US:GLOBAL WARMING is likely to have a series of destabilising effects around the world, causing humanitarian crises as well as surges in ethnic violence and illegal immigration, according to an assessment released by US intelligence agencies.
The report warns that rising temperatures could weaken already fragile regimes around the world and create a new set of national security challenges for the US over the next two decades.
"Climate change alone is unlikely to trigger state failure" during that time frame, said Thomas Fingar, the deputy director for National Intelligence, in remarks prepared for a joint congressional hearing. "But the impacts will worsen existing problems - such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership and weak political institutions."
The report represents the US intelligence community's most comprehensive assessment to date of the long-term security consequences of global warming. It also marks a reluctant foray into a politically charged topic.
The document was praised by Democrats and environmental activists as a formal acknowledgment by a key part of the government that the threat of rising temperatures is real.
But the report was also criticised, particularly by sceptics of global warming and opponents of using US intelligence resources to track something as amorphous as the environment.
The report said the impacts of global warming are likely to be most severe in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and central and southeast Asia.
"We judge that economic refugees will perceive additional reasons to flee their homes because of harsher climates," Mr Fingar said. "Many likely receiving nations will have neither the resources nor interest to host these climate migrants" who could be carrying infectious diseases. - (LA Times-Washington Post service)