The recent earthquake in Haiti has highlighted a whole host of issues related to development, poverty, the environment, and security. Countries in which natural resources are mismanaged, degraded, or heavily exploited are more susceptible to the devastation brought on by environmental change, and when extreme events and conflicts do occur, these countries are far less likely to effectively respond to the crisis.

Even before the earthquake in Haiti, decades and indeed centuries of deforestation left the country with declining agricultural yields, heavy erosion, and few natural buffers to limit the possibility of landslides, flooding, and subsequent structural failures during the onslaught of seasonal tropical storms and hurricanes. The destruction brought about during the recent earthquake and the 2008 hurricane season illustrated this fact in painfully clear terms.

In this regard, Haiti is not unlike a great deal of other countries in the developing world. While it is an extreme case, it is not a unique one, and increasingly the security community is drawing the linkages between the role natural resources, and now climate change, play in fueling instability and even worse, armed conflict.

The United Nations Environment Programme has a Post Conflict and Disaster Management branch dedicated to this focus, and in recent years has launched efforts to draw focus to the role of illegal trade in timber, minerals, and other high value resources, amongst a host of other environmental drivers, in fueling conflict. The branch has begun the long process of bringing attention to these factors, and ensuring that they are an integral part of the recovery and reconstruction process.

(Watch this short video from the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program featuring David Jensen, policy manager at UNEP’s Post Conflict and Disaster Management Branch.)

In the case of natural disasters, as has been seen in Haiti and in a plethora of other cases such as the Indian Ocean Tsunami in late December 2004, degraded ecosystems clearly play an important role in intensifying human vulnerability. As with deforestation in Haiti, areas where mangrove forests had been removed along the coast near Aceh in Indonesia and elsewhere were most badly damaged by the ocean’s violent surge. Unsurprisingly, these areas also tend to be where humans are most settled.

The upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review from the Department of Defense is also taking these factors, and the role that climate change may play in accelerating them, very seriously (see a new working paper from CNAS on the DOD’s Quadrennial Defense Review). As natural systems around the world stand to be even further disrupted, many of the countries that are already vulnerable to internal unrest and extremist insurgencies struggling for power and control could well face a threat multiplier from climate change, as their resource base becomes increasingly unstable, populations begin to migrate, and tensions over scarce (or increasingly valuable) resources multiply.

How the security community, and the U.S. military and international peacekeepers, responds to these challenges is yet to be fully determined (see Dot Earth’s post on the U.S. military response in Haiti). It is a safe guess, however, that we will likely see more and more missions similar to the U.S. military’s response in Haiti.