearby Economic Centers  (meters)
Yellow River Delta (Huanghe) Tianjin, Beijing .–.
Yangtze River Delta (Changjiang) Shanghai .–.
Pearl River Delta (Zhujiang) Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Zhuhai .–.
Sources: Fan Daidu, Li Congxian, “Complexities of China’s Coast in Response to Climate Change,” Ad-
vances in Climate Change Research  (Suppl. ) (); C. X. Li, D. D. Fan, B. Deng, and D. J. Wang, “Some
Problems of Vulnerability Assessment in the Coastal Zone of China,” in Global Change and Asian Pacific
Coasts, Proceedings of APN/SURVAS/LOICZ Joint Conference on Coastal Impacts of Climate Change and
Adaptation in the Asia-Pacific Region, ed. N. Mimura and H. Yokoki (Kobe, ), –; and Lu Xianfu,
“Climate Change Impacts, Vulnerability and Adaptation in Asia and the Pacific,” GEF Training Workshop
on Environmental Finance and GEF Portfolio Management, May –, , http://ncsp.va-network.org/
UserFiles/File/PDFs/Resource%Center/Asia/BackgroundPaper.pdf.

China’s eastern coastal provinces are responsible for the lion’s share of that growth, about
three-quarters of GDP. As a result, the fact that China’s core economic development infra-
structure is directly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change poses a great risk to its
leadership.
China contains roughly , square kilometers of low-lying coastal lands with an el-
evation no greater than  meters, mainly distributed across the deltas of the Yellow, Yang-
tze, and Pearl rivers, and including the major industrial centers of Tianjin, Shanghai, and
Shenzhen/Guangzhou. This is a land area roughly equivalent to the entire country of
Bangladesh. China’s low-lying coastal area is also its most densely populated, and its popu-
lation is growing twice as quickly as the national average; furthermore, the urban sections
are growing at three times the national rate. China is not only attracting more people to
the coast at the present time; it is also establishing an urban migration structure, which
means that the population will continue to move to the coast far into the future. The pro-
jected sea-level rises in the three delta regions on China’s eastern coast, which are also core
economic centers, are listed in table ..
Extreme climate events are the main causes of natural disasters in low-lying coastal re-
gions. In China, both the frequency and intensity of tropical storm surges have increased
since the s. Studies predict ever more frequent exceptional floods in eastern China.
The South China region, which includes the low-lying Pearl River Delta, is susceptible
to sea-level rise. Sea-level rise threatens the continued rapid economic growth of these
low-elevation coastal regions, which not only surround the economic centers of Shanghai,
Tianjin, and Guangzhou but are also home to key ports through which imports and ex-
ports pass, connecting China to the rest of the world. About  percent of China’s freight
goes through Shanghai and  percent through Tianjin, whereas  percent of its foreign
trade income comes from Guangzhou.
Extreme weather events have already taken a toll on China’s eastern coastal region,
which perhaps indicates what is to come. In  such disasters cost China more than $
billion in damage. Much of this damage is related to the infrastructure in these densely
populated areas. Other economic impacts related to climate change might stem from de-
creased access to hydropower resources, which currently generate  percent of China’s
electricity. The annual direct economic loss caused by desertification is approximately
$. billion. In addition to the impacts on agriculture mentioned above, declining yields
Joanna I. Lewis 15

of rice and other grains could have implications for revenue from trade. China is the
world’s largest producer of rice and second largest producer of wheat and coarse grains,
and it is among the principal sources of tobacco, soybeans, peanuts, and cotton. Exports
of rice and maize amounted to $ million and $ million, respectively, in . The
total value of exported agricultural products in  was about $ billion, and today it is
significantly higher.
Threats to Human Livelihood
Climate change increases the possibility of disease incidence and transmission, greatly in-
fluencing the distribution and the potential danger of vector-borne infectious diseases.
The risk of climate-related disease will more than double globally by . Although there
is limited evidence of the impact that future climate change will have on specific diseases,
climate cycles have been shown to cause inter-annual variations in disease incidence.
A greater incidence of ill health is likely to result from the spread of vectors of tropical
diseases such as malaria, dengue, Chagas’s disease, and perhaps others such as the Ebola
virus, into previously temperate regions of the world. The IPCC has concluded that the
changes in environmental temperature and precipitation could expand the geographical
range of malaria in the temperate and arid parts of Asia. A Chinese study suggests that
the lethal HN virus (avian flu) will spread as climate change shifts the habitats and mi-
gratory patterns of birds. Disease can also be spread by stagnant water following flood-
ing disasters, which are expected to become more frequent as a result of climate change.
Studies have shown that after a flood, the incidents of infectious diarrhea diseases such as
cholera, dysentery, typhoid and paratyphoid often increase. Heat itself is an issue, espe-
cially among the elderly and very young, and in densely populated megacities. In addi-
tion to heat stroke, the incidence of cardiovascular and respiratory disease is affected by
temperature.
Another threat to human livelihood that could be exacerbated by climate change relates
to large numbers of refugees. Climate change could trigger civil unrest as a result of human
migrations to avoid climate impacts. In the short term, populations from regions where
water is scarce may move toward northwest and southwest China, where rainfall and gla-
cier runoff may result in increased water availability. The movement of Han Chinese into
Muslim Uighur and ethnic Tibetan areas may aggravate existing ethnic tensions in these
regions, many of which are caused by ongoing resource extraction from the “west” for the
“east.” As glaciers melt and inhabitants of the Tibetan Plateau region must deal with more
water scarcity, they may migrate toward central or eastern China. A similar phenomenon
may occur as Inner Mongolia faces more desertification as a result of climate change. A
population migration from Tibet and Inner Mongolia into predominantly ethnic Chinese
regions could further ethnic tensions, and even threaten regional stability.
Agriculture, economic development, and human livelihood are all interrelated, and
while the exact nature of the interactions may be hard to predict, feedback between these
systems is highly likely. Changing weather and precipitation patterns will affect agricul-
tural productivity, which at a macro level will affect economic output and trade, and at
a micro level will have an impact on farmers’ livelihoods. In addition, the rising sea level
will affect economic development on China’s eastern coastline—the key region for overall
economic productivity—which in turn will affect global trade. Populations will need to
migrate inland to flee the rising sea level and storms, which will change agricultural pat-
terns and potentially cause regional conflicts. Rising temperatures increase the prevalence
of certain diseases that affect both humans and ecosystems and agricultural productivity.
16 China

Increased desertification in northern China will exacerbate water scarcity, reducing the vi-
ability of hydropower for energy, and also creating human migration from areas of minor-
ity ethnic population such as Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, which will increase the
risk of ethnic conflict in areas that currently lack such minorities.
It is evident that climate impacts on China will vary markedly across regions. The four
maps that make up figure . illustrate different aspects of China’s vulnerability to climate
change. Map  shows where China’s population is located, as well as the percentage of mi-
nority population in each province. Map  illustrates each province’s contribution to GDP,
as well as the provinces that depend heavily on agriculture (defined as provinces where
more than  percent of GDP comes from farming). Map  illustrates per capita water re-
source availability by province, as well as water consumption per capita, highlighting those
provinces with a water deficit (i.e., where use exceeds available resources within the prov-
ince). Map  portrays the provincial distribution of China’s coal and hydropower resources.
Looking at the four maps together, several distributional trends become clear. First,
eastern China is the most densely populated region, and it currently contains a very small
percentage of minorities (map ). This makes it vulnerable to immigration-related ten-
sions, including overpopulation and ethnic conflict. Eastern China is also the economic
center of China (map ). The high-value economic activity, combined with population
density, makes the coastal economic centers particularly vulnerable to the costly impacts of
sea-level rise and extreme weather events. The central eastern and southeastern provinces
are heavily reliant on agriculture, which results in high water consumption, despite rela-
tively low water resource availability (map ). Western China, particularly Tibet and Qin-
ghai, are very rich in water resources (map ), but the rivers, lakes, and glaciers in these
provinces are under threat in a warming world. Extreme water scarcity is already a prob-
lem in two major population centers, the greater Beijing and Shanghai regions, as well as
in the northern provinces (map ). Eastern China also contains minimal energy resources
(map ), with both hydropower and coal being scarce. This makes these provinces heavily
dependent on imported resources and power from other provinces. Hydropower resources
are richest in the western provinces of Tibet, Sichuan, and Yunnan, though the impact of
climate change on China’s rivers that flow from the Tibetan Plateau region will directly
threaten the continued availability of water for electricity.

Regional and Global Security Risks

Expanding the scope of assessment beyond China’s borders highlights myriad security im-
plications stemming both from the impacts the country faces and from its likely response
to a warming world.
Impacts on the Tibetan Plateau
One of the most severe threats concerns the Tibetan Plateau region, which is potentially
a hot spot with respect to both climate and conflict. The Tibetan Plateau, which has been
called both “the reservoir at the top of the world” and “the water tower of Asia,” is the
source of most of Asia’s major rivers. As global temperature rises, Tibet’s glaciers are melt-
ing and grassland permafrost is thawing at an alarming rate. The region’s warming cli-
mate is causing glaciers to recede at a rate faster than anywhere else in the world, and in
some regions of Tibet by  feet per year. These changes will have an impact on the mil-
lions living downstream in China, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, Vietnam, and other
countries that are dependent for their water supply on the waters of such rivers as the
Joanna I. Lewis 17

Yangtze, Yellow, Mekong, Salween, Irrawaddy, Indus, Sutlej, and Brahmaputra. It has been
estimated that almost half the world’s population lives in the watersheds of rivers whose
sources lie on the Tibetan Plateau, and at least  million people in Asia and  million
people in China are at risk from declining glacial flows on that plateau.
Given these statistics, and Tibet’s historic capacity to store more freshwater than any
other place on Earth except the North and South poles, it is not surprising that Tibet is be-
coming an ever more crucial strategic territory. The impacts related to climate change are
exacerbated by a host of serious environmental challenges to the quantity and quality of
Tibet’s freshwater reserves caused by industrial activities. These include large-scale erosion
and siltation resulting from increased deforestation, along with air and water pollution
stemming from mining, manufacturing, and other human activities.
Under a scenario in which the melting of the Tibetan glaciers reducers river flow across
East and Southeast Asia, there could be significant conflicts over scarce water resources.
Water scarcity could cause China to divert these rivers from flowing into surrounding
countries, which could cause tensions with neighbors such as Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos,
Pakistan, Nepal, and India. Water scarcity in the region would raise concerns about water
available not only for consumption and agriculture but also for electricity generation, be-
cause hydropower is heavily relied upon among many countries in the region, including
China.
If China wins this resource battle, it could become a destination for migrants or refu-
gees from the countries that lose out. It could also become a destination for climate refu-
gees from neighboring Asian countries, such as Central Asian states severely affected by
drought, North Korea, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. Migration into China by other ethnic
groups could cause social unrest and ethnic conflict outside its borders.
All in all, the Tibetan Plateau represents a concentration of potential political tensions
and climate change impacts that could combine to create civil unrest and threaten political
stability.
Regional Economic and Trade Impacts
In a warming world, changes within China will generate many regional economic and
trade-related impacts. As outlined above, climate change is projected to have a consider-
able impact on China’s current agricultural system, and China is a major player in inter-
national agricultural commodity markets. The lower yields projected under a warming
climate in parts of China could mean reduced exports of key crops such as rice, maize, and
wheat from China to other countries. Because trade in agricultural products is a valuable
part of China’s economy, currently accounting for about  percent of its GDP, this would
pose a risk to economic development.
China’s future energy consumption will also be influenced by the domestic impacts of
climate change, and because of the size of China’s energy markets, its consumption pat-
terns will have international economic repercussions. Increased water scarcity may lead to
reduced hydropower resources, which in turn may mean heavier reliance on fossil fuels.
Hydropower scarcity, combined with a scenario under which China takes no major policy
actions to reduce carbon emissions by moving away from fossil fuels, may mean increased
Chinese reliance on imported energy resources, which would create continued pressure
on world oil markets. If China were able to implement a massive shift to other forms of
domestic renewable energy and nuclear power, or to achieve widespread implementation
of carbon capture technologies, this pressure on oil markets could be averted—but such a
path-changing scenario is unlikely in the near future.
18 China
Joanna I. Lewis 19

The potential impacts of climate change on crucial economic infrastructure, particu-

larly in China’s eastern coastal provinces, also pose a threat to the country’s trade partners.
The three major eastern coastal river deltas, which serve as crucial economic and trade
centers, cause the highest concern because of their vulnerability to sea-level rise, storm
surges, flooding, and typhoons. As the current global financial crisis has illustrated, China’s
economic well-being is inherently tied to the economies of the United States, the European
Union, and other major economic markets. As a result, the economic impact of climate
change on China has potential implications for all major economies connected to that of
China. For example, the European Union and the United States are the top two trading
partners of Shanghai, with  trade volumes amounting to $. billion for the EU and
$. billion for the United States.
International Responses to China’s Inaction
Another risk confronting China in conditions of global warming is the high probability of
international retaliation if it fails to engage proactively with the international community
to forge a solution to this problem in whose creation it has played a significant role. Should
the developed world move ahead with climate change mitigation actions and China fail to
follow suit, it is highly likely that international pressure on the Chinese will mount.
It is uncertain how China will respond politically either to the climate change threat or
to its role in the challenge. Although dramatic, path-changing action is unlikely in the near
future, it is possible that gradual changes will be instituted that begin to address domestic
greenhouse gas emissions. These changes are most likely to occur, however, if they simul-
taneously address other pressing issues. For example, the Chinese government is already

Figure . Climate Change Factors in China

Sources: Map : Topographical and population data from China Historical GIS, Harvard University, www.fas
.harvard.edu/~chgis/data/chgis/downloads/v. Minority population data for regions with minority popu-
lations greater than  million. From Geography of Chinese Nationalities, ed. Li Zhihua (Shanghai: Shanghai
Educational Publishing House, ).
Map : China Statistical Yearbook . Agricultural output data are from . Agriculture, animal hus-
bandry, and fishery data were calculated as a percentage of total gross domestic product by dividing agricul-
tural outputs by the total gross domestic product for each region.
Map : China Statistical Yearbook . Drought and flood coverage refers to the land covered by flood
and drought, as a percentage of the total cultivated land, at the end of . The area covered by flood and
drought is defined as those areas that have lost more than  percent of cultivation land (compared with
previous years) due to droughts or floods. If several disasters occurred on the same land, only the event in
which the largest area of land was lost is counted.
Map : Per capita water resource and regions with water deficit are from China Statistical Yearbook .
Note that the per capita water resource world average, according to the World Bank, is , cubic meters
per person. The water deficit is calculated by subtracting the water use per capita from the water resource
per capita. The potential hydropower capacity by region () and coal resources () are from Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, China Energy Databook, volume . (October ). The potential hydro-
power capacity for each region is estimated on the basis of the sites that can accommodate power plants
≥ kW of installed capacity. The figure for Hebei Province includes Beijing and Tianjin. The figure for
Jiangsu includes Shanghai.
Maps drawn by Tian Tian, Georgetown University.
20 China

under domestic pressure to address severe local air and water pollution, and reducing these
pollutants by using less coal could also be a climate change mitigation strategy. Likewise,
current policies to promote energy efficiency and renewable energy are in line with domes-
tic priorities and are also crucial to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Several proposals
are being discussed in the context of the post- United Nations climate negotiations
that would require China’s commitment to the international community to be expressed in
the form of policy actions, or sector-specific actions, rather than national mandatory emis-
sions limits. Other studies have attempted to quantify the potential for mitigating green-
house gas emissions from China through such ongoing policy activities.
It is possible, however, that these win–win actions, or mitigation actions with other as-
sociated benefits, may not be sufficient in the eyes of the international community as we
approach . Although Europe is thus far the only global region to have implemented
mandatory national measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, several countries are
expected to soon follow suit, including Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Many ex-
perts believe that under the Barack Obama administration, the United States is likely to
adopt mandatory climate policies sometime during the next few years; at the global cli-
mate change conference in Copenhagen in , the United States pledged to reduce emis-
sions  percent below  levels by , “in conformity with anticipated U.S. energy
and climate legislation.” In addition, several U.S. states have already adopted mandatory
greenhouse gas reductions. If both the United States and the EU have adopted mandatory
action to combat climate change, it is primarily from these quarters that the international
pressure on China is likely to come.
Historically, the developing countries have for the most part remained unified in their
approach to the international climate change negotiations, representing their positions in
the context of the Group of  (G-). Additional pressure could mount if other Non–
Annex I countries (i.e., the developing countries that are currently exempted from bind-
ing mitigation commitments under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change,
or UNFCCC) opt to take on mitigation commitments in the current round of negotiations
for the post- period. For example, Brazil and Mexico have already signaled their will-
ingness to pledge national actions within an international framework. This puts pressure
on China, and it creates an environment for a unified, multilateral approach against China,
led by the United States and the EU.
Despite the fact that the United States does not yet have mandatory greenhouse gas
emissions limits in place at the federal level, several draft proposals for legislation in Con-
gress include trade measures aimed at large developing countries, primarily China. In the
th Congress () these included S , the “Low Carbon Economy Act” introduced
by Senators Jeff Bingaman and Arlen Specter, and S , “America’s Climate Security Act,”
introduced by Senators Joseph Lieberman and Mark Warner. With a stated purpose of pro-
tecting the United States against foreign countries’ undermining a U.S. objective of reduc-
ing greenhouse gas emissions, both bills stipulate that U.S. importers of certain goods from
certain countries must buy international reserve allowances to offset the lower energy costs
of manufacturing those goods. The requirement for a purchase of international reserve al-
lowances amounts to a carbon allocation associated with the amount of carbon embedded
in the imported product on a per unit basis. These “border adjustments” specifically target
greenhouse gas–intensive products, including iron, steel, aluminum, cement, bulk glass,
and paper. Although some least-developed countries are excluded from this requirement,
it applies to developing countries representing greater than . percent of global green-
house gas emissions, unless they have taken policy action at home deemed comparable to
Joanna I. Lewis 21

U.S. action. Although the impact of such measures on leveling the carbon playing field
between the United States and China has been questioned, it is widely believed that U.S.
legislation will contain some form of “China provision” aimed at appeasing labor interests,
which have helped shape the provision described here and widely support it.
It is possible that trade measures beyond those currently being proposed in draft legis-
lation could escalate, if the imbalance between countries that “act” and countries that do
not increases. A unified approach to climate change that includes the Group of Eight and
possibly other developing countries but does not include China could result in a multilat-
eral effort to coerce China into taking action. Under such circumstances it is easy to imag-
ine the development of a mutually reinforcing cycle of intensifying economic or political
sanctions, whose impacts on broader patterns of international relations would be difficult
to anticipate. It seems certain that perceptions of relative justice and burden sharing will
become increasingly central to climate politics, to the point where they may become an in-
dependent source of pressure for action by governments.
China and other developing countries have already voiced some concern about trade
measures in proposed U.S. legislation. The EU has not yet proposed similar measures,
though many EU leaders are generally supportive of the idea as a means of encouraging
action on climate change. At the March  summit, a statement by EU leaders warned
that “if international negotiations fail, appropriate measures can be taken,” with concerns
particularly focused on protecting European industry. The French president, Nicolas Sar-
kozy, went so far as to say that “our main concern is to set up a mechanism that would
allow us to strike against the imports of countries that don’t play by the rules of the game
on environmental protection.”

China’s Response to Climate Change

Many of the climate changes that are beginning to affect China, and will become more
severe in the coming decades, could initiate disruptive change, both internally and exter-
nally. Although there are already signs of modest government responses to these threats,
measures are likely to become bolder as impacts worsen.
The Chinese leadership will act to address the impacts of climate change if they are
deemed to represent a serious threat to national stability. In examining the likely implica-
tions of climate change for China, three threats rise above the others: () severe impacts on
minority regions, in particular Tibet, leading to migrations and potential regional tensions;
() severe impacts on the core economic development zones in China’s eastern coastal del-
tas; and () international pressure upon China as the developed world moves ahead with
climate change mitigation actions and China does not follow suit.
Although all these risks are significant, the Chinese Communist Party has shown ex-
treme resilience in facing both internal and external threats. Thus state failure is not likely,
but when the threats from climate change are compounded with others, in particular those
that threaten economic and therefore social well-being, it is possible.
China possesses the ingenuity and institutional capital to meet certain elements of the
climate change challenge better than others. It has the technical, engineering, and innova-
tion capacity that many other developing countries lack. China serves to gain from devel-
oping many of the technologies that will be crucial to dealing with climate change, from
renewable energy to fossil fuel capture and sequestration technologies, which would allow
the country to continue to rely on fossil fuels while mitigating some of the most severe im-
pacts of climate change.
22 China

China is already involved in several efforts to develop and demonstrate low- or zero-
emission coal technologies. These include GreenGen, a -megawatt-scale integrated-
gasification, combined-cycle plant to which carbon capture and storage will be added by
; and the Near Zero Emission Coal partnership between China, the EU, and the
United Kingdom, whose goal is to have a coal plant with capture and storage online by
. In addition, China’s Huaneng Power Company, in cooperation with the Australian
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, has launched a postcom-
bustion carbon capture project (without storage).
China is also poised to become the world leader in renewable energy technology de-
velopment. The country’s wind power capacity has been growing at more than  per-
cent per year, expanding from , megawatts in  to more than , megawatts in
. An increasing number of these wind turbines are being manufactured domestically
by Chinese companies. China also has moved aggressively into solar energy and has be-
come the world’s largest manufacturer of photovoltaic cells, currently accounting for about
half the global market. It also both manufactures and utilizes more solar water heaters
than the rest of the world combined. Its entry into the renewable energy technology mar-
ketplace is beginning to drive down costs due to the increased production scale, access to
lower wages, and increased technological learning.
It is at least possible, then, that China may develop sufficient expertise in and commit-
ment to next-generation low-carbon energy technologies to be able to benefit from climate
change mitigation rather than merely tolerating it. Such a scenario would meet the precon-
dition of China’s political leaders, who have stated that climate change “can only be solved
through development.” This is one of the few scenarios under which China is a winner in
the climate change challenge, and under which the rest of the world stands to benefit as well.

Conclusions
This chapter has examined the impacts of climate change facing China, and the implica-
tions of these impacts and of China’s response to them, for both China and the world. It
finds that the impacts on China will be significant, and they may have sizable adverse eco-
nomic implications, particularly on the nation’s vulnerable eastern coastal economic cen-
ters. Water scarcity, a problem that is already challenging the country’s leadership, will be
exacerbated under projected climate impacts. China is likely to maintain its reliance on
coal at least up to , the end of the period on which this study focuses. This will in-
crease the environmental and health impacts of coal use locally, and it will perpetuate a
major source of carbon dioxide emissions globally. Although the global impact is likely to
attract more attention around the world, the local impacts are particularly important, be-
cause domestic concerns are likely to be the primary motivation behind any actions China
may take to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
Because of China’s great size, whatever impacts it suffers and whatever actions it takes
as a consequence of climate change are certain to have at least regional implications. A
major regional threat that may be aggravated by climate change is that of political insta-
bility in Tibet. The crucial role of the Tibetan Plateau as the major watershed of Asia can
only heighten the interest of outsiders in developments there, while perhaps embolden-
ing both the Tibetan and Chinese leaderships in unpredictable ways. Other important cli-
mate security hot spots include the low-lying eastern coastal economic centers around the
Yangtze, Pearl, and Yellow river deltas, which are particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise,
storm surges, and typhoons. Finally, China faces the risk of international retaliation if it
fails to undertake serious greenhouse gas mitigation actions. This is likely to take the form
Joanna I. Lewis 23

of trade sanctions or other constraints on China’s exports imposed by importing countries.

For a country whose economic prospects will remain closely tied to its overseas exports for
the foreseeable future, this is a serious risk.
It is fair to say that if China were to stake its future exclusively on a policy of high
growth fueled by high greenhouse gas emissions, showing only defiance or indifference in
the face of deteriorating climatic conditions both locally and worldwide, its national sta-
bility would eventually come under threat. Yet China is not without options. It is already
poised to become a leader in the low-carbon technology revolution. It has also come to
perceive itself, and wishes to be perceived by others, as one of the world’s leading nations,
and not simply its most populous. Although it is unrealistic to expect China to sacrifice
its drive for economic growth in order mitigate the impact of climate change, it is possible
that the two goals could converge sufficiently to avert any overt clash with either its re-
gional neighbors or its trading partners in the West.

Notes
The author would like to acknowledge the invaluable research assistance of Lynn Kirshbaum, and the GIS
assistance of Tian Tian, both of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. An earlier version of this
chapter appeared as an article, “Climate Change and Security: Examining China’s Challenges in a Warming
World,” International Affairs , no.  (October ): –.
. “Summary for Policymakers,” in IPCC, Climate Change : Science, –.
. Ibid.
. Ibid.
. Lin Erda, Xu Yinlong, Wu Shaohong, Ju Hui, and Ma Shiming, “Synopsis of China National Climate
Change Assessment Report (II): Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation,” Advances in Climate Change Re-
search  (Suppl.) (): –; Lin Erda, Xiong Wei, Ju Hui, Xu Yinlong, Li Yue, Bai Liping, and Xie Liyong,
“Climate Change Impacts on Crop Yield and Quality with CO Fertilization in China,” Philosophical Trans-
actions: Biological Sciences , no.  (): –.
. Lin et al., “Synopsis,” .
. “Summary for Policymakers.”
. Yu Qingtai, “Special Representative for Climate Change Negotiations of the Ministry of Foreign Af-
fairs Yu Qingtai Receives Interview of the Media,” September , , www.chinaembassy.org.in/eng/zgbd/
t.
. Elizabeth Economy, “China vs. Earth,” The Nation, May , , www.thenation.com/doc//
economy.
. Lin et al., “Synopsis,” .
. Eun-Shik Kim, Dong Kyun Park, Xueyong Zhao, Sun Kee Hong, Kang Suk Koh, Min Hwan Shu,
and Young Sun Kim, “Sustainable Management of Grassland Ecosystems for Controlling Asian Dusts and
Desertification in Asian Continent and a Suggestion of Eco-village Study in China,” Ecological Research ,
no.  (November ): –.
. World Health Organization, Climate Change and Human Health: Risks and Responses (Geneva: World
Health Organization, ).
. Lin et al., “Synopsis,” .
. Fan Daidu and Li Congxian, “Complexities of China’s Coast in Response to Climate Change,” Ad-
vances in Climate Change Research  (Suppl. ) (): –; C. X. Li, D. D. Fan, B. Deng, and D. J. Wang,
“Some Problems of Vulnerability Assessment in the Coastal Zone of China,” in Global Change and Asian Pa-
cific Coasts, Proceedings of APN/SURVAS/LOICZ Joint Conference on Coastal Impacts of Climate Change
and Adaptation in the Asia-Pacific Region, ed. N. Mimura and H. Yokoki (Kobe, ): –.
. Economy, “China vs. Earth.”
. J. G. Titus, “Greenhouse Effect, Sea Level Rise, and Land Use,” Land Use Policy , no.  (April ):
–. www.epa.gov/climatechange/impacts/downloads/landuse.pdf.
. Li et al., “Some Problems of Vulnerability Assessment.”
24 China

. Several errors in the data surrounding Himalayan glaciers have been found in the IPCC report, which
could mean that some of these projections are overstated or inaccurate. See, e.g., Damian Carrington, “IPCC
Officials Admit Mistake over Melting Himalayan Glaciers,” The Guardian, January , , www.guardian
.co.uk/environment//jan//ipcc-himalayan-glaciers-mistake.
. Economy, “China vs. Earth.”
. Jessica Tuchman Mathews, “Redefining Security,” Foreign Affairs , no.  (Spring ): –.
. United Nations Environment Program, Understanding Environment: Conflict and Cooperation (Nai-
robi: United Nations Environment Program, ), www.unep.org/pdf/ECC.pdf.
. Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, “Environmental Scarcities and Violent Conflict: Evidence from Cases,”
International Security , no.  (Summer ): –.
. Lester R. Brown, Who Will Feed China: Wake-Up Call for a Small Planet (Washington, DC: World-
watch Institute, ).
. Zhang Dian, Jim Chiyung, and Lin Chusehng, “Climate Change, Social Unrest and Dynastic Transi-
tion in Ancient China,” Chinese Science Bulletin , no.  (): .
. Daniel Deudney, “The Case against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security,”
Millennium Journal of International Studies , no.  (): .
. Ibid.
. Avilash Roul, “Beyond Tradition: Securitization of Climate Change,” Society for the Study of Peace and
Conflict  (), http://sspconline.org/article_details.asp?artid=art; Michael Renner, “Security Council
Discussion of Climate Change Raises Concerns about ‘Securitization’ of Environment,” Worldwatch Perspec-
tive, April , , www.worldwatch.org/node/.
. Center for Naval Analysis, National Security and the Threat of Climate Change (Alexandria, VA:
Center for Naval Analysis, ), http://securityandclimate.cna.org/report/.
. Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post Cold War (New York: Vintage
Books, ).
. See, e.g., Wu Jiao, “Changing Diet Offers More Food for Thought,” China Daily (Beijing), June ,
, www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/-//content_.htm.
. Lin et al., “Synopsis.”
. World Economic Forum, Africa@Risk , www.weforum.org/pdf/Africa/Africa_RiskRe
port_.pdf.
. Lin et al., “Synopsis,” .
. Xunming Wang, Fahu Chen, Eerdun Hasi, and Jinchang Li, “Desertification in China: An Assess-
ment,” Earth Science Reviews , nos. – (June ): –.
. “Facts and Figures: China’s Main Targets for –,” Gov.cn [Chinese Government Official Web
Portal], March , , www.gov.cn/english/-//content_.htm.
. Fan and Li, “Complexities of China’s Coast.”
. Gordon McGranahan, Deborah Balk, and Bridget Anderson, “The Rising Tide: Assessing the Risks of
Climate Change and How Human Settlements in Low-Elevation Coastal Zones,” Environment & Urbaniza-
tion , no.  (April ): –, http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/gpw/docs/McGranahan.pdf.
. Fan and Li, “Complexities of China’s Coast.”
. China National Bureau of Statistics, China Statistical Yearbook  (Beijing: National Statistics Press,
), table -; “Guangdong Reports % Growth in Foreign Trade in ,” SINA English, January ,
, http://english.sina.com/business////.html.
. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, China Energy Databook [CD-Rom] (Berkeley: Lawrence Berke-
ley National Laboratory, University of California, ), table A..; available at http://china.lbl.gov/databook.
. Secretariat of the China National Committee for the Implementation of the United Nations Conven-
tion to Combat Desertification (CCICCD), China National Report on the Implementation of United Nations
Convention to Combat Desertification and National Action Programme to Combat Desertification (Beijing:
CCICCD, ), www.unccd.int/cop/reports/asia/national//china-eng.pdf.
. Peng Peng, Jianling Huang, John E. Sheehy, Rebecca C. Laza, Romeo M. Visperas, Xuhua Zhong,
Grace S. Centeno, Gurdev S. Khush, and Kenneth G. Cassman, “Rice Yields Decline with Higher Night
Temperature from Global Warming,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  (): –.
Joanna I. Lewis 25

. U.S. Department of Agriculture, “World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates,” WASDE-,
January , , www.usda.gov/oce/commodity/wasde/latest.pdf.
. China National Bureau of Statistics, China Statistical Yearbook , tables - and -.
. Dong Fengxia and Helen H. Jensen, “Challenges for China’s Agricultural Exports: Compliance with
Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures,” Choices , no.  (), –, www.choicesmagazine.org/-/
foodchains/--.htm; and The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations Database,
http://faostat.fao.org.
. M. Ezzati, A. D. Lopez, A. Rodgers, and C. J. L. Murray, eds., Comparative Quantification of Health
Risks: The Global and Regional Burden of Disease Attributable to Selected Major Risk Factors,  vols.
[CD-Rom] (Geneva: World Health Organization, ), vols.  and .
. Robert G. Arnold, David O. Carpenter, Donald Kirk, David Koh, Margaret-Ann Armour, Mariano
Cebrian, Luis Cifuentes, et al., “Meeting Report: Threats to Human Health and Environmental Sustainability
in the Pacific Basin,” Environmental Health Perspectives , no.  (December ): –.
. Economy, “China vs. Earth.”
. University of Wisconsin–Madison, “Climate Change and Disease,” press release, November , ,
reprinted in Environment , no.  (March ): –.
. John Podesta and Peter Ogden, “Security Implications of Climate Scenario : Expected Climate Change
over the Next  Years,” in The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of
Global Climate Change (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, ), chap. .
. “Summary for Policymakers,” .
. Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, in an interview with Circle of Blue, May , , www
.circleofblue.org/waternews/world/china-tibet-and-the-strategic-power-of-water/.
. Minxin Pei, “The Impact of Global Climate Change on China,” memorandum prepared for Work-
shop on Climate Change and Regional Security, Long Range Analysis Unit, National Intelligence Council,
December .
. Others have discussed how sea-level rise could cause China to need to resettle its own eastern coastal
population in other countries in Europe or Russia, including neighboring Siberia. See R. James Woolsey,
“The Security Implications of Climate Change Scenario ,” in Age of Consequences, –.
. Food & Fertilizer Technology Center of the Asian and Pacific Region, table , www.agnet.org/
situationer/stats/.html. Data are for .
. “Shanghai Foreign Trade Volume Rises .% in ,” Xinhuanet.com, January , , http://news
.xinhuanet.com/english/-//content_.htm.
. Joanna Lewis and Elliot Diringer, Policy Based Commitments in a Post- International Climate
Framework, Pew Center on Global Climate Change Working Paper (Arlington, VA: Pew Center on Global
Climate Change, ); Jake Schmidt, Ned Helme, Jim Lee, and Mark Houdashelt, “Sector-Based Approach
to the Post- Climate Change Policy Architecture,” Climate Policy  (): –.
. Jiang Lin, Nan Zhou, Mark Levine, and David Fridley, “Taking Out  Billion Tons of CO: The Magic
of China’s th Five-Year Plan?” Energy Policy  (): –; Center for Clean Air Policy, Greenhouse
Gas Mitigation in China, Brazil and Mexico: Recent Efforts and Implications (Washington, DC: Center for
Clean Air Policy, ).
. Letter from the U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change to the UNFCCC Executive Secretary, Janu-
ary , , http://unfccc.int/files/meetings/application/pdf/unitedstatescphaccord_app..pdf.
. Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, http://rggi.org/home; California Assembly Bill  (AB), www
.arb.ca.gov/cc/ab/ab.htm.
. The Group of  (G-) was established on June , , by seventy-seven developing countries,
which became signatories of the “Joint Declaration of the Seventy-Seven Countries” issued at the end of the
first session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in Geneva. Although member-
ship in the G- has increased to  countries, the original name was retained because of its historic signifi-
cance. See www.g.org/doc/.
. Government of Brazil, Interministerial Committee on Climate Change, National Plan on Climate
Change, Executive Summary, November , ), www.mma.gov.br/estruturas/imprensa/_arquivos/
_.pdf; Government of Mexico, Intersecretarial Commission on Climate Change, Na-
26 China

tional Strategy on Climate Change: Mexico, Executive Summary, , wwwupdate.un.org/ga/president//

follow-up/climatechange/Nal_Strategy_MEX_eng.pdf.
. “Trade Sanctions Emerge as Tool to Force China and India to Curb Emissions,” Greenwire, March ,
, www.wbcsd.org/plugins/DocSearch/details.asp?MenuId=&ClickMenu=&doOpen=&type=DocDet
&ObjectId=MjMOTg.
. As illustrated in table ., China far exceeds this cutoff at  percent of global emissions.
. Trevor Houser, Rob Bradley, Britt Childs, Jacob Werksman, and Robert Heilmayr, Leveling the Car-
bon Playing Field: International Competition and US Climate Policy Design (Washington, DC: Peterson In-
stitute for International Economics and World Resources Institute, ). Also see memorandum from
Abraham Breehey, International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, to the Obama-Biden transition team, http://
otrans.cdn.net/b_jhmbe.pdf.
. “Trade Plan Opposed by China, Brazil, and Mexico,” Greenwire, September , , www.earthportal
.org/news/?p=.
. Paul Ames, “EU Leaders Urge Trade Sanctions on U.S., China,” Seattlepi, March , , http://
seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/_eusummit.html.
. Xu Shisen, “Green Coal-Based Power Generation for Tomorrow’s Power,” Presentation to the APEC
Energy Working Group: Expert Group on Clean Fossil Energy, Thermal Power Research Institute, Lampang,
Thailand, February , .
. European Commission, “EU-China Summit: Joint Statement,” September , , http://ec.europa
.eu/comm/external_relations/china/summit_/index.htm; U.K. Department of Environmental, Food
and Rural Affairs, , www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/internat/devcountry/china.htm.
. “Carbon Capture Milestone in China,” Science Daily, August , , www.sciencedaily.com/releases/
//.htm.
. Yu, “Special Representative for Climate Change Negotiations.” He went on to say that “if the develop-
ing countries cannot maintain economic and social progress, eliminate poverty or raise people’s living stan-
dards, the material foundation for coping with climate change will not exist, not mentioning the capacity to
fight against climate change.”
 3
Vietnam
Carlyle A. Thayer

The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is the world’s thirteenth-most-populous country. Since

 Vietnam has undergone a remarkable transformation from a Soviet-style centrally
planned economy to a market-led economy. And during the past two decades the coun-
try has achieved success across the board on most major indicators of development. For
example, it has sustained among the highest economic growth rates in East Asia for more
than a decade. And it recently overtook India to become the world’s second-largest ex-
porter of rice. Vietnam has attracted a windfall of foreign direct investment.

Vietnam
28 Vietnam

At the same time, Vietnam has achieved remarkable success in lowering the incidence
of poverty from  percent in  to  percent in . The country is also expected to
attain its UN Millennium Development Goals by reducing infant mortality and improv-
ing maternal health and overall national nutrition. It is also poised to become a middle-
income country by . It has set its sights on becoming a modern and industrial country
by . To meet projected shortfalls in domestic sources of energy so that it can keep up
the pace of industrial development, it is turning to nuclear power.
Vietnam’s successful economic transformation has been mirrored by a similar trans-
formation in its external relations. The country is no longer one of the least-developed
members of the Cold War–era Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. And it is also no
longer economically and militarily dependent on the Soviet Union. Since the s, Viet-
nam has looked outward toward its region and further afield to become a member of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the ASEAN Regional Forum, and the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC). In  Vietnam became the th
member of the World Trade Organization. It was also unanimously selected by the Asia
bloc as its candidate for a nonpermanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
When Vietnam’s nomination was put before the General Assembly in October , it re-
ceived  of the  votes cast.
Vietnam’s potential to become a major regional power is being increasingly recognized
by strategic analysts. For example, in  Richard Armitage and Joseph Nye coauthored
an article in which they wrote: “Perhaps the greatest opportunity over the next fifteen years
lies in Vietnam, where political reforms needs to complement the economic reforms al-
ready well under way if the nation is to reach its potential and contribute more to the over-
all effectiveness of ASEAN.” Ashton Carter and William Perry have even suggested that
the United States seek out Vietnam as a potential military partner.
Any analysis of Vietnam’s strategic future would not be complete, however, without a
consideration of how it will cope with the impact of global climate change. According to
the World Conservation Union, climate change is a “critical issue for Vietnam in the me-
dium and long term” because “as the water level increases, inundation from the ocean may
occur more frequently until permanent inundation occurs.” Vietnam would be threatened
by crop failures, biodiversity loss, and damage to wetlands, coral reefs, and other critical
ecosystems, particularly in coastal areas. In sum, global climate change has now emerged
as one of—if not the most—serious security issues Vietnam will face in the next two de-
cades and beyond. Global climate change threatens to undermine not only the country’s
remarkable economic and social progress but also possibly the unity and cohesion of the
state itself.
This chapter considers the impact of global climate change on the Vietnamese state and
society through . The analysis that follows is divided into seven sections. The first
sets out the scientific data on the likely impact of climate change on Vietnam. The second
section considers the likely evolution of the Vietnamese state over the next two decades.
The third section examines Vietnam’s likely response to environmental stress. The fourth
section examines the possibility of state failure in Vietnam. The fifth section discusses the
resilience of Vietnamese state and society. The sixth section analyzes the likely impact of
climate change on Vietnam’s relations with its neighbors. And the seventh section explores
Vietnam’s likely external response as a consequence of global climate change. A concluding
section offers a net assessment of the impact of climate change on Vietnam.
Carlyle A. Thayer 29

Global Climate Change and Vietnam

Vietnam is already experiencing the impact of global climate change. A study by the coun-
try’s Institute of Meteorology, Hydrology, and Environment reports that during the past
decade, sea levels have risen . to  centimeters per year and annual average temperature
has risen . degree Celsius. These developments have contributed to altered weather pat-
terns, including increasingly violent and more frequent storms along the coast, the intru-
sion of saline water into the Mekong Delta, extremes of heat and cold, and the onset of de-
sertification further inland.
In , according to Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development
(MARD), nearly five hundred people died due to flooding and , hectares of agricul-
tural land was submerged. Low-lying fields were inundated with salt water that destroyed
crops. Rising temperatures have encouraged a plague of pests, including the brown plant
hopper, which has been particularly destructive of Vietnam’s rice and cashew crops. Four
indicators provide an indication of Vietnam’s current vulnerability to climate change: tem-
perature rise, access to freshwater, agricultural productivity, and sea-level rise. Of the three
Southeast Asian countries considered in this study, Vietnam appears to be in the most ad-
vantageous position with regard to the first three indicators but not the fourth, sea-level
rise (see appendix A).
According to CIESIN data summarized in appendix A in this volume, Vietnam’s aggre-
gate temperature vulnerability score of . is less than that for Indonesia (.) and the
Philippines (.) and well below the global average of .. Vietnam’s relative temperature
vulnerability is rated average, the same for Indonesia and the Philippines. The country’s
temperature vulnerability in degrees Celsius, ., is only marginally higher than that of the
Philippines (.) but below Indonesia’s (.). All three countries rank below the global
average of .. Vietnam’s agricultural productivity impact is assessed as negligible, the
same as Indonesia’s, but better than that of the Philippines, where the rating is moderate.
At present, Vietnam scores well on the third indicator, freshwater availability as measured
by the percentage of population with access to less than , cubic meters of freshwater
per capita. In  Vietnam (. percent) ranked below the Philippines (. per-
cent) and Indonesia (. percent), and well below the global average of . percent. By
, however, the situation will be reversed, when the proportion of the Vietnamese
population with access to less than , cubic meters of freshwater per capita will rise to
. percent, above that of Indonesia (. percent) and the Philippines (. percent). In
the meantime, increased salinity in the southern delta threatens water for irrigation and
human consumption. A separate report by the Vietnam–Sweden Cooperation Program
forecast that Vietnam will be among sixty countries that will experience serious water
shortages by  because of population pressures, urbanization, and industrialization.
However, as noted above, Vietnam scores less well on the fourth indicator, sea-level rise,
in its coastal zones. The country has a ,-kilometer-long coastline and two of the larg-
est low-lying river deltas in the world. It thus faces very serious problems due to projected
sea-level rise. A recent United Nations Human Development Report found that “sea-level
rise projected for  would expose around  percent of the [Mekong] Delta’s land area
to extreme salinization and crop damage through flooding.” This same report found that a
projected sea-level rise of  meter by  would lead to the displacement of up to  mil-
lion people and a loss of up to  percent of GDP. A rise of  meter in low-elevation coastal
zones will affect . percent of the population, more than double for the Philippines ( per-
cent) and well above Indonesia (. percent) (see appendix B).
30 Vietnam

A separate study by Vietnam’s MARD estimates that if sea levels were to rise by  meter,
, square kilometers of the Red River Delta and , square kilometers of the Me-
kong Delta would be inundated, affecting between  and  percent of Vietnam’s popu-
lation if no adaptive measures were taken. The intrusion of seawater would exacerbate
an already-existing problem of saline water intrusion caused by upland deforestation and
dam building that is reducing Vietnam’s supply of freshwater. In addition, according to a
research study commissioned by the former Ministry of Irrigation, coastal plains would
sink by nearly a meter and many major urban areas, including Ho Chi Minh City, would
be flooded during high tides.
Sea-level rise as high as  meters is unlikely within the time frame of this study, but pos-
sible in the longer run, and a reasonable proxy for extreme coastal weather events, whose
incidence has recently been increasing. Such a rise would appear to be devastating, with
. percent of the land area and . percent of the population affected. The main im-
pact of sea-level rise would fall on Vietnam’s rice-growing delta regions, which are densely
populated and contain much of the country’s industrial infrastructure. In  agriculture
contributed  percent of Vietnam’s GDP. The projected impact on GDP is severe—
. percent, by far the highest of the countries included in this study (see appendix B). At
even more extreme levels, a -meter rise would have an impact on  percent of Vietnam’s
land area,  percent of its population, and  percent of its GDP. The greatest impact would
be felt in the Mekong River and Red River deltas.
A separate study by the World Bank placed Vietnam at the top of its list of eighty-four
countries surveyed for the impact of sea-level rise. It calculated that . percent of Viet-
nam’s population would be displaced with a -meter sea-level rise, with disproportionately
high effects in the Mekong River and Red River deltas (even worse than the projected im-
pact on Egypt’s Nile River Delta). The World Bank report concluded, “At the country level,
results are extremely skewed, with severe impacts limited to a relatively small number of
countries. For these countries (e.g., Vietnam, Egypt, and the Bahamas), however, the con-
sequences of [sea-level rise] are potentially catastrophic.”
Sea-level rise would not only have an impact on the population, industry, aquaculture,
fishing, transport, and coastal energy sectors but, most important, would have impact on
agriculture. Approximately  percent of Vietnam’s population is rural. More than half
its total population resides in low-lying delta areas. It is currently among the top three
rice-exporting countries in the world. Rice depends on controlled irrigation and is highly
vulnerable to fluctuations in water levels. Thus sea-level rise and saline intrusion would
threaten not only Vietnam’s food security but the food security of other states that are de-
pendent on its exports. MARD concluded that a -meter rise in sea level would reduce the
nation’s food output by  percent, or  million tons per year.
Global climate change brings with it altered weather patterns. According to Dao Xuan
Hoc, deputy minister of MARD, an increase in the intensity and frequency of typhoons, for
example, is likely to breach Vietnam’s river and sea dike system, causing extensive flooding
and loss of agricultural productivity. In addition, extreme weather could contribute to the
outbreak of human and animal diseases.
A recent study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development of 
key port cities worldwide analyzed the exposure of people, property, and infrastructure to
a -year flood event. In its estimate of the impact of climate change, the study assumed
a mean sea-level rise of . meter by , a hypothesis that is by no means extreme. In
, Vietnam ranked fifth in terms of exposed population. When the risk of exposure was
projected out to , Ho Chi Minh City still occupied fifth position, but the northern port
city of Hai Phong rose to tenth position.
Carlyle A. Thayer 31

In sum, Vietnam is slated to become one of the countries most adversely affected by
global climate change, comparable to Bangladesh and small island states. The World Bank
study of eighty-four countries cited above reveals that Vietnam ranks among the top ten
countries that will feel the adverse impact of global climate change in six major areas: land,
population, GDP, urban extent, agriculture extent, and wetlands. Vietnam ranks first on
four of these indicators and second on the remaining two.

Vietnam and Political Change to 2030

The history of Vietnam from the end of World War II to the present has been marked by
prolonged periods of conflict and other manifestations of traditional risks. North Vietnam
was struck by a devastating famine at the end of World War II. Vietnam then experienced
an eight-year war of resistance to French colonialism (–) that resulted in a political
settlement partitioning Vietnam at the seventeenth parallel. In  Communist North
Vietnam initiated a “war of national liberation” to reunify Vietnam. What began as a guer-
rilla war in the early s steadily escalated with the arrival of northern military units in
the south. In  the United States introduced combat forces to engage North Vietnamese
regulars. Ground combat displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians. At the same time
the United States conducted an air war over the north that destroyed much of its indus-
trial and transport infrastructure. The northern air war was suspended in  to encour-
age peace negotiations but was resumed in December  to force a final settlement. In
 the United States withdrew all its combat forces and ground combat resumed between
Communist and South Vietnamese armed forces. In , the Communist side prevailed
and the Republic of Vietnam surrendered unconditionally. In the immediate aftermath of
the war and in subsequent years, more than a million South Vietnamese fled the country
by boat to neighboring countries.
In  and  Khmer Rouge forces attacked population settlements along Vietnam’s
southwestern border. Vietnam responded by invading Cambodia in late . China re-
taliated by attacking Vietnam’s northern border in February–March  and maintained
hostilities until . Vietnam occupied Cambodia for a decade before withdrawing in
September . Finally, Chinese and Vietnamese naval vessels clashed in the South China
Sea in , and in  China began to occupy features in the Spratly Archipelago.
Developments in Vietnam since the end of the Cold War have seen a marked turn for
the better. Southeast Asia has remained immune from state-versus-state conflicts, and
Vietnam has reached a peaceful modus vivendi with its three neighbors, China, Laos, and
Cambodia. And the potential for territorial conflict in the South China Sea region has di-
minished since the signing of the Declaration on Conduct of Parties in the South China
Sea by China and the ten members of ASEAN, including Vietnam, in .
On the domestic front, Vietnam has regularly experienced flooding, draught, typhoons,
and famine. The birth of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in September  coin-
cided with one of the worst famines in Vietnam’s recorded history, with an estimated one
million persons perishing. Since reunification, Vietnam’s central coast has been lashed by
increasingly destructive tropical storms. In  “six major storms from the South China
Sea, a global typhoon hotspot, battered Vietnam, killing more than  people and leaving
large areas in central Vietnam inundated for months.” In late November  sea tides
rose to . meters in Ho Chi Minh City, the highest in forty-eight years.
In precolonial times it was the duty of the emperor to protect his people from natural
disasters. Vietnam has constructed , kilometers of river dikes, including an extensive
system in the Red River Delta, and an additional , kilometers of sea dikes. The dikes in
32 Vietnam

the Red River Delta are built above farming levels. If the dikes were to fall into disrepair or
be breached, extensive flooding would result. According to Vietnamese tradition, natural
disasters are a portent that the emperor has lost his “mandate from heaven” and thus justify
rebellion or “uprising in a just cause.”
Today, it is as if the traditional Vietnamese political culture continues to cast a shadow
over the country’s future. The Vietnamese people expect their leaders to protect them from
storm, flooding, drought, and pestilence. In recent interviews with officials and opinion
makers in Hanoi, respondents noted that the current leadership deserves high marks for
the priority it has set on mitigating the effects of natural disasters.
Vietnam’s current leadership has established a Central Committee for Storm and Flood
Control as the body with responsibility for national disaster preparedness and mitigation.
This committee comprises representatives from all the relevant government ministries as
well as the Vietnam Red Cross, the Hydro-Meteorological Service, and the Department
of Dike Management, Flood, and Storm Control in MARD. The Central Committee for
Storm and Flood Control has been quick to mobilize government resources in response to
natural disasters. To deal with natural disasters, the government regularly calls on the re-
sources of its large regular armed forces (with , soldiers) and extensive reserves, as
well as the mobilization of young people.
An analysis of the impact of climate change on Vietnam until  must consider likely
changes in the country’s society and political system between now and then. Currently,
Vietnam is relatively stable compared with Indonesia and the Philippines, the two other
Southeast Asian case studies considered in this volume. The Philippines continues to suffer
from Communist insurgency, Islamic-inspired armed separatism, and attempted military
coups. Indonesia was wracked by communal conflict in its outer islands in the late s,
and it continues to suffer from sporadic outbursts of communalism, terrorism, and armed
separatism. By contrast, Vietnam has experienced only momentary political turbulence in
the form of peasant demonstrations over land issues, ethnic unrest, and labor strikes.
In trying to make a forecast two decades into the future, it is important to take a look
back at what Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines were like twenty years ago and how
their political futures changed over the course of the subsequent years. In the early s,
Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam were considered more or less stable authoritarian
regimes. Yet the Ferdinand Marcos regime collapsed in , and New Order Indonesia
fell twelve years later. Both countries then embarked on a process of democratic transition
and consolidation. Few observers could have imagined that Communist Vietnam would
begin to dismantle its socialist central planning system in late , join ASEAN in ,
and integrate with the global economy through membership in the World Trade Organi-
zation in .
What will Vietnam’s current soft-authoritarian, one-party state look like in ? As
the above examples indicate, straight-line extrapolations of contemporary trends may be
misleading and can map out only one of several plausible futures. The experiences of Tai-
wan and South Korea, in addition to those of Indonesia and the Philippines, indicate that
authoritarian regimes are capable of liberalizing political change. There is more than one
likely scenario. The Vietnamese Communist Party could continue in power or could grad-
ually transform itself into a more pluralistic organization. It could also split into progres-
sive and conservative factions. Other possibilities include political instability, as the party
attempts to fend off challenges by prodemocratic forces or southern regionalism. Finally,
Vietnam could muddle through after a period of political turbulence as it embarks on
democratic transformation.
Carlyle A. Thayer 33

Perhaps the least likely possibility, given the general social and economic dynamism
that has marked Vietnam’s recent history, is that things will simply stay as they are. This
analysis makes the assumption that Vietnam’s current one-party political system will be
substantially transformed by , and that the initiative for this transformation will come
from members of the Communist Party itself. They will seek to broaden the party’s pres-
ent elitist base by reaching out to politically active non–party members in society. In sum,
progressive and pragmatic members of the party are most likely to remain in power in the
future and successfully manage Vietnam’s adaptation to the security challenges posed by
global climate change.

Vietnam’s Response to Environmental Stress

How do societies react to environmental stress? The question examined in this section is
whether the Vietnamese response will be fight, flight, or some mixed alternative. Fight re-
fers to major internal instability leading to armed conflict, while flight refers to emigration.
Both can occur simultaneously.
The Vietnamese people originated in what is today called the Red River Delta. As these
people mastered wet rice cultivation, population density increased to such an extent that
demographic pressures spurred a southward migration known as nam tien (southern ad-
vance). It is entirely realistic to portray this human movement from the Red River Delta
south along the narrow coastline to the Mekong Delta as a product of environmental stress
due to overpopulation. This push factor has been advanced to explain the history of the
wars between Vietnam and the Cham Empire in northern-central Vietnam, which led to
the demise of the latter.
During the French colonial era, several hundred thousand Vietnamese fled to neigh-
boring Laos and Cambodia, and also to Thailand. Some were motivated to escape con-
flict while others moved across the land border because of the opportunities for employ-
ment. When Vietnam was partitioned in –, nearly a million Vietnamese civilians
fled south. Subsequently, the governments in both Hanoi and Saigon pursued population
resettlement programs to shift ethnic Vietnamese from the overpopulated deltas to the
highlands, which were inhabited by ethnic minority groups.
During the Vietnam War (–) large numbers of rural South Vietnamese sought
safety from the fighting by fleeing to district towns, provincial centers, and Saigon itself. On
the other hand, in North Vietnam the residents of urban areas, particularly Hanoi, were evac-
uated to the countryside. When the war ended in , more than a hundred thousand Viet-
namese fled South Vietnam. After a brief decline, the numbers of “boat people” shot up two
years later. Although fear of political repression was a motive for early refugees, economic
issues and the impact of major natural disasters in the south in – were increasingly
the most salient push factors. Nearly a quarter million ethnic Chinese or Hoa people fled
to southern China when relations deteriorated between Hanoi and Beijing in the late s.
In the precolonial past, the political turmoil in China that accompanied the decline and
fall of dynastic rule produced waves of refugees who fled south into Vietnam. To the extent
that southern China is affected by global climate change, Vietnam could well come under
pressure from a similar wave of migration. The arrival of large numbers of ethnic Chi-
nese fleeing the impact of global climate change would most certainly arouse nationalist
sentiment, especially in times of domestic socioeconomic crisis. This would undoubtedly
produce friction between the governments of Vietnam and China. In , for example,
an anti-China backlash arose in Vietnam when it was revealed that Chinese workers had
34 Vietnam

taken jobs in the bauxite mining industry in the Central Highlands while Vietnamese
workers remained unemployed. General Vo Nguyen Giap even termed the presence of
Chinese workers a threat to national security.
Vietnam’s Communist rulers do not countenance political pluralism, organized opposi-
tion, or a multiparty system. In recent years, Vietnam’s one-party system has come under
challenge by ethnic minorities in the Central Highlands and a nascent prodemocracy
movement in urban areas. The United Buddhist Church of Vietnam, for instance, has long
resisted incorporation into Vietnam’s “mono-organizational” political system. Prodemoc-
racy groups can be expected to be vocal critics of the government if it should fail to deal
effectively with the challenges posed by climate change. These social forces are unlikely to
mount a credible challenge to Communist Party rule in the coming decades, however.
There is some evidence that Vietnam’s well-off citizens are now critical of the government’s
inability to satisfactorily address inflation, pollution, corruption, and traffic jams. Their
solution is not to overturn the present system but to replace officials who are perceived as
ineffective with more dynamic leaders from within the party.
These past patterns of history suggest that as adverse climatic effects are felt in Vietnam,
some Vietnamese will respond by flight. Lowland Vietnamese settlers in provinces located
along the central coastline can be expected to push into the Highlands and spark various
forms of resistance by indigenous ethnic minorities. This resistance is likely to be subdued
and result in the flight of ethnic minorities into neighboring Cambodia and Laos. Larger
numbers of Mekong Delta farmers are likely to push into Cambodia’s eastern provinces.
Vietnamese living in the former South Vietnam may seek to emigrate in order to join rela-
tives living abroad.
It seems unlikely that future adverse weather conditions will spark an exodus compa-
rable to the waves of boat people that engulfed Southeast Asia in the s. First, the op-
tion of political asylum or guaranteed resettlement in the United States is no longer on
the table. Second, Vietnam’s economic reforms have generated prosperity and a stake in
the future of the country. This contrasts with the s, when many South Vietnamese felt
marginalized at a time when the economy was deteriorating. However, adverse climatic
conditions could well inspire smaller numbers of desperate northern “boat people” to flee
to Hong Kong and Hainan Island, while southerners are likely to head for the Philippines,
Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Vietnam: A Failed State?

The discussion above indicates that global climate change is likely to increase the prob-
ability of disruptive change. The question examined in this section is whether the net
effects of disruptive change will result in a breakdown or failure of the Vietnamese state.
Vietnam has already recognized the severity of the threat posed by global climate
change and is taking steps to mitigate its adverse impact. Vietnam has a national body
to coordinate data gathering, issue weather alerts, monitor flood and storm events, and
coordinate disaster response and mitigation measures. The structure of the Central Com-
mittee for Storm and Flood Control extends from the national to province, district, and
commune levels. Local storm and flood control committees work with local people’s com-
mittees to implement appropriate protective and mitigation measures. Moreover, Vietnam
has in place a Second National Strategy and Action Plan for Disaster Mitigation and Man-
agement for the period –.
A report by the Southern Institute for Water Resources Planning revealed serious
erosion of the coastal area between Quang Ngai Province in the center to Binh Thuan
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