Climate change ups war risk in many state: report

By Peter Apps

LONDON (Reuters) - Climate change will put half the world's countries at risk of conflict or serious political instability, a report said on Tuesday, making the world more unstable unless nations and communities consider problems now.

International Alert, a London-based conflict resolution group, identified 46 countries -- home to 2.7 billion people -- where it said the effects of climate change would create a high risk of violent conflict. It identified another 56 states where there was a risk of political instability.

"It is about half the countries in the world," International Alert secretary general Dan Smith told Reuters in a telephone interview. "I would expect to see some pretty serious conflicts that are clearly linked to climate change on the international scene by 2020."

Climate change will affect water supplies, growing seasons and land use, he said, bringing communities in the poorest and most vulnerable countries into conflict.

Near the top of the list are west and central Africa, with clashes already reported in northern Ghana between herders and farmers as agricultural patterns change.

Bangladesh could also see dangerous changes, while the visible decline in levels of the River Ganges in India, on which 400 million people depend, could spark new tensions there.

Water shortages would make solving tensions in the already volatile Middle East even harder, Smith said, while currently peaceful Latin American states could be destabilized by unrest following changes in the melting of glaciers affecting rivers.

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