Events running up to the UN's climate-focused Bali Summit, held in December 2007, raised the issue for the first time at the public level: climate change could pose a global security risk. Since then, the possibilities have been panicking experts, with no easy solution at hand. Today, however, the topic remains a matter for experts and commentators to discuss, rather than being part of the general discourse. The month of the Bali Summit, journalists Alexander T J Lennon and Julianne Smith wrote, "Climate scientists tend to think in decades; national security experts in days or years at best. This difference helps explain why climate change is rarely considered a national security challenge. Yet the links are inescapable. One that is even less frequently discussed is the connection of global change to the threat of terrorism."
Let us briefly engage in a thought experiment on this intriguing, worrying line of reasoning. To some in the Western world, the fear seems to be that the jihadists could take advantage of the emerging crisis over climate change. The threat is not just Western, however, but rather global – and Southasia seems to be particularly vulnerable to potential militant actions. What could set off such a trend in motion could lie in certain inevitabilities of climate change. Southasia will be hit very badly by global warming, and the effects will be manifested through dramatic declines in crop production, losses of homes and lands, rises in vector-borne diseases and malnutrition, all of which will undoubtedly lead to attempted immigration to 'safer' places. However, the capacity of many impoverished countries to provide alternative spaces for such displaced populations is very low; as such, the fleeing to better-off areas would almost certainly follow historic precedent and point to movements across borders as well as continents.