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10.00 Registration and Coffee
10.25 Welcome
Dr Stuart Parkinson, Executive Director, SGR
10.30 Keynote Speaker 1
CLIMATE CHANGE AND CONFLICT
Dan Smith OBE, Secretary General, International Alert
11.30 Coffee Break
11.45 Keynote Speaker 2
ENERGY, PEAK OIL AND CONFLICT
Dr Mandy Meikle, Depletion Scotland
12.45 Lunch
13.45 SGR AGM
14.30 Tea Break
14.45 Parallel Workshops
WATER AND CONFLICT - PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE
Dr Philip Webber, SGR
USING LESS IN OUR HOMES
Dr Alan Cottey, SGR
VOLUNTEERING FOR SGR
Dr Stuart Parkinson, SGR
16.15 Closing Comments
16.30 Close
The broad scientific consensus about climate change tells us that in many areas of the world the physical consequence of climate change will make human habitats less habitable. This will sharpen existing social divisions and conflicts and make them harder to handle and resolve peacefully. A further likely consequence is migration, potentially on a very large scale involving hundreds of millions of people. This will generate further risks of division and conflict.
The issue is whether these conflicts will be pursued peacefully or violently. The risk of violence is greater in countries where there is already violent conflict, or the risk of it, because of poverty, bad governance, corruption or chronic instability. In these countries, the social and political knock-on effects of climate change will simply add to the existing pressures and make violent conflict more likely; this will, in turn, make adaptation to climate change even more difficult.
These are countries that mostly have poorly developed capacities for conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Helping strengthen those capacities now will both help these countries adapt to the consequences of climate change and contribute to their prospects for sustainable peace and equitable, sustainable development.
Dan Smith is Secretary General of International Alert, the
London-based international peacebuilding organisation, and is a member of the
Advisory Group for the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund.
Positions held previously include Director of the International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (1993-2001), and Director of the Transnational Institute, Amsterdam (1991-3). He held the honorary position of Chair of the Board of the Institute for War and Peace Reporting in London from 1992-2006. He has also held fellowships at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo (2001) and the Hellenic Foundation for Foreign and European Policy in Athens (2003).
He is the author/co-author of ten books and editor/co-editor of six on peace and conflict issues, including The State of the Middle East: An atlas of conflict and resolution (2006), and successive editions of The State of the World Atlas and of The Atlas of War and Peace. He has produced over 100 journal articles and chapters in anthologies, as well as several reports including the overview report of the Joint Utstein Study of Peacebuilding – Towards a Strategic Framework for Peacebuilding: Getting Their Act Together (Oslo, Norwegian MFA, 2004). He is also the author of three crime novels.
He was awarded the OBE in 2002.
Peak oil is in essence an economic problem. As global demand continues to grow while global supply peaks and starts to fall, the cost of oil quickly rises. So the problem is the end of cheap energy, not oil running out. But while peak oil may force the transition to a low-carbon future by curbing energy demand, it is just as likely to do the reverse through stimulating a switch to cheaper, more polluting alternatives, such as tar sands, heavy oil and coal. Increasing oil prices are also likely to affect the costs of other goods such as, most worryingly, food.
With increasing oil prices and shrinking oil supplies concentrated in unstable parts of the world, the potential for conflict is serious. Nations will vie for the most profitable reserves and civil unrest will arise as fuel and goods rise in price – unless, of course, we do something now.
This talk will look at the links that peak oil has with climate change and with conflict. After discussing the theory of peak oil and the need for energy demand reduction, potential solutions will be looked at, including Transition Towns and Tradable Energy Quotas. This talk will interest everyone from geologists to economists to psychologists.
Dr Mandy Meikle is an energy campaigner who works with a number
of organisations including Depletion Scotland. She became involved in energy
issues ten years ago, via campaigns against opencast coal mining. After a spell
writing energy policy for the Scottish Green Party, and a brief period working
at the Centre for Human Ecology, she now regularly runs workshops on the links
between peak oil and climate change. Mandy’s day-job is with Reforesting
Scotland, an Edinburgh-based environmental group, where her roles include editing
their journal and newsletter.
Mandy has a PhD in microbiology from Dundee University, and spent four years as a post-doctoral researcher, before concerns about ethical issues led to a shift in career direction. She believes that radical social change has to come about and fast. With rising oil prices and climatic changes damaging crop production both here and overseas, she believes it is vital that we prepare all sectors of society for a bumpy ride. As such, she is also involved in the Transition Towns network and is looking into Carbon Rationing Action Groups. She is a member of SGR.
Water is obviously a vital resource, yet more than a billion people worldwide currently do not have access to sufficient clean water or sanitation. Meanwhile, unsustainable water consumption in many areas, combined with climate change, is threatening future supplies. So, while conflicts over water have occurred throughout history, there is good reason to believe that they could become more common in the future.
This workshop will first discuss some historic cases where there has been conflict over scarce water resources, including how the conflict was triggered and what form the conflict took. Examples will include the Middle East and also parts of Africa. We will then look at some of the current disputes as well potential future flashpoints. The commonalities between conflicts over water and over other resources will also be touched upon, as well as the potential to tackle such problems. The role of engineers, scientists and similar professionals in helping to tackle these problems will be a particular focus of this discussion.
Philip Webber has been Chair of SGR since its creation in 1992
(except for 2001-2). His current paid post is in Kirklees Metropolitan Council,
West Yorkshire where he heads an award-winning environment unit which runs programmes
on renewable energy and energy conservation and the Kirklees Council Eco-Management
and Auditing System (EMAS).
Philip has been very active in the peace movement, speaking and writing widely on military and environmental issues. During the 1980s, while in Scientists Against Nuclear Arms (SANA), one of SGR’s founder organisations, he co-wrote London after the Bomb and Crisis over Cruise, and wrote New Defence Strategies for the 1900s. With SGR, he has authored/edited publications on the Iraq war, ethical careers and military science. He also spent 12 years as a research scientist at Imperial College, where he gained his PhD in surface science.
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USING LESS IN OUR HOMES
Dr Alan Cottey, SGR
In the spirit of “think global, act local”, we will here address our own use of resources at the most local level, in our own homes. We all have expertise in this and I invite participants to contribute accounts of their practice, experiences, observations, ideas and analyses. I will facilitate participants’ contributions. I will also initiate a discussion of some issues of greenwash. We are all constantly exhorted to use less in our homes yet much of the advice serves the interest of business and does not lead to real reductions of resource use. Two examples that I am currently studying are manual versus machine dishwashing and bathing, i.e. personal washing. The business lines in these two cases are exemplified by the phrases “a dishwasher uses less water and energy than manual washing” and “take a shower instead of a bath”. I will show how the business lines contribute to the steady increase with time of resource use, and how to achieve real reductions.
Alan Cottey is convenor of SGR's study group Population, Consumption and Values. Alan was formerly a lecturer in Physics at the University of East Anglia, where he also convened a course for natural science students on Science, Values and Ethics. Since retiring, Alan has continued his connection with UEA, as a Fellow, active in the academic and public interest aspects of the responsible conduct and use of science. It is important to Alan to make this work, his SGR activities, his support of peace-environment-justice activists, and his own life (especially his ecological footprint) as seamless as he can.
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VOLUNTEERING FOR SGR
Dr Stuart Parkinson, SGR
Volunteers – often SGR members – are crucial to the effective operation of the organisation. Volunteers make up the National Co-ordinating Committee (NCC), which sets SGR’s strategy and policies. They also help in a variety of other tasks, for example, maintaining the website, dealing with media inquiries, and helping organise the annual SGR conference. Some SGR members – also in voluntary capacity – use their expertise to help put together SGR’s newsletter, briefings and other documents.
This workshop will look at how we might expand voluntary activity within SGR – both through greater utilisation of the expertise of SGR members in research, education and lobbying work, and in the day-to-day operation of the organisation. If you want to get more involved in SGR, please come along to this workshop!
Stuart Parkinson has been Executive Director of SGR since 2003.
During that time, he has co-ordinated SGR’s research and education projects
– on military involvement in science and technology, and on ethical careers
– and also led lobbying work on climate change, energy and science policy.
He has also lectured and written widely on these issues.
Stuart holds a BEng in physics and electronic engineering and PhD in climate science. He spent five years in a postdoctoral post at the Centre for Environmental Strategy at the University of Surrey, where his research included work on climate and energy policy, and environmental systems analysis. During this time, he became an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He has also worked for Friends of the Earth, co-ordinating research and policy work on the link between environmental problems and social injustice.
It was his experiences during his bachelors degree – specifically industrial placements involving military engineering projects – that caused him to question the ethics of his career path and change direction, moving into the environmental field and then, at SGR, to combine this with peace work.
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